was an example of the paralysing effect which such an experience could produce on a nervous system sensitive to noise, for he was a good officer both before and afterwards. I felt no sympathy for him at the time, but I do now. From the support-trench, which Barton called 'our opera box', I observed as much of the battle as the formation of the country allowed, the rising ground on the right making it impossible to see anything of the attack towards Mametz. A small shiny black note-book contains my pencilled particulars, and nothing will be gained by embroidering them with afterthoughts. I cannot turn my field-glasses on to the past.2
7.45. The barrage is now working to the right of Fricourt and beyond. I can see the 21st Division advancing about three-quarters of a mile away on the left and a few Germans coming to meet them, apparently surrendering. Our men in small parties (not extended in line) go steadily on to the German front-line. Brilliant sunshine and a haze of smoke drifting along the landscape. Some Yorkshires3 a little way below on the left, watching the show and cheering as if at a football match. The noise almost as bad as ever. 9.30. Came back to dug-out and had a shave. 21st Division still going across the open, apparently without casualties. The sunlight flashes on bayonets as the tiny figures move quietly forward and disappear beyond mounds of trench debris. A few runners come back and ammunition parties go across. Trench-mortars are knocking hell out of Sunken Road trench and the ground where the Manchesters4 will attack soon. Noise not so bad now and very little retaliation. 9.50. Fricourt half-hidden by clouds of drifting smoke, blue, pinkish and grey. Shrapnel bursting in small bluish-white puffs with tiny flashes. The birds seem bewildered; a lark begins to go up and then flies feebly along, thinking better of it. Others flutter above the trench with querulous cries, weak on the wing. I can see seven of our balloons,5 on the right. On the left our men still filing across in twenties and thirties. Another huge explosion in Fricourt and a cloud of brown-pink smoke. Some bursts are yellowish. 10.5. I can see the Manchesters down in New Trench, getting ready to go over. Figures filing down the trench. Two of them have gone out to look at our wire gaps!6 Have just eaten my last orange. .. . I am staring at a sunlit picture of Hell, and still the breeze shakes the yellow weeds, and the poppies glow under Crawley Ridge where some shells fell a few minutes ago. Manchesters are sending forward some scouts. A bayonet glitters. A runner comes back across the open to their Battalion Headquarters, close here on the right. 21 st Division still trotting along the sky line toward La Boisselle. Barrage going strong to the right of Contalmaison Ridge. Heavy shelling toward Mametz. 1916 1930
2. The extracts that follow are edited versions of 4. Men of the Manchester regiment. the actual entries in Sassoon's diary. (See Siegfried 5. Long cables, tethering such balloons, prevented Sassoon: Diaries 1915-1918, ed. Rupert Hart-attacks by low-flying aircraft. Davis, 1983, pp. 82-83.) 6. Holes, made by shell fire, in the long coils of 3. Men of a Yorkshire regiment. barbed wire protecting the trenches.
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1965
IVOR GURNEY 1890-1937
Ivor Bertie Gumey was born in Gloucester and showed an early aptitude for music. After five years at the King's School, Gloucester, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. He first acquired a modest reputation as a composer. After war broke out in August 1914, he enlisted; his battalion was sent to France the following year, and Gurney experienced the horrors of the Western Front. He was wounded in April 1917, and when in the hospital in Rouen, he sent some of his poems to friends in London. The resultant volume, Severn and Somme, was published that year. (The Severn is the English river at the head of whose estuary Gloucester is situated; it appears often in his poetry. The Somme is the northern French river that was the scene of some of the most murderous fighting in the war.) Gurney was returned to the front in time to take part in the grim Paschendale offensive of the summer of
1917. He suffered the effects of a poison-gas attack on August 22 and was sent home, where he moved from hospital to hospital. He returned to the Royal College of Music to study under the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872?1958) and continued also to write poetry. His second book of poems, War's Embers, appeared in 1919. Gurney, now believed to have been schizophrenic, spent the last fifteen years of his life in mental asylums.
Gurney was a mere private in the war, unlike officers such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and his poems recapture with immediacy particular scenes and moments in the trenches. He was influenced by the poetry of Edward Thomas, with whom he shares a limpid directness, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose 'terrible' sonnets are racked by despair. Though ruminating on traditional subjects such as landscape, nature, and mortality, Gurney dislocates these Georgian conventions through the compression, disharmony, and unredemptive language of his poetry. His 'modern' techniques include syntactic contortions, colloquial diction, shifting rhythms and rhymes, and enjambments that accentuate the jarring experience of war (a body described as 'that red wet / Thing' in 'To His Love').
To His Love
He's gone, and all our plans Are useless indeed. We'll walk no more on Cotswold1 5 Where the sheep feed Quietly and take no heed. His body that was so quick Is not as you Knew it, on Severn river0 Under the blue a British river 10 Driving our small boat through. You would not know him now . . . But still he died 15 Nobly, so cover him over With violets of pride Purple from Severn side.
1. Range of hills in Gloucestershire, in western England.
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1966 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1
Cover him, cover him soon! And with thick-set Masses of memoried flowers? Hide that red wet 20 Thing I must somehow forget.
1919
The Silent One
Who died on the wires,' and hung there, one of two? Who for his hours of life had chattered through Infinite lovely chatter of Bucks2 accent: Yet faced unbroken wires; stepped over, and went
s A noble fool, faithful to his stripes?and ended. But I weak, hungry, and willing only for the chance Of line?to fight in the line, lay down under unbroken Wires, and saw the flashes and kept unshaken, Till the politest voice?a finicking accent, said:
10 'Do you think you might crawl through there: there's a hole.' Darkness, shot at: I smiled, as politely replied? 'I'm afraid not, Sir.' There was no hole no way to be seen Nothing but chance of death, after tearing of clothes. Kept flat, and watched the darkness, hearing bullets whizzing?
15 And thought of music?and swore deep heart's deep oaths (Polite to God) and retreated and came on again, Again retreated?and a second time faced the screen.
1954
