In the opening pages of Part II, Chapter 2 of A Man Could Stand Up Ford Madox Ford writes about Christopher Tietjens in a Front-Line trench. He hears a key-bugle playing a seventeenth-century air and his mind is transported back to the world of the poet George Herbert and the Bemerton parish in Wiltshire that he looked after:
It might be two hundred yards off along the trenches. Astonishing pleasure came to him from that seventeenth century air and the remembrance of those exact, quiet words…
What had become of the seventeenth century? And Herbert and Donne and Crashaw and Vaughan, the silurist?…Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright, the bridal of the earth and sky!
It is worth recalling that the most common book of poems taken into the trenches by soldiers was A.E. Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad. Although written and published twenty years before the war it had a nostalgic tone which brought to mind leisured spaces and a rural continuity. Since most of the war was fought in an agricultural environment the contrast between the mud, slime and destruction and the regular turnings of the farmer’s year must have been shockingly evident.
The American poet George Oppen was trapped in a fox-hole in France during the Second World War and recalled the experience of thinking back to sixteenth century poems by Thomas Wyatt as well as two lines by the 1930s American poet Charles Reznikoff:
Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies
a girder, still itself among the rubbish.
Oppen landed in Marseilles with the 103rd Antitank Division and moved north to participate in the Battle of the Bulge and afterward saw action in the mountainous region near Alsace. Late in the war, while he was driving a truck in a convoy, he came under enemy fire and was forced to dive into a foxhole. Two other men also leapt in the foxhole, and both were killed, while Oppen was seriously wounded from exploding shrapnel. In a later poem he remembers lying in the foxhole, pinned down by enemy gunfire and surrounded by carnage, remembering Wyatt’s lyric ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’ and Reznikoff’s couplet.
An interesting creative writing exercise might be based around the idea of what thoughts might go through the mind of a soldier trapped in a dangerous landscape far away from his companions.
Ian Brinton