The End and the Beginning
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.
Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.
We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.
From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.
Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.
by Wislawa Szymborska,
translated by Joanna Trzeciak
William Orpen, 1917
Edwin Martin 1918
John Lavery 1918
Reginald Mills 1941-42
Dear Josie,
The actor Benedict Cumberbatch plays Jimmy Langley.
The Racing Correspondent, Roger Mortimer took part in the same rear guard action and was captured, after being knocked-out. Later in life his letters to his wayward son, Charlie in the 1960s and 70s were publish by Nick Robinson of Constable Robinson. Wonderfully Humourous, the book “Dear Lupin” became a best seller and the source of a West End play.
Dear Josie,
The 3 part BBC docudrama (2004) covers the rear guard action in its third episode (deliverance). We see the action taking place through the eyes of Jimmy Langley. Whose hand written notes and order of battle he sent to my grandmother.
Now I’m wondering if that’s available somewhere.
Thanks for the info Nicholas.
Dear Josie,
As well as being an artist I have, for thirty years or so supplied many an author with historical data. Much to do with the Second World War, and indeed stretching across huge tracks of the Medieval. Dunkirk I know is one of your subjects. I was once at a dinner party where all four of us husbands discovered that we had grandfathers who were killed in action whilst fighting the rear guard action – and so keeping the Germans away from the embarkations all along the coast around Dunkirk. In my paternal grandfathers case all five officers killed in the battalion were related. Their bodies were not given a burial for a year. Slowly DNA has allowed their names to be added to their headstones instead of just their rank and regiment.
That must have been quite the dinner party! The story of that rear guard action is so often lost in the telling of the “miracle”.
Dear Josie,
The topped hatted boys in the photograph are wearing Eton Jackets. At Harrow, Eton Jackets were worn only by the most junior of boys or those under 5ft 4in. At Harrow such jackets were called in our jargon “bumfreezers”. These were worn on Sundays and Special occasions such as Speech Day. The other boys at the school wore tails for such days. The rest of the time we wore bluers and greyers. We wore a black tie in mourning for Queen Victoria. Our hats were boaters whilst Etonians wore top hats. Only Harrow monitors had top hats with tails, and they did not wear “bumfreezers”.
Cecil Beaton photographed in the Western Desert. He lived,towards the end of his life at Broad Chalke in Wiltshire, where indeed he is buried. It is the same village where the diarist, John Aubrey had lived, and where now, each year a well attended Literary Festival is held.
I defer to you on the school outfit front. I’m surprised though that someone has not pointed this out to all the stock photo and newspaper folks who use it so often and misidentify the name of the school.
And you are a wonderful mine of fascinating items from history. Thanks.
Dear Josie,
I wonder if your are missing an opportuity here. The photographer Ceil Beaton photographed the destruction of war. He was an Old Harrovian like your “Mr Chips” Mervyn Comrie – as was the artist, Claude Francis Barry (The Park) who crops up in another one of your articles. I lived with a “Barry” on my walls for a period of time some forty years ago. His family called his paintings “room dividers” since they were painted to a large scale. Indeed it was Barrys influence that broght me to my present stage of painting with the juxtaposition of bright colours. Barrys son, Rupert, captured at Dunkirk, was one of the first British officers to be imprisioned in Colditz. Indeed there is a well known group photograph of them. Rupert, in the photograph sports a stashe and wears a cricket jersey. In fact he escaped. In your article of Mervyn Comrie there is a photograph of a pair of top hatted boys. They are Etonians. It was optional to vanish the boaters yourself. However the wind did have a habit of blowing them off the head and under the wheels of of a passing car ( Inspite of the hat band at the back of the head – which was seldom utilised).
Interesting stuff, as usual Nicholas. Thanks. All the credits for that Lord’s photo say that the boys are from Harrow, not Eton. If that’s wrong then it’s a perfect example of – once a mistake is made it multiplies.
I’m familiar with Beaton’s war work but other than Tower Bridge, London: A War-Time Nocturne I am unfamiliar with Barry’s art. I shall have to go explore. Love the idea of “room dividers” as a term of fine art appreciation!
Ben Macintyre’s book about Colditz is on my reading list. (I loved the BBC TV series back in the 1970s. )
Dear Josie,
There are a few examples of my work dotted around, but not very many. It really depends on what combination of words you use in the search engine. My one man shows are self organised – usually in London, where I throw myself at the mercy of media friends to generate a presence. Indeed I have shown at Private venues in New York and New England where also I have painted a mural or two. Some examples of my old style of painting and photographs are registered with the Brigeman Art Library. There has been much evolution in the last twenty years or so. I still paint ruins – but the juxtaposition of colour choice has come into its own with Fauvist undertones. I have no Website.
I was once asked to put together the outline for a television documentary devoted to British War Artists. Two of those on my list had fought in the Second World War. Over the years, I had met and got to know, as friends many of those who had fought behind enemy lines during the war. One of those artists was David Cobb whose main job was to run, on dark nights, special agents with his MTB into the coast of France. The second artist I met only twice, was Brian Stonehouse, when an old school friend of mine gave him an exhibition. Stonehouse had operated behind enemy lines in France. He had been captured and survived Dachau by drawing his captors and fellow S.O.E prisoners (most of whom would be subsequently shot). Stoneshouses work is in the Imperial War Museum.
Thanks Nicholas – you’ve provided some great leads here. I shall follow-up. Thank-you.
Dear Josie,
My maternal grandfather was a Battery commander at Alamein and subseqently at Monte Cassino. Ted Todhunter, his contempory had already been captured and ended up in Campo 12, the prison camp for Commonwealth Generals. However there, in Italy my grandfather came across the artist Edward Seago. When I was a child, in my grandparents library, there was a copy of an illustrated book detailing Seagos time in Italy with the Allied armies. In my twenties I specialised in painting historical ruins. This book, which is now in my library, was the inspiration to go one step further and become a painter of war ruins. (I have gone several steps further since then). I belonged, and indeed still belong to a very lose set of war artists. None of us are of the same school but all are independent war artists where life is certainly more hectic. (no minders) The CNN War Correspndent Jack Laurence (read his book “The Cat from Hue,” it is superbe) asked me once at a book launch why I risked my life to paint on the front line. I threw the question back at him as far as his Vietnam days were concern. Neither of us could come up with a credible answer.
Quite the family history! I remember hearing parts of it in your interview with the IWM. (My brother has a compass with a radioactive luminous dial that our father swapped for something with an Italian prisoner of war somewhere in the Western Desert.)
How interesting to know someone who met Edward Seago. I am familiar with some of his landscapes of the east coast and have always admired his work.
Interesting exchange with Jack Laurence – there is no accounting for what drives us to do what we do when it seems to be counter to common sense and for no good reason. I shall have to look for that book.
In terms of your own work – are there any other examples available to see online? (I couldn’t locate any.)
Dear Josie,
I have a particular penchant for the juxtaposition. I am reminded of an R.F.C pilot I once met. He described to me how they would attack the German lines with bombs dropped by hand over the side of the biplane. Their aiming device was a small apperture in the floor of the aeroplane over which was stretched a crosswire. When these pilots got a weekend leave, they would fly back to to England and within a matter of hours would be a guest at a formal dinner party, white tie and tails, in London. They would be back in France over the German trenches again by Monday morning. Another person I met told me that during the Second World War she was at a tennis party where at the same time, they could see and hear the Stuka dive bombers attacking Portsmouth harbour for two hours. When I was in Zagreb one particular Friday I was at a dinner party given by a Croatian friend. The entire meal was perforated by gunfite and tracer bullets slanting up into the sky. This was not an attack but a ritual performance, celebrating Friday night. The following week I was sitting in a street cafe again on a Friday night when a soldier calmly stepped out into the street, drew his pistol, held it aloft with both hands and fired a whole magazine into the air. He shouted something then returned to his drink at his table. Nobody batted an eyelid.
It’s always interesting when you allow your mind to wander a little and start making connections and associations. Your anecdotes reminded me of my father who grew up in a farmhouse right on the Sussex cliffs and spoke of how they could hear the guns across the channel when there was a big push on the Western Front. And my grandmother’s story of giving birth in Croyden during a Zeppelin raid. I have no such dramatic stories to tell from direct experience although we are all surrounded by the oddities of our collective lives – the coincidences, the random happenings, the “just missed a metaphorical bullet” moments.
AVENGING ANGELS
They say, come the hours of dark,
The angels visit to mark
The next man to die.
And lovely corpses lie
With a look on their faces
which, some say, bare the traces
of the angels touch;
And there’s nothing so much
As the dead mans stare,
In the moonlight where
The soldiers talk to the dead;
And the angels, it is said,
Are but shadows passing by.
But they mark the men to make them die.
Copyright 2023 Nicholas.R.A.Gibbs
This is very effective – and affecting – Nicholas. Works really well when read out loud too.
On the day I painted “Ruins of war” I had managed to persuade the Croat checkpoint to allow me through into the battlezone. As I walked down the road towards the devastated town of Petrinja some 6 kms away, a patrol car took pity on me and offered me a lift. Considerable refugee traffic was streaming in the opposite direction. I was dropped at the edge of town with the warning that I should not venture off the road as everywhere was mined (or booby trapped). I seemed to be the only cilivian in the town (which was seething with military activity). In a surreal twist, three hours later on my walk back towards the checkpoint the refugee traffic quite literally dried up. The long and strait road, both ways became totally deserted. Then in the distance, from where I had just come, I noticed with apprehension, two soldiers, at least a kilometre away coming towards me (shades of the Well scene in the film Lawrence of Arabia). I waited and by chance beside a request bus stop. As the soldiers came within three or four hundred yards of me a bus appeared as if from nowhere in the distance. The soldiers hailed it and all three of us boarded a former tourist bus without a word being said.
Nicholas – Am only now discovering your comment. (Clearly I was not been paying attention.) What a wonderful description of that day. Thank you.
I am now listening to the tapes of your interview with Lyn Smith on the IWM website. Fascinating.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80028533
I’ve also been looking for other examples of your work and coming up empty.
Dear Josie,
There indeed a footnote to that day. I had taken a train from Zagreb to Sisak. No taxis around. Why should there be in a war zone – so I opted to walk to the checkpoint and the battle zone. I had been walking for about half an hour when a beat up Trebant? car drew up beside me and kept pace with my steps. The window was wound down and hail-farmer-well-met said something to me in Serbo-Coat. I replied in English that I did not understand. Then in very broken Enlish he offered me a lift to the checkpoint. I got in and off we set through trails of refugee columns. However I noticed that his driving tended to sway from one side of our lane to the next – getting, at times perilously close to the on-coming refugee traffic. Although we were only doing about 20 miles an hour my hand hovered near the steering wheel just in case. When we reached the checkpoint we both got out of the car and my drive friend rather unsteadily swayed towards a group of checkpoint Police. After a short period time one of the police approached me, and in perfect English asked me from where the farmer had given me a lift. Then he added “The man who brought you here is completely drunk”.
Your accounts of your adventures – keep them coming!
Thank you.
And are there any other examples of your art available to see online?
All the best – Josie.
Ardizzone. Bawden, Szymborska – three artists (one in poetry) I admire the most. What a chastening but still wonderful assemblage of images of construction among the rubble. And how senseless the destruction, one thinks, every time one sees it. I was always especially struck by Lidiya Ginzburg’s description, in her Blockade Diary (about living through the Leningrad siege) of an apartment with its front ripped off exposed to the world as an image of how fragile our habitation is. I was going to quote it but then realised that she adds one more detail, and another, so it can’t be a short excerpt.
Agreed – a delightful trio. I had always thought of Ardizzone and Bawden primarily as illustrators of children’s books so it’s great fun to find yet more to discover.
On a totally separate note – we heard a stupendous Mahlers 1st with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting at Carnegie Hall last night. Blew out a few mental cobwebs.
Thanks for this resonant post Josie.
I’d like to add these paintings, which I’ve known for years.
https://in.pinterest.com/pin/395402042257892606/
http://davidsartoftheday.blogspot.com/2014/12/ben-shahn-red-stairway.html
and a poem that for me always encapsulated grief (which Sue’s recalled) by Edna St. Vincent Millay. “Lament”:
Listen, children:
Your father is dead.
From his old coats
I’ll make you little jackets;
I’ll make you little trousers
From his old pants.
There’ll be in his pockets
Things he used to put there,
Keys and pennies
Covered with tobacco;
Dan shall have the pennies
To save in his bank;
Anne shall have the keys
To make a pretty noise with.
Life must go on,
And the dead be forgotten;
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Life must go on;
I forget just why.
Curt – I’m only reading your wonderful response just now!
Because of the links it got caught up in the spam filter and I wasn’t paying enough attention. So sorry. I love the poem. All that matter-of-fact, life-must-go-on, stiff upper lip undercut by a simple ending phrase.
And I love both of the Shahn paintings. And – as chance would have it – used one for https://www.josieholford.com/wild-geese/ without reading your comment!
The children swinging wildly around the pole – playing with wild abandon and release – that one speaks to me and I have it stored away for use coming right up!
Thanks so much. And I’m going to pay more attention to spam filter going forward!
This calls for its essential companion poem, Szymborska’s Reality Demands
Reality demands
that we also mention this:
Life goes on.
It continues at Cannae and Borodino,
at Kosovo Polje and Guernica.
There’s a gas station
on a little square in Jericho,
and wet paint
on park benches in Bila Hora.
Letters fly back and forth
between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,
a moving van passes
beneath the eye of the lion at Chaeronea,
and the blooming orchards near Verdun
cannot escape
the approaching atmospheric front.
There is so much Everything
that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.
Music pours
from the yachts moored at Actium
and couples dance on the sunlit decks.
So much is always going on,
that it must be going on all over.
Where not a stone still stands,
you see the Ice Cream Man
besieged by children.
Where Hiroshima had been
Hiroshima is again,
producing many products
for everyday use.
This terrifying world is not devoid of charms,
of the mornings
that make waking up worthwhile.
The grass is green
on Maciejowice’s fields,
and it is studded with dew,
as is normal grass.
Perhaps all fields are battlefields,
those we remember
and those that are forgotten:
the birch forests and the cedar forests,
the snow and the sand, the iridescent swamps
and the canyons of black defeat,
where now, when the need strikes, you don’t cower
under a bush but squat behind it.
What moral flows from this? Probably none.
Only that blood flows, drying quickly,
and, as always, a few rivers, a few clouds.
On tragic mountain passes
the wind rips hats from unwitting heads
and we can’t help
laughing at that.
I love that concept of history speaking across time and space – letters back and forth between Pearl Harbor and Hastings and all the rest. So simple. So clever.
“What moral flows from this? Probably none.” And I like that too. No sententious, portentous pretentious moralizing. Just the words and the sly swift thoughts that are down-to-earth and mean the world.
Thanks for the link to the Coventry story, Ingrid. I had heard of that claim and was always inclined to believe it to be true. It’s a classic ethical dilemma of history. “What would you have done if …?” The variables also need to include the complexities of evacuating the city as well as the competing needs of saving lives and preserving a vital secret.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11486219