David Constantine's Lecture for Stanza 2014 the First World War At
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David Constantine’s Lecture for StAnza 2014 The First World War at Home and Abroad 1 This will be a partial view of the War, and I make no apology for that. I have always in mind a quotation from Milton’s Areopagitica which hung, framed, on the wall in my English teacher’s classroom: ‘Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinions in good men is but knowledge in the making.’ In this centenary year people do want to learn about the War; and many also want to learn from it, fervently hoping that, after repeated failures, now finally nothing like it will ever be visited by human beings on themselves and the rest of creation again. My view is partial first because my family, like millions of families in all the countries involved in the War, was deeply affected by it – my grandfather was killed on the Somme, my grandmother, whom I was very close to, lived as a widow with three children for more than fifty years; and partial also because, although I have read many historical accounts, my closest witnesses of the War, since I was sixteen, have been poets and novelists. One or two commentators lately, on television and in print, have observed that our view of the War nowadays is largely determined by Owen, Sassoon, Graves, Aldington and the rest. Their tone has been almost complaining and their intention more than a little revisionist: really, it wasn’t quite that bad (not quite so futile, not quite so murderous, not quite so Oh, What a Lovely War! as we have been led to believe). Yes, poetry and fiction are partial. They have to be, that is how they work. More on this later. Meanwhile, it may be worth noting that the chief documents of that literary view of the War were not published until ten years or so after it. There were earlier publications: Wilfred Owen’s Poems first came out in 1920 (reprinted 1921); Siegfried Sassoon’s Counter-Attack in 1918; and Robert Graves published three collections during the War; but it was Edmund Blunden’s complete edition of The Poems of 1 Wilfred Owen, in 1931, his own Undertones of War, 1928, Graves’s Goodbye to all that, 1929 and Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer in 1930, which contributed to the ‘determining’ effect. Those texts, together with Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929 and 1930), Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We (1929 and 1930), Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen Nichts Neues and Ludwig Renn’s Krieg, constitute much of the poets’ and novelists’ testimony of the First World War. Krieg, published in Germany in 1928, was translated into English, as War, by Willa and Edwin Muir in 1929. In January of that same year Remarque’s novel apeared in German; in March, it was translated, as All Quiet on the Western Front, by Arthur Wesley Wheen, and by September more than a quarter of a million copies of that English translation had been sold. All these works by front-line soldiers (except Owen’s) were written after some years of reflection, and in none is there the remotest suggestion that the War wasn’t really so very terrible. The only experience described positively is that of comradeship in fellow-suffering; which is a virtue, but not one worth a war. Why so many accounts a decade after the event? To be rid of it, no doubt, to say goodbye to all that; but also in the bitter realization that this war fought ‘for Civilization’ had achieved no such thing. Much that wanted changing had gone on unchanged; the class that had suffered most continued poorly housed, poorly paid, poorly educated, unhealthy, dying early; and, far from ending all wars, the First led predictably into the Second and into atrocities on an even vaster scale. In this talk I’ll present some views of life in Britain during the War and some about the War afterwards. My chief witnesses will be D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas. Also French and German views – quoting Guillaume Apollinaire, Alfred Lichtenstein and Anton Schnack – of life at the front. Some of the opinions, writings and arguments will, I hope, be unfamiliar; and perhaps also the familiar, in this particular context, may be productively estranged. 2 D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) Lawrence was in Germany in 1912 and 1913, on extended honeymoon with his wife-to-be Frieda von Richthofen (a distant cousin of Manfred von Richthofen, the ‘Red Baron’, the fighter-pilot), and out of his observations there he wrote two stories, ‘The Prussian Officer’ and ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’, in which, with an exact loathing, the nature of ‘Prussian’ militarism, or, we should really say, of malign structures of power, of abuse and violent 2 bullying, is presciently exposed. Then in the spring of 1914 he and Frieda rented a small house at Fiascherino, near Lerici, and it was from there, having lived as free as birds, that they returned to England, in June. They married in July, three weeks later war was declared and in England the Lawrences remained, were confined, until November 1919, when they got away south again, to Italy first, and then to years of wandering. By August 1914 Lawrence was already known as a writer. He had published his third novel, Sons and Lovers, in 1913 and begun working on the next, The Rainbow. This, however, was banned as soon as it appeared in 1915, and its sequel, Women in Love, which he worked at on and off throughout the War (trying to publish a version of it in 1917) found no publisher till 1921. The War, and the censors, prevented him from earning a living as a writer and for that reason alone might have turned him venomously angry. After the passing of the Defence of the Realm Act, 8 August 1914, officialdom, always suspicious, was licensed to become actively oppressive. Lawrence was suspect as a writer; as a non- combatant; and because of his German wife. In Cornwall, in remote internal exile on the coast near Zennor, Lawrence and Frieda were spied on and continually harrassed. Twice, though manifestly sick, he was summoned for medical examinations in Bodmin (and a third time, the worst, in September 1918 in Derby). All in all, he had a bad time – along with many others, it must be said, and neither he nor Frieda was ever circumspect or even tactful: she, for example, continued to have her copy of the Berliner Tageblatt delivered, via Switzerland, to their moorland cottage, they sang German folksongs together, they walked the cliffs within view of which German U-boats were sinking British ships. But aggravated by their own conduct or not, what they experienced, especially in Cornwall, was, as Lawrence called it later, ‘the nightmare’. Lawrence is valuable as a witness to what it felt like at its worst in England during the War. Sick, in penury, unable to publish, he became, so to speak, a living consciousness of the worst; he suffered the times; helplessly, without measure, he felt them and without self-censorship, with no tact, consideration or restraint, he expressed them. In letters at the time and in fictions for the rest of his life he said what it felt like, what the War did to him and, so he believed, what it did to all people whether they knew it or not. Here, without much further comment, is a selection of Lawrence’s utterances on the War and during it, some of them extreme and unpleasant, all of them the truth as he felt it. He said of Women in Love, ‘I should wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters.’ Truly, he himself, and all his fictions, were steeped in those years of pervasive horror. 3 On 31 July 1914 Lawrence joined three other men on a walking tour in the Lake District. He wrote to Lady Cynthia Asquith about it, in January the following year: I had been walking in Westmorland, rather happy, with water- lilies twisted round my hat – big, heavy, white and gold water- lilies – that we found in a pool high up – and girls who had come out on a spree and who were having tea in the upper room of an inn, shrieked with laughter. And I remember also we crouched under the loose wall on the moors and the rain flew by in streams, and the wind came rushing through the chinks in the wall behind one’s head, and we shouted songs, and I imitated music-hall turns, while the other men crouched under the wall and I pranked in the rain on the turf in the gorse … It seems like another life – we were happy – four men. Then we came down to Barrow-in-Furness, and saw that war was declared. And we all went mad. I can remember soldiers kissing on Barrow station, and a woman shouting defiantly to her sweetheart – ‘When you get at ’em, Clem, let ’em have it’, as the train drew off – and in all the tramcars, ‘War.’ Messrs Vickers-Maxim call in their workmen – and the great notices on Vickers’ gateways – and the thousands of men streaming over the bridge. In thousands, men were leaving for the front. And in thousands men were hurrying into Vickers-Maxim, to make the weaponry. It is not a question of me, it is the world of men.