‘A spear through the side of all sorrows and hopes’: D.H. Lawrence and WWI, a civilian’s thoughts leading up to the war.

In a letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 31st January 1915, Lawrence declared that ‘The War finished me’. He had been on a walking tour in Westmoreland at the time of the declaration of war in August 1914:

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.

When Lawrence had been staying in the former Alsace-Lorraine city of Metz with Frieda in 1912 he had noted the aggressive manner of the German soldiers in an essay ‘The English and the Germans’. The city had been seized by Germany in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War:

In Metz the Germans are German, and the French are French; and I think I am the only Englishman. In Metz there seem to be four soldiers to every civilian. In my hotel seven officers are lodged. Wherever I go to dinner or supper there are officers or soldiers present. I am tired of German soldiers.

In another essay from 1912, ‘How a Spy is Arrested’ he commented upon the ridiculous nature of Prussian fierceness and referred to the military fortifications. In a third essay, ‘French Sons of Germany’, there is the uneasy tension between the French community and the military presence of the Germans. All three pieces can be found in Paul Eggert’s edition of Twilight in Italy and other essays, Cambridge University Press 1994.

The publication of ‘With the Guns’ (Manchester Guardian, 18th August 1914) appeared as a result of being on the walking tour in the Lake District referred to at the opening of this article. In the newspaper piece Lawrence recalled an incident from 1913:

Last Autumn I followed the Bavarian army down the Isar valley and near the foot of the Alps. Then I could see what war would be like—an affair entirely of machines, with men attached to the machines as the subordinate part thereof, as the butt is the part of a rifle.

Watching the firing-practice he commented

I watched, but I could not see where they had gone, nor what had been aimed at. Evidently they were directed against an enemy a mile and a half away, unseen by any of the soldiers at the guns. Whether the shot they fired hit or missed, killed or did not touch, I and the gun-party did not know. Only the officer was shouting the range again, the guns were again starting back, we were again staring over the face of the green and dappled, inscrutable country into which the missiles sped unseen.

The article concluded

It is a war of artillery, a war of machines, and men no more than the subjective material of the machine. It is so unnatural as to be unthinkable. Yet we must think of it.

He could almost have been foreseeing the use of drones in warfare!

As Lawrence and Frieda travelled down into Italy in 1913 he wrote the first of his pieces about ‘Christs in the Tyrol’ in which he referred to ‘so many Christs carved by men who have carved to get at the meaning of their own soul’s anguish’. In the Zemm valley he noted that one carver had made ‘some half-dozen crucifixes’ and the very large one deep in the Klamm ‘is strangely brutal, and is set with an ache of weariness and pain and bitterness, and his rather ugly, passionate mouth is shut with bitter despair’:

After all, he had wanted to live and to enjoy his manhood. But fools had ruined his body, and thrown his life away, when he wanted it. No one had helped. His youth and health and vigour, all his life, and himself, were just thrown away as waste. He had died in bitterness.

Although written the year before war broke out there is an uncanny accuracy about Lawrence’s perception of the damage that would haunt Europe.

The essays were collected together and rewritten for publication in 1916 as Twilight in Italy and they included an autobiographical piece titled after the farm on the edge of Lake Garda where Lawrence and Frieda had been staying. In ‘San Gaudenzio’ the farmer’s son, Giovanni, goes to America to try for a new quality of life:

But it is all passing away. Giovanni is in America, unless he has come back to the war. He will not want to live in San Gaudenzio when he is a man, he says. He and Marco will not spend their lives wringing a little oil and wine out of the rocky soil, even if they are not killed in the fighting which is going on at the end of the lake. In my loft by the lemon houses now I should hear the guns. And Giovanni kissed me with a kind of supplication when I went on to the steamer, as if he were beseeching for a soul. His eyes were bright and clear and lit up with courage. He will make a good fight for the new soul he wants—that is, if they do not kill him in this war.

It might be worth comparing the tone of this passage with Edward Thomas’s poem ‘As the Team’s Head Brass’ since both give us a picture of civilian reactions to the war which was destroying the young men of Europe.

Ian Brinton [May 2016]