Louis B. Solomon fought in the First World War with the Royal Fusiliers and with the Royal Flying Corps. His poems were published posthumously in 1919 by The Fountains Press under the title Wooden Crosses and Other Poems. According to the Newsletter of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship, Winter 2013, Solomon was living in the London suburb of Upper Norwood just before the outbreak of war and went to Dulwich College. When he left school he went on to become a motor mechanic.
According to his obituary in the Jewish Chronicle, it would appear that he joined up early in the war and was killed in April 1918.
Ypres
Thou, Ypres, that once wert queen of Flanders plains,
What art thou now?—a tumbled heap of dust,
With scarce a wall that stands, nor iron where rust
Has not for many a moon more heavy lain.
The Cloth Hall and Cathedral, once thy pride,
That showed a ceiling lined by master hand,
Or raised a tower that lauded all the land,
Now lie a mass of ruins side by side.
And little mounds of earth, which at their head
Bear little wooden crosses, tell the tale
Of those who fought for thee and passed the veil,
Of many a myriad of heroic dead.
Those tree stumps shattered out afar,
Shell-torn on shell-torn ground, once formed a glade
Where feathered songsters their sweet music made,
Nor dreamt would war their fervent beauty mar.
And overhead, where those same birds of song
Made fleeting melody with every breath,
Now soar aloft machines that token death,
The while they guide the speeding shell along.
And where he once a lofty solace raised,
Or to some humble cottage gave birth,
Now, like a skulking rodent ‘neath the earth,
Man builds himself a tunnelled burrow mazed.
Although Solomon was not a highly significant poet the Oxford Bodleian Library catalogue possesses in its list Wooden Crosses and Other Poems by L.B. Solomon, published, albeit privately, at Roehampton in 1918. The Jewish Chronicle’s account of his death mentioned him as the ‘owner of a keen sense of humour and a knack of versification which must have given a great deal of pleasure to his friends.’ The 2013 Newsletter of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship quoted the poem ‘Ypres’ and suggested that ‘there is sometimes a powerful, if conventionally expressed, sense of being present at an event and on a scene unparalleled in European experience’. Some of the imagery used by Solomon in the poem does indeed possess a power of observation such as ‘Those tree stumps shattered out afar / Shell-torn on shell-torn ground’.
It might be worth comparing this poem with Edmund Blunden’s ‘Les Halles d’Ypres’ which had been written in January 1917.
Les Halles d’Ypres
A tangle of iron rods and spluttered beams,
On brickwork past the skill of a mason to mend:
A wall with a bright blue poster—odd as dreams
Is the city’s latter end.
You can read the rest of the poem on the Poetry Nook website http://www.poetrynook.com/poem/halles-dypres-les
In his fine new edition of Blunden’s Undertones of War, John Greening’s notes point us to chapter XV of this powerful memoir:
One morning, dark and liquid and wild, Colonel Harrison and a number of us went off in a lorry to reconnoitre in Ypres proper, and to see the trenches we were to hold. The sad Salient lay under a heavy silence, broken here and there by the ponderous muffled thump of trench mortar shells round the line. We passed big houses, one or two, glimmering whitely, life in death; we found light come by the time that we passed the famous Asylum, a red ruin with some gildings and ornaments still surviving. There was in the town itself the same strange silence, and the staring pallor of the streets in that daybreak was unlike anything that I had known. The Middle Ages had here contrived to lurk, and this was their torture at last. We all felt this, and when we got out of the lorry by the Menin Gate (that unlovely hiatus) we scarcely seemed awake and aware.
Greening, in his notes to what will clearly become the authorized edition of this memoir, points us to both Robyn Marsack’s Selected Poems of Blunden and to Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory noting that both writers ‘have remarked on Blunden’s use of gilded in Undertones’. Referring to the first line of the poem Greening also makes some very valuable points about precise meanings:
Sputtered can mean ‘to scatter in small splashes’ or ‘to fly in small splashes or pieces’, but the more common usage makes the reader think of the inadequacy of language in the face of such destruction. Another meaning (‘to scatter ink in writing’) may remind us that Blunden was a life-long user of a steel dip-pen.
‘Les Halles d’Ypres’ is reproduced on a plaque beside the Cloth Hall in Ypres.
This page contributed by Ian Brinton