Literary travels with The Lobster: Verses of Valour and The Somme

April is perhaps the best month to drive around the battlefields of the Somme. Whilst not experiencing the ‘Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain’ of which Edward Thomas speaks, the persistent drizzle this time of year does give a feel for the bleakness of life in the trenches.

After picking up a volume of Thomas’ poetry a few weeks ago, I decided a second trip to this region was very much in order. I first visited the Somme on a school trip, as is relatively common in Britain. This time (8 years later), I travelled not with 50 other pupils on a bus, but simply accompanied by a pocket-size anthology of British Great War poems.

The war was written down in prose, too, and in this respect, I would recommend Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. There’s also Robert Graves’ Good-bye to All That and Maurice Genevoix’s Ceux de 14 on the French side. Yet I find it is poetry which most poignantly phrased the atrocities of war. Sassoon (yes, he very much is one of my favourite writers!) proves this with his melancholic ‘Does it Matter’, written in October 1917:

Does it matter? – losing your legs?...

For people will always be kind,

And you need not show that you mind

When the others come in after hunting

To gobble their muffins and eggs.

Does it matter? – losing your sight?...

There’s such splendid work for the blind;

And people will always be kind,

As you sit on the terrace remembering

And turning your face to the light.

Do they matter? – those dreams from the pit?...

You can drink and forget and be glad,

And people won’t say that you’re mad;

For they’ll know you’ve fought for your country

And no one will worry a bit.

Such delicately paced lines offer the space for reflection which an action-packed narrative cannot. They suit the solemn formality of remembrance ceremonies, too, perhaps explaining why we so often turn to our favourite poets in times of national grief.

Poetry also allows for more explosive expressions of bitterness. Through onomatopoeic bursts condensed in short poems, writers of the Great War could convincingly imitate the sound of canons and the incessant firing of guns. Take, for instance, these harrowing lines from Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum est’:

(…)

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

Bitten as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg, McCrae… all these are poets which, having studied them at school and university, I – and doubtless many of our readers – was already familiar with. What’s more, regular reeditions of their poetry cement their heralded position within the literary canon. The reputation of their French counterparts is blurrier. The names Edmond Rostand, Paul Claudel, and Paul Éluard will ring a bell for Francophiles, but few would associate them with the war, let alone with its poetry.

A stop at the Péronne Historial museum shed some light on this puzzling discrepancy in literary output between the two countries. There I found a recently published and surprisingly extensive anthology of French war poetry. Several poems are translated into English; it’s an editorial decision which perhaps aims to redress the balance in public recognition between French and British poets. And it may well pay off, because the war seems to also have been a productive period for French writers.

The already revered Rostand could be considered the equivalent of Rudyard Kipling, producing poetry in the romance tradition as war broke out. In ‘Les Ruches Brûlées’ (‘The Burnt Bee Hives’), he evokes the beauty of soldiers marching off to Flanders with roses on their horses’ backs and chanting the Marseillaise. Paul Claudel, also 46 years old in 1914, published only patriotic verse during the war, most notably ‘Tant que vous voudrez, mon Général!’ (‘As long as you wish, General!’). Again, the engaging refrain structure of the piece is reminiscent of Kipling’s chauvinistic ‘If –’, written four years prior.

However, for a younger generation of French writers, the war was an opportunity to introduce a radically new way of ‘doing’ poetry. Guillaume Apollinaire was one of those who never lived to witness peace in 1918 – he died of Spanish flu two days before the Armistice. But he lives on as the French war poet par excellence, acting as a precursor to modernist currents of imagism and surrealism. Apollinaire may have been stuck in the trenches, but his concerns were with the future development of Europe, its growing industrialisation, and the development of mass media, especially of advertising. His poem ‘Festival’ is telling of such anxieties:

Fireworks in the steel

How delightful is this lighting

An artificer’s artifice

Mingling grace with valour

Two flares

Rose explosion

Like two breasts unbound

Raising their nipples insolently

HE KNEW HOW TO LOVE

what an epitaph

A poet in the forest

Gazes languidly

His revolver on its safety catch

At roses dying of hope

(…)

Apollinaire confronts us with resolutely avant-gardist visuals, disturbing the reader’s eye as he indents lines and jarringly capitalises ‘HE KNEW HOW TO LOVE’. Unlike Edward Thomas or Rupert Brooke, who lull us with longing recollections of Georgian England, Apollinaire is charging ahead in a revolutionary vein, pre-empting the works of Pound, Eliot, and Stein.

French poets, then, were by no means trailing behind the British. They might well have been paving the way to a new era of poetry, and indeed many famed symbolists, surrealists and even existentialists were present in the French trenches. Whilst we firmly associate Thomas, Brooke, Graves, and their contemporaries with the war, the likes of Jean Cocteau and George Duhamel are remembered for their work post-1918. Life in the trenches, for them, was just the beginning of a prolific literary career.

Even during the war these forward-thinking poets seemed to have an uncanny inkling of what awaited them. And so, this piece, composed by Paul Éluard in July 1918, feels fitting to conclude our whistlestop tour of Great War poetry:

I

All the happy women have

Found their husband back – he returns from the sun

                    As he brings so much heat.

                 He laughs and says “good day” very gently

                 Before kissing his wonder.

II

Splendid, the breast slightly arched,

Saint wife of mine, you belong to me even better than

At the time when, along with him, and him and him

I was holding a rifle, a can – our life!

VIII

For a long time I had a useless face,

But now

I have a face to be loved

I have a face to be happy.