Remembrance
Showing posts with label Remembrance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Remembrance. Show all posts

Charles Hamilton Sorley: The Forgotten Poet of WWI by Catherine Hokin

 It Is Easy To Be Dead - Aberdeen Performing Arts
November's commemorations of the end of World War One have had a particular poignancy this year. Not only is it the centenary but the hundreds of acts of remembrance have taken place against a backdrop of Brexit and the break-up of Europe, possibly also the break-up of the Union. This isn't the place to get political but, for those of us with strong connections to our wider European community, there were extra reasons to shed tears this month as we watched the nations coming together to lay their wreathes. It seemed fitting therefore that I got a chance to see Neil McPherson's wonderful play It Is Easy To Be Dead, recently in Glasgow. This tells the story of  forgotten war poet Charles Hamilton Sorley who was born in Aberdeen, educated at Marlborough and killed, aged 20, at the Battle of Loos in October 1915. In his very short life he wrote 38 poems, spurred on, in his own words by his mother's "badgering". Although his name is included on the War Poets' memorial in Westminster Abbey, you'll rarely find him mentioned now, or taught, but at his death the Poet Laureate John Masefield called Sorley "potentially the greatest poet lost to us in that war". 

 Charles Hamilton Sorley
That we don't know him as well as we should is a great loss - his poems are unsentimental, compassionate and filled with a concern for humanity that belies his young age. They were first published in 1916, by his parents, together with a collection of his letters written both from the front and during the lengthy period he spent as a student in Germany in 1914. A trip cut short when Britain came into the escalating conflict in the August of that year. It is this experience I think which marks his work out from his better-known contemporaries - it has certainly been cited as the reason why he does not fit well in the war poets' canon. Sorley did not see the war through patriotic eyes and there is none of the jingoistic language in his work that was more commonly found in early WWI poetry. His letters suggest that he identified more strongly with German values than he did with English ones - while this may be no more than the enthusiasm of a young man on his first trip abroad, it certainly gave him a sense of fellow-feeling. He spoke fluent German and was enamoured with the country and its culture - his poem To Germany written on the eve of the war addresses the common bond he shares with the young Germans about to be plunged, like him, into a madness not of their making:

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,

And no man claimed the conquest of your land.

But gropers both through fields of thought confined

We stumble and we do not understand.

He was under no illusions about the cost of the coming war in terms of the misery it would bring - the poem's last line reads: "until peace, the storm, the darkness and the thunder and the rain." As his father, a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, said of his son in the preface to the volume of letters and poems: ‘He looked on the world with clear eyes and the surface show did not deceive him.’

The title of the play, It Is Easy To Be Dead, comes from perhaps Sorley's best known poem and his last one: When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead. It was written shortly before his death and found with his kit. It is a beautiful poem; that a twenty-year old had learned to be so aware of the reality of war and the ultimate futility of weeping for the dead makes it a heart-breaking one.

When you see millions of the mouthless dead

 Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
 
Say not soft things as other men have said,
 
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
 
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know 

It is not curses heaped on each gashed head? 

Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
 
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead. Say only this, 'They are dead.'
 
Then add thereto, ‘Yet many a better one has died before.'
 
Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
 
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
 
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
 
Great death has made all his for evermore.

Sorley didn't live to see what came next - as we remember those who died in a frighteningly divided world, let's hope we don't live to regret what's coming next for us.
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Of poppies and remembrance: Sue Purkiss

It can hardly have escaped anyone's notice that last Sunday was the hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War. (A hundred years would have seemed an unimaginably long time to me when I was a child: now, not so much!) There have been poppies everywhere - but apparently, not quite enough of them...

In Cheddar, where I live, there has been some murmuring, because there has been no civic display of poppies. Other villages, it is claimed, have HUGE poppies attached to lamp posts. (It seems that there weren't enough of these to go round - Cheddar asked, but did not receive.) Outside every shop in Winscombe, a neighbouring village, there hangs a flag with that iconic image of exhausted soldiers stumbling through the hideous desert of the battlefields.

It has to be said that Cheddar has form here. When it was the Millenium, all the villages for miles around - tiny, many of them - suddenly acquired boundary stones with the village name carved on them. Not Cheddar. We got two raised beds, which are known as 'the village green' - even though we have two huge quarries nearby which could surely have provided any number of magnificent boulders. (You can tell this is still a sore point.)

Outside Cheddar Catholic Church

However, as others pointed out: even if the lamp posts lacked poppies, there were numerous displays in shops and outside churches: there was even one in a telephone box, which has been adopted by a group of local artists and used for mini-exhibitions. For Remembrance Day, they filled it with poppies in different media - fabric, ceramics, glass. And next weekend, there will be a theatrical performance scripted by brilliant local dramatist Gill Scard, who specialises in researching local history and then creating a performance piece from her discoveries, using local people as actors.

Inside the phone box (photo Ellen Grady)

So Cheddar, like everywhere else, has in fact found its own ways to remember, and to remind. And the vehicle for this is the poppy. It's not a universal symbol; it was adopted after the First World War, and its choice was inspired by a poem called In Flanders Fields, written in 1915 by a Canadian doctor, John McCrae, who noticed that poppies were growing in the scarred battlefields, and saw them as a symbol of hope and revival. In 1921, the Royal British Legion first sold poppies to raise money for wounded and disabled servicemen. In France, the cornflower became the symbol of remembrance. The white poppy, which has become more popular in recent years, was actually first promoted in the twenties by the Peace Pledge Union, who felt they wanted something which symbolised peace: perhaps they felt that red suggests blood.

Red and white poppies on the beautiful thirteenth century steps to the Chapter House in Wells Cathedral


Symbols are powerful things. This display, at Wells Cathedral, on the well-worn steps which lead up to the Chapter House (one of my favourite places in the world), surely testifies to that.

Incidentally, I wasn't at church at 11am on the 11th. I had popped into my local branch of Sainsburys, and, stupidly, hadn't even noticed the time. I wondered why all the staff were standing at the front of the store: someone quietly told me. And at 11am, we all stood in silence for two minutes. And there was something intensely moving about that, and about the way that afterwards some people spoke softly about those they had been remembering. It didn't matter that we weren't in a beautiful church, or before some imposing monument. It did matter that we were a group of human beings, sharing in an act of remembrance. And it doesn't matter which village has the best poppy display. What matters is that we remember, in whatever way suits us best.

Displays by children from local schools in the Chapter House
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The Men Behind The Glass Sheena Wilkinson

I’m writing this on 4 November 2018 at my home thirty miles from the Irish border. A border I cross at least weekly, a border whose future I worry about daily thanks to Brexit.

The British border in Ireland during the Troubles


On the radio today I have heard –

Tributes to Wilfred Owen, who was killed in action 100 years ago today, including the playing of a German bugle he found on a dead German soldier. This was moving. 

The president of the United States declare that barbed wire ‘used properly’ can be beautiful. This was horrifying. And disgusting. 

Wilfred Owen
A few weeks ago I was involved in a creative writing project in a local school, helping sixth formers to respond creatively to the  school’s World War One archive. The initiative was part of a wider school remembrance project called The Men Behind The Glass. https://menbehindtheglass.co.uk.

Campbell College is a boys’ school in east Belfast -- C S Lewis was a pupil -- and between 1914-1918 many of its alumni served as soldiers, medics, and chaplains. This was, of course, typical of schools of the period, all over Europe.  In my previous career as a teacher I explored the wartime experiences of my own school, Methodist College as inspiration for the story ‘Each Slow Dusk’ in The Great War (Walker Books, 2014) and the novel Name Upon Name(Little Island, 2015). (I wrote about it for my first ever HG post -- http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/search?q=sheena+wilkinson.)  So when I was asked to work with pupils  at Campbell, along with two neighbouring girls’ schools, Strathearn and Bloomfield Collegiate, I was delighted – this was so very much my kind of project. 

Campbell College
Photos of the 127 men who died in the conflict are displayed around the walls in the school’s central hall – hence ‘the men behind the glass’. Our work was designed to take their stories off the walls and into the hearts and minds and imaginations of the sixth formers who honoured their memories with their responses. I shared with the group my own experience of using an archive to inspire creative work, and we discussed the issues involved. They had biographies of some of the men, which they used as inspiration for their own work – mostly imagined letters home from the western front.

My story in this anthology was inspired
by research in another school archive
The highlight of the project was hearing the students read their work in that hall, surrounded by the portraits of young men often barely older than they. I didn’t understand every word of the finished pieces – my A Level German studies are thirty years behind me now, but that didn’t matter. 

Oh yes. Did I not say? The pieces were in German. It was a German A Level class, and the stories were shared online with a partner school in Germany who will be writing their own wartime stories in English.  Hearing these letters read in German was extraordinarily moving: not only had the students imagined themselves into the minds of young Irish soldiers from a century ago, but, by voicing the sentiments in German, they were also echoing the words of the thousands of German soldiers who would have written home from the same fronts. In that way, it was the most truly European project I have been involved with. Physically the students may not have left the school; imaginatively and emotionally they travelled beyond borders, with or without barbed wire. 

When I heard that German bugle played today, in memory of Wilfred Owen, I detected the same notes of hope. I just hope they can be heard above the clamour of more raucous voices.
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