The End of the War

A hundred years ago today, the worst war the world had seen finally came to an end. If you know me, you probably know that I’ve got quite an interest in the Great War, but, on such a momentous day, I don’t feel like anything I could write would do justice to this Armistice day of all armistice days, so here is a selection of quotations and poetry from men and women who lived through this horror.

 

The Beginning of the War

 

To start off, a quotation from Vera Brittain, from her memoir: Testament of Youth, on the beginning of the war: “When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.” This war, like every major change in history, didn’t seem as such when it was happening.

 

Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary in 1914, was almost prescient in his quotation, “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time”

 

Living through the War

 

From Helen Z. Smith’s novel Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of war. This is my favorite novel and takes its inspiration from the memoirs of an Ambulance Driver who served on the front. “It seems a waste of a well cut uniform to be in a place where the men are too wounded or harassed to regard women other than cogs in the great machinery, and the women are too worn out to care whether they do or not.”

 

One of my favorite Poems by Wilfred Owen, an infantry officer who died 100 years and 7 days ago, who was killed in action crossing the Sambre-Oise Canal only a week before Armistice. It is titled ‘The Letter’ about a man writing home to his wife from the trenches:

 

With B.E.F. June 10. Dear Wife,

(Oh blast this pencil. ‘Ere, Bill, lend’s a knife.)

I’m in the pink at present, dear.

I think the war will end this year.

We don’t see much of them square-‘eaded ‘Uns.

We’re out of harm’s way, not bad fed.

I’m longing for a taste of your old buns.

(Say, Jimmie, spare’s a bite of bread.)

There don’t seem much to say just now.

(Yer what? Then don’t, yer ruddy cow!

And give us back me cigarette!)

I’ll soon be ‘ome. You mustn’t fret.

My feet’s improvin’, as I told you of.

We’re out in rest now. Never fear.

(VRACH! By crumbs, but that was near.)

Mother might spare you half a sov.

Kiss Nell and Bert. When me and you—

(Eh? What the ‘ell! Stand to? Stand to!

Jim, give’s a hand with pack on, lad.

Guh! Christ! I’m hit. Take ‘old. Aye, bad.

No, damn your iodine. Jim? ‘Ere!

Write my old girl, Jim, there’s a dear.)  

 

From Siegfried Sassoon’s (An infantry officer and poet who was popularized Owen’s poetry after the war) semi-autobiographical novel ‘Memoirs of an Infantry Officer’: “I still maintain that an ordinary human being has a right to be momentarily horrified by a mangled body seen on an afternoon walk.”

 

To follow up, one of Sassoon’s poems about the war entitled ‘Suicide in the Trenches’:

 

I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy,

Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,

And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,

With crumps and lice and lack of rum,

He put a bullet through his brain.

No one spoke of him again.

 

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you’ll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

 

Those Who Fell

 

These are the first two stanzas of a poem we all have heard, and the reason Poppies are a symbol of First World War Remembrance. Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae (Who died himself in January of 1918 in Boulogne-sur-Mer), a Canadian Doctor from Guelph, Ontario, penned this poem after his friend, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer died at the Second Battle of Ypres:

 

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

 

We are the dead, short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

 

And Sassoon’s poem ‘Memorial Tablet’:

 

Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight,

(Under Lord Derby’s scheme). I died in hell –

(They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,

And I was hobbling back; and then a shell

Burst slick upon the duckboards: so I fell

Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light

 

At sermon-time, while Squire is in his pew,

He gives my gilded name a thoughtful stare;

For, though low down upon the list, I’m there;

“In proud and glorious memory” … that’s my due.

Two bleeding years I fought in France, for Squire:

I suffered anguish that he’s never guessed.

Once I came home on leave: and then went west…

What greater glory could a man desire?

 

And of course, back to Wilfred Owen, the poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (Note,’ Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ is Latin for ‘It is Noble and Sweet to die for one’s country’)

 

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

 

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

 

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

 

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

 

Those Who Survived

 

From Helen Z. Smith’s ‘Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War’ after the protagonist survives an air raid “Her soul died that night under a radiant silver moon in the spring of 1918 on the side of a blood-spattered trench. Around her lay the mangled dead and the dying. Her body was untouched, her heart beat calmly, the blood coursed as ever through her veins. But looking deep into those emotionless eyes one wondered if they had suffered much before the soul had left them. Her face held an expression of resignation, as though she had ceased to hope that the end might come.”

 

From Ferdinand Foch, a French General with a chilling prediction, “This is not a peace. It is an Armistice for twenty years.”

 

And, a quotation from Calvin Coolidge, because, too often we forget that this was a World war, and not just a White Man’s war, “The colored people have repeatedly proved their devotion to the high ideals of our country. They gave their services in the war with the same patriotism and readiness that other citizens did.” Many African Americans gave their lives defending a country that did not treat them as equals so that their descendants may someday properly be free.

 

And for my last quotation from the war, from William March’s ‘Company K’ about God’s response to War:

“You can always tell an old battlefield where many men have lost their lives. The next spring the grass comes up greener and more luxuriant than on the surrounding countryside; the poppies are redder, the corn-flowers more blue. They grow over the field and down the sides of the shell holes and lean, almost touching, across the abandoned trenches in a mass of color that ripples all day in the direction that the wind blows. They take the pits and scars out of the torn land and make it a sweet, sloping surface again. Take a wood, now, or a ravine: In a year’s time you could never guess the things which had taken place there.

 

I repeated these thoughts to my wife, but she said it was not difficult to understand about battlefields: The blood of the men killed on the field, and the bodies buried there, fertilize the ground and stimulate the growth of vegetation. That was all quite natural she said.

 

But I could not agree with this, too-simple, explanation: To me it has always seemed that God is so sickened with men, and their unending cruelty to each other, that he covers the places where they have been as quickly as possible.”

 

Hope

 

To finish off, one of the more powerful quotations from the Bible, The Gospel of John Chapter 1 Verse 5: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”