The War is Too Much With Us

I thought of going back to France, but realised the absurdity of the notion. Since 1916, the fear of gas obsessed me: any unusual smell, even a sudden strong smell of flowers in a garden, was enough to send me trembling. And I couldn’t face the sound of heavy shelling now; the noise of a car back-firing would send me flat on my face, or running for cover.

As he describes it in his memoir Goodbye to All That (1929) Robert Graves had all the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He called it war-shock and the Army Medical Board that awarded him a disability pension called it neurasthenia. 

Shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight, even though Nancy shared it with me; strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends who had been killed… I could not use a telephone, I felt sick every time I travelled by train, and to see more than two new people in a single day prevented me from sleeping.

At Oxford …

In the middle of a lecture I would have a sudden very clear experience of men on the march up the Béthune–La Bassée road; the men would be singing… These daydreams persisted like an alternate life and did not leave me until well in 1928. The scenes were nearly always recollections of my first four months in France; the emotion-recording apparatus seems to have failed after Loos.

The war was officially over on November 11th 1918 but the dying, the suffering and the personal and cultural rupture were not.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission has the record of 45,904 military deaths between the Armistice and the signing of the Versailles treaty on June 28th 1919.

I picked Versailles as an arbitrary point in time just to make a simple and perhaps obvious point. The war was “over’ but the ongoing effects endured and still endure. WW1 was a time of such grief, horror and ferocity that its grip has not left the collective consciousness of historians and writers. And families.  All those terrible losses echo through the generations in families who ‘evermore’ live with a hollow place of grief that can never be filled.

With the centennial of the Armistice we are awash with remembrance.

If I were in the UK right now I would probably be hiding in emotional retreat, clinging to a lift raft to save myself from drowning in a surfeit of politicized poppies and versions of ritualized recreational grief.

Instead, I am in America whose current resident of the White House chose not  to attend a ceremony at the Aisne Marne American Cemetery marking the Battle of Belleau Wood. It was a 50 mile drive but it was raining. 

Drawn to watching Remembrance Day celebrations as a child I always felt something was amiss. There had to be a counter-narrative somewhere that was not poppy-driven and pseudo patriotic. It took me a while to discover Graves, Sassoon and the other voices that provide just that. 

The news of the Armistice had Graves  “… out walking along the dyke above the marshes of Rhuddlan… cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead.”

Not for him the flag-waving, drunken celebrations so often used as proxies for the relief that came with the Armistice.

Graves recorded his reactions in a poem called November 11th. Still deep in his personal grief he called those celebrating “thoughtless and ignorant scum” and “the froth of the city”. The politics of the time led him to choose to keep the poem unpublished.

Here’s a poem that Robert Graves first published in 1927, more than a decade after his active soldiering days. Those days came to an abrupt end on 20 July 1916 when with the 2nd Battalion, Royal Welsh Fusiliers, he was on a ridge to the east of Bazentin-le-Petit. The battalion was in reserve to an attack on High Wood. They came under heavy shell fire and fell back. A German shell burst close to Graves, who ‘felt as though I had been punched rather hard between the shoulder blades’. He was badly wounded in multiple places, including by a piece of shrapnel that pierced his chest.

Graves was taken to a dressing station near Mametz Wood, where it was expected he would die. On the morning of 21 July, when he was found to be still alive, he was sent to No. 8 General Hospital in Rouen. A letter was sent to his family stating that he had died of his wounds and his death was announced in The Times. Graves was then sent to recover at Queen Alexandra’s Hospital in London and another announcement was soon placed in the newspaper, retracting the first. – IWM

The Cool Web

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children’s day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

– Robert Graves, 1927

There’s a cool web of language, he suggests, that surrounds and protects us from the raw extremities of experience. In the relationship between language and emotion the former serves as a veil that dulls the latter. The intensity of the heat and the smell of roses are cooled and blunted by words. The sight of dreadful wastes of the evening sky and the sound of tall soldiers drumming by are modified and muted by language. 

Children have yet to experience this phenomena and feel the joy and fear with greater passion. “We” – he says – can cool the heat of the day, dull the scent of roses and “spell away” our dread at the coming of the dark and the march of armies.  Our retreat from the raw intensity of emotion gives us protection but comes at price.

We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But – the poet says – the alternative is madness.

We protect ourselves from raw intensity of feeling with words that children are still  too “dumb”  to have.

And Graves should know of what his poem speaks.

Traumatized by his experiences of war – Graves wrote a memoir characterized by distance from emotional experience. Goodbye To All That is part matter-of-fact account and part comic irreverence. Incompetence and stupidity lead to tragic consequences often presented as farce. The content is horrific, the tone is irreverent. The cool web was at work and Graves did not descend into the madness that his poem suggested would be the inevitable consequences of too much emotional reality.

Poetry may be the closest we can get to that emotional intensity.

Music of course is a different language. It exposes us to a raw intensity of feeling without the protective layer of words.  

The Cool Web – The Cool Web : A Robert Graves Oratorio – is also the title of a choral  and orchestral work written by Jools Scott and Sue Curtis composed to commemorate the First World War and based on the work of Robert Graves. 

Here are two excerpts from the Bath Abbey première performed by Edward Grint (baritone), Philharmonia Voices, Endymion Ensemble and the Melody Makers of Bath Abbey, conducted by Robin O’Neill

You can read the poems on which they are based below.

Lament In December

December’s come and all is dead;
Weep, woods, for summer far has sped
And leaves rot in the valley bed.

Grey-blue and gaunt the oak-boughs spread
Mourn through a mist their leafage shed.
December, season of the dead!

Brown-golden, scarlet, orange-red
Autumn’s bright hues are faded, fled.
December, season of the dead!

A Dead Boche

To you who’d read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)
”War’s Hell!” and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:
Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

                                – Robert Graves 1916