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On the Somme: Poets, Artists, Composers,Thinkers & Writers.

Night-Dawn-Day-Evening-Night

A Work in Progress.................

Introduction

The Somme Project is about the site of battle, landscape and memory; rather than just about the battle itself.

After nearly one hundred years the Somme landscape remains intimately marked by what occurred after that fateful day of 1st July 1916.

The battle took its course in the open landscape of Picardy and those that fought ‘On the Somme’ fell into a routine dictated by not only the vagaries of battle but also that of the natural world and natural phenomena that remained beyond their control.

An indifferent nature that both hindered and protected men in battle:- the hindrance of fighting in the marshy pools of the River Ancre, at the northern most part of the battlefield, in contrast to the protection offered by the trenches, dug in the chalky surrounding fields - regardless of the battle that raged around them day and night.

Their experiences were condensed and re-surfaced in their works, during, after and often years long after the First World War.

'Trench Education'

‘Day succeeded unto Day, Night to pensive night’.
Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War.

Life in the trenches, woods and exposed fields, took on the peculiar form of a Medieval Book of Hours.

As Blunden points out, the repetitive cycles of trench life, the daily hours in the open landscape, amongst the seasons, against the full spectrum of natural light - from dawn to the dusk and finally the shade of night, determined the perceptual relationship that combatants had with their immediate environment.

How slow you move, old Time; Walk a bit faster! Old fool, I’m not your slave......Beauty is my master.
Ivor Gurney, Time and the Soldier.

The cycle offered in a Book of Hours, suggests a compelling metaphor for the murderous and sombre routine between the combination of man-made battle and the restrictions, dangers and protection offered by the natural world. War and nature incongruously co-existing in a macabre partnership.

The Book Hours –the daily and nocturnal passage of time

Vigils (Night) - Laudes (Dawn) - Terce (Morning - Sext (Noon) - Nones (Mid –afternoon) - Vespers (Evening) and Compline (Night).

As Blunden continually pointed out in his Undertones of War; the dangers and anxieties offered in full daylight and understanding the cover offered by nightfall, were an essential part of a ‘trench education’.

On both sides of No-Mans-Land, in opposing trenches, poets, artists, composers, thinkers and writers; detailed their experiences, against the back drop of the natural world; often in an urgent immediacy that paralleled the battle itself.

The Somme Landscape

'The dead land oppressed me; I turned my thoughts away, And went where hill and meadow are shadowless and gay'.

Ivor Gurney, Trees

Alongside the march of hours, there existed a direct, almost primordial relationship with the landscape of the Somme. Soldier poets made references to both earth and water in their work. Leaving the relative protection of a trench and going ‘over the top’ into the open landscape was one of the most fundamental and terrifying experiences for all combatants to undertake.

I watched the boys of England where they went
Through mud and water to do appointed things

Ivor Gurney, To England – a Note

The last lines of John Masefield’s The Old Front Line, first published in Great Britain in 1917, directly echo Gurney’s; the men described by Gurney undertaking ‘appointed things’ find equal solemn purpose in Masefield final words of The Old Front Line:-

Just before half-past seven, the mines at half a dozen points went up with a roar that shook the earth and brought down the parapets in our lines. Before the blackness of their burst had thinned or fallen the hand of Time rested on the half-hour mark, and along all that old front line of the English there came a whistling and a crying. The men of the first wave climbed up the parapets, in tumult, darkness, and the presence of death, and having done with all pleasant things, advanced across the No Man’s Land to begin the Battle of the Somme.

The descriptions of landscape, the importance attached to times of day and night, its physical composition, could be either literal or metaphorical in tone.

J.R.R Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, much of which was written during the Second World War, outlines an ancient battle-scarred landscape of pools and Dead Marshes, beneath which the dead of long past battles are submerged - suggestively echoing the muddied pools surrounding the River Ancre:

‘Hurrying forward Sam tripped, catching his foot in some old root or tussock. He fell and came heavily on his hands, which sank deep into sticky ooze, so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mere. There was a faint hiss, a noisome smell went up, the lights flickered and danced and swirled. For a moment the water below him looked like some window, glazed with grimy glass, through which he was peering. Wrenching his hands out of the bog, he sprang with a cry. ‘They are dead things, dead faces in the water’ he said with horror. ‘Dead faces’’.

J.R.R. Tolkein, The Passage of the Marshes, The Lord of the Rings

The mythological tone struck by Tolkein; his sense of something ancient and solemn is both mirrored and contrasted by Edmund Blunden. Blunden recalls his first experience of the ‘Old British Line’ at Festubert, before his regiment was transferred to the Somme Battlefield in 1916. His classical reference to Homer’s Iliad with its story of the titanic struggle between the Greek states and Troy described within, hold solemn reference and equal parallel to Blunden’s experiences of the Great War:

‘Such as it was, the Old British Line at Festubert had the appearance of great age and perpetuity; its weather-beaten sand bag was already venerable. It shared the past with the defences of Troy’.

Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War

Vigils: Out in the Darkness

‘O river of stars and shadows, lead me through the night’.
Siegfried Sassoon, Before the Battle, June 25th, 1916.

On the Somme, activity at night, beneath the surface of the landscape was a practical and logistical necessity. The movement of men and material, under the cover of darkness, to the front-line and firing-step was facilitated by a vast network of communication trenches operating as webbed arteries across and below the battlefield.

Darkness never guaranteed safety, as Robert Graves recorded in his poem The Leveller:

Near Martinpuich that night of hell
Two men were struck by the same shell,
Together tumbling in one heap
Senseless and limp like slaughtered sheep.

Troop Movement at night took place on both land and at sea.

On a night crossing to Le Havre on the 22nd June 1916, in a boat packed with troops showing ‘no lights’; composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, following disembarkation, records his arrival at Maizieres, in a cattle truck inscribed ‘40 men or 8 horses’. From Mazieres he hears ‘the ceaseless sound of gunfire On the Somme’

As a ‘waggon orderly’, in the London Field Ambulance he recalls going up to the line ‘every night to bring back wounded and sick in a motor ambulance’. Vaughan Williams records that, ‘all this takes place at night except an occasional day journey for urgent cases.’

Laudes: Night -through-to -Dawn

“Mail’s up!’’ The vast of night is over, And love of Friends fills all one’s mind.
Ivor Gurney.

In Siegfried Sassoon’s, Prelude: The Troops, night progresses through to a burgeoning dawn; what Sassoon identifies as the ‘thinning of the shapeless gloom’. As the morning light and the sky above becomes apparent, the activities of the day takes over from those of the night:

Dim, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom
Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals
Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots
And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky
Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down
The stale despair of night, must now renew
Their desolation in the truce of dawn,
Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace.

He further asks in his 1919 poem Aftermath:-

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz—
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench—
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'

In an attempt to consolidate the British line at Quadrangle Wood and Strip Trenches; Sassoon took part in the1st Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers failed and uncoordinated night attack on Mametz Wood on the 3/4th July, alongside the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment.

A further night attack on the 5th July had Sassoon leading a patrol followed by a single-handed grenade attack against a German trench.

Sext (Noon)-through to -Nones-(Mid-afternoon)

Somme Villages-West-to-East

The villages ‘On the Somme’ are pulled out of their anonymity and into memory in the works of soldier poets who fought there. They exist in poems, diaries, the written word and musical scores in response to the experiences of battle. They are destinations on a trench map from which fields, paths and lanes join into focus. They are welded to the experiences of spring summer, autumn and winter - day and night - as the battle progresses in an easterly direction, either side of the present day D.929, from Albert to Bapaume:

‘By wire and wood and stake we’re bound,
By Fricourt and by Festubert,
By whipping rain, by the sun’s glare,
By all the misery and loud sound,
By a Spring Day
By Picard Clay.’

Robert Graves, Two Fusiliers.

Vespers (Evening)- through to - Compline (Night)

The approach of night, allowed combatants to expect the ensuing cover of darkness and a period of rest.

‘Down in the hollow there’s the whole Brigade
Camped in four groups; through twilight falling slow
I hear a sound of mouth organs, ill-played,
And Murmur of voices, gruff, confused and low.’

Siegfried Sassoon, At Carnoy.