Enlisting for a soldier.

 

 

Settings:A Soldier-Poet: Edward Thomas enlists and trains.

Artists' Rifles HQ, 17 Duke Street, Euston: The recruiting office was in Albemarle Street.
An extract:

'He travelled up to London by train and walked fast to Albemarle Street, hunting for a brass nameplate – ‘The Artists’ Rifles.’ A printed poster was pinned to a sandwich board on the pavement, announcing ‘Recruiting Office.’ The regimental symbol printed at the head showed Mars and Minerva intertwined. He looked up at the sky for a moment, then turned, breathed deeply and walked through the open door.

He was attested fit by the Medical Officer the following day. He had passed the first test that he’d set himself.'    (A Conscious Englishman.)                                             *
 

On the day he 'passed the doctor' he completed the important poem below, For These. Edward describes it as 'a prayer'.

He had agonised for months about whether he should follow Robert Frost to America or enlist or at least 'do something' for his country threatened and injured by war.

'All I can tell is, it seemed to me that either I had never loved England, or I had loved it foolishly, aesthetically. Something, I thought, had to be done before I could look composedly again at English landscape, at the elms and poplars about the houses, at the purple-headed wood-betony with two pairs of leaves on a stiff stem, who stood sentinel among the grasses or bracken by hedge-side or woods-edge. at he stood sentinel for I did not know, any more than what I had to do.’   E.T.

His journey through the cities of the Midlands and  the North, collecting the thoughts expressed by ordinary people during the early months of war, led to him speculating about why a man volunteered:

'On his last day he saw some recruits, lean pale young men in their dark clothes and caps, with occasionally the tanned face of a farm worker among them. Why had they enlisted – because of the posters, urging them to fight for King and country? Under pressure from employers? From girl-friends? Or to follow their friends?

He had a sense that a man joined up for inexplicable reasons, making a leap beyond rational thought. Then afterwards he would explain himself to his parents and friends in the old conventional terms about fighting for king and country – but surely that was simply too poetical and too self-conscious to be real? (A.C.E)'

 So many reasons why Edward Thomas took that first step toward his death at the Battle of Arras. Some would add an episode of cowardice/ common-sense witnessed by Robert Frost in confrontation with a game-keeper.

After initial training on Hampstead Heath where his map-reading skills were recognised he was sent first to High Beech, Epping Forest, training camp. No doubt he spent some  leisure time here in the  King's Oak.

Then he was sent to Hare Hall Camp, near Romford , Essex, where he was to stay for a year and a half.

From Liverpool Street station the train took him east through gentle, orderly countryside to Romford and on to Gidea Park halt. November trees were black and bare against the horizon.

Hare Hall camp was built in the grounds of a Georgian mansion. Tall elms and horse-chestnuts at the entrance, instead of the barren wire he expected, declared its past as a country estate. There were guard boxes certainly, but a pretty eighteenth-century lodge too. Planted all over the gracious parkland between some great oaks were new white bell tents. A line of wooden barrack huts stood at the centre of the camp.

 

'His first impression of a great house and park soon faded as he was drawn into the changed life of Hare Hall. Exercises, parades, routines, the new way of passing time. Much of his life was spent in lecture huts, the canteen, the reading room and the mess. Hut Number 3, a sound wooden hut sleeping twenty-five men, was home. The park became a site for compass exercises, and the great Georgian house was the remote home of the most senior officers, of whom he was in awe.' (A.C.E)




The Poem: For These
Edna Longley sees irony in the poem. I wouldn't want to quarrel with Edna Longley, goodness knows, but I think I'd call it realism.

For These

An acre of land between the shore and the hills,

Upon a ledge that shows my kingdoms three,

The lovely visible earth and sky and sea

Where what the curlew needs not, the farmer tills:

A house that shall love me as I love it,

Well-hedged, and honoured by a few ash trees

That linnets, greenfinches, and goldfinches

Shall often visit and make love in and flit:

A garden I need never go beyond,

Broken but neat, whose sunflowers every one

Are fit to be the sign of the Rising Sun:

A spring, a brook's bend, or at least a pond:

For these I ask not, but, neither too late

Nor yet too early, for what men call content,

And also that something may be sent

To be contented with, I ask of Fate.

 

The Novel's Settings

 

 

1. Leddington and Dymock, in summer and autumn.

Maps, so important to Edward throughout his life and indeed right through his military training to his death in France. Place was all-important too, and there is a great revival of interest and study in the cultural geography and indeed 'psychogeography' of his work.
My purpose in visiting: observing, absorbing and imagining the places he knew and trying to recreate them in the reader's mind.

Part One of A Conscious Englishman is set in Leddington(now spelt Leadington), near Ledbury, with excursions to Dymock, May Hill near Gloucester and the Malvern Hills. I paid four visits to the area, two of them with Friends of The Dymock poets, two separately. It is farming or market gardening country with orchards and copses still surviving alongside some over-large arable fields with the most startling red soil. In Dymock especially, half-timbered white-rendered   houses stand, while most cottages and farm-houses are of mellowed brick clearly reflecting the red-rust of the area's clay.

The Thomas family rented a room in a farm called Oldfields which still exists but is greatly altered and enlarged. I'm so sorry to say I did photograph it years ago but all those photos are lost- probably I hadn't even heard of blogs then. But there is a good picture available of the Frosts' rented cottage, Little Iddens. I walked the few hundred yards across a field between the two houses several times, thinking of how often the two families, and especially Edward and Robert, walked that way. Eleanor Farjeon stayed for a few days at a farm called Glyn Iddens, just across the lane.



Dymock

Dymock daffodils

The area between May Hill and the Malvern Hills is most famous for its wild daffodils, which once grew everywhere in the meadows and woods. There are still many places where wild daffodils can be seen in late March and early April and Dymock is one

There are two marked footpaths, the Poet's Paths, which start at the church, Dymock.


 The first heads east of Dymock in an 8-mile figure of eight that passes Abercrombie’s cottage,the Gallows, which features in the autumn chapters as the Frosts had moved there. The second is north of Dymock in a figure of eight that passes near Frost’s, Thomas’s and Gibson’s cottages.

St Mary's Dymock. The lych gate allows Edward and Robert a place to rest:

"They went on into Dymock. Robert admired the half-timbered houses, very like Little Iddens, lining
 the street. Beauchamp Green, with its row of lime trees leading up from the road to the lych gate, invited them to rest. They sat for a while under the silvered oak of the lych, looking down the valley. ‘You should have seen it  early last April,’ Robert said. ‘A torrent of little yellow daffodils tumbling down to the brook. Beautiful.’  

Two gypsies came up to them, a young woman smoking a clay pipe, with a baby in her brown shawl, and a thin young man with a concertina. The woman asked for money for the baby, but they’d scarcely any money and what they had was for cider at the Beauchamp Arms. Seeing Edward with his pipe she asked if he could spare half a pipe of tobacco. He looked long at her and smiled. Her brown fingers dipped delicately into the leather pouch he held out to her as she gazed back at him. Then she laughed, waved and went away, gracefully swaying across the green with the baby on her hip. "

The Malverns

British Camp in the Malvern Hills - Edward and Robert took a phenomenal walk from Leddington to this hill and as they were returning saw the moon effect that Robert wrote of in 'Iris by Night' -  his 'Elected Friends' poem.

On May Hill

An Edward Thomas Fellowship walk on May Hill, Gloucestershire.

Marc Thompson

Saturday 20th at May Hill
The Edward Thomas Fellowship  Walk.

Valerie McLean






 

It was an uncharacteristically misty day, so none of the far views Edward Thomas saw and included in his wonderful poem, Words. But it was very atmospheric and had the spirit of place rather closer to Marc's painting than to Valerie's.
Matthew Oates of the National Trust was there and made the walk extra richly interesting. His twitters will be worth following.









Here is an extract from the novel: it takes place just as Edward is reaching a decision about the enlisting or America dilemma.

'It was a chance to pay another visit to May Hill, where he’d been more than once with both Robert and Jack together.

They pedalled up through slopes of bracken and foxgloves, talking about Robert as they went, remembering how he would sometimes find their walks over-long, good-humouredly complaining. Tears came, to Edward’s surprise, and he blinked them away.

Some old firs and a beech tree were all that was left of a wood that had once clothed the slopes, Jack told him. As the gradient flattened, the hill became a broad common topped by a square plantation of young Scots firs. It was a clear bright day, one of the days when you could, it was said, identify twelve counties from the west side of the hill. There was the Severn snaking across its plain. Turn a little and you were looking towards the Cotswold Hills. He recognised the deep green of the Forest of Dean and the dip in its contours that was the Wye. Far beyond were the dark hills of Monmouthshire and further still the cloudy mass of the Black Mountains.

Jack spent his time closely observing the plants through his round glasses, often taking out his magnifying glass to see better. Once Edward heard him mutter,

‘Ah-ha -Veronica Officinalis – the heath speedwell – good.’

He looked towards Wales. That inheritance would always be part of him, but without doubt he was mostly an Englishman. To claim that he was Welsh was something of a sham, and he loathed sham and deception above anything. Still he valued Wales, that beautiful country, its language and its people, but he must admit to being a visitor, an admiring visitor whose roots gave him a small claim.

 Sitting down with his back to a sweet chestnut tree, looking towards the English counties, he began to write a draft of a poem in his notebook. It was about English words. And about names, villages and hills. He would include Wales. And himself and what, most passionately, he wanted. He thought of all his prose writing, the millions of words he’d written. Poetry was different; sometimes it was as if the words chose him, not the other way. He wanted to celebrate the history and the ever-changing, ever-renewing quality of words. They were old and yet worn new, again and again, they were like streams, always young, especially after rain. Words, and names, and things – real, exact concrete things – these he could celebrate.

He wrote feverishly, composing a kind of prayer – a prayer to words:

‘Let me sometimes dance

With you,

Or climb

Or stand perchance

In ecstasy,

Fixed and free

In a rhyme,

As poets do.’

 

And here is the poem in its entirety:
Words
Out of us all
That make rhymes,
Will you choose
Sometimes –
As the winds use
A crack in the wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through –
Choose me,
You English words?
I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
Precious as gold,
As poppies and corn,
Or an old cloak:
Sweet as our birds
To the ear,
As the burnet rose
In the heat
Of Midsummer:
Strange as the races
Of dead and unborn:
Strange and sweet,
Equally,
And familiar,
To the eye,
As the dearest faces
That a man knows,
And as lost homes are:
But though older far
Than oldest yew, -
As our hills are, old, -
Worn new
Again and again:
Young as our streams
After rain:
And as dear
As the earth which you prove
That we love.
Make me content
With some sweetness
From Wales
Whose nightingales
Have no wings, –
From Wiltshire and Kent
And Herefordshire,
And the villages there, –
From the names, and the things
No less.
Let me sometimes dance
With you,
Or climb,
Or stand perchance
In ecstasy,
Fixed and free
In a rhyme,
As poets do.

There is an excellent article about Words, in Carol Rumens' Poem of the Week column, the Guardian.

School visits for trench experience, and a Sixth-form Conference   on WW1 Poetry

• News

Haileybury's First World War trench open to school visits as part of Centenary commemorations

Published on: 11 June 2014
As part of the College’s commemorative activities marking the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, a replica command trench will be built in the grounds of the school this summer which will be open to visiting school groups during the Autumn Term and of course will be a superb resource for our own pupils.
"We hope our trench trail will provide a unique and valuable perspective on one of the most tragic and important chapters on the history of both our school and country" Joe Davies, Master

The Haileybury Trench Trail, Autumn 2014

In late 1914 and early 1915 Haileybury pupils helped dig up land around the College’s rugby pitches to create a system of trenches for their military training and 589 Haileybury pupils and staff died in the conflict. The 2014 trench will replicate one that might have been created in the battlefields of the First World War complete with duckboards, firestep and dugout. The trench will form part of a Trench Trail using Haileybury’s archive materials, architecture, memorials and Chapel to explain what life was like during the conflict both at home and at the Front.
The Trench Trail will enable pupils to learn about the First World War through items linked to those who experienced the conflict first hand. Each school group will work their way around the trail led by a workshop leader and a learning session will give children the opportunity to see and handle artefacts, medals, letters and photographs.
The Trench Trail will be open to school group visits on selected dates from September to December 2014 and will be suitable for both Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 levels so we will welcome groups from Year 4 up to Year 8.
If your school is interested in visiting the Haileybury Trench Trail, please click here for further information, contact the Box Office, or call 01992 70635501992 706355.
Image: computer-generated visual of Haileybury's replica trench
In addition to this exciting and innovative project, the programme of commemorative events will include:
• The design and installation of two new commemorative stained glass windows in Chapel
• The installation of interactive plaques around the College, highlighting the lives of six famous Haileyburians, including Field Marshal Allenby, with an associated lecture series to enhance and enrich pupils’, parents’, OHs’ and visitors’ understanding and awareness of the rich history of the College
• A school production of Oh! What a Lovely War
• A concert featuring music from the period of the Great War
• A special version of the annual Removes WW1 Battlefields trip
• A Sixth Form Poetry of the First World War conference for schools

Poetry of the First World War: A one-day conference for Sixth Form - Friday 17 October 2014, 10 am - 4.30 pm

The aim of this conference is to involve Sixth Form pupils and their teachers in the critical discussions and revaluations of the poetry of the First World War that are taking place in this its Centenary year.
The keynote speaker is by Dr Adrian Barlow, president of the English Association. Simon Armitage, whose new film The Great War: An Elegy will be broadcast on BBC2 in the Autumn, will be giving a poetry reading followed by Q&A. In addition, the programme will include papers and presentations by teachers and pupils, and a poster competition for pupils: click here for full details. Delegates will also be able to take a tour of the First World War replica battlefield trench being constructed in Haileybury’s grounds this Summer.
If you are a teacher or pupil and would like to present a short paper, or are interested in creating a poster related to the poetry of the First World War for our competition, please contact Head of English, Dr Tom Day.
Places at the conference are free for school groups and places are limited so advance booking is essential. Book online now or call our Box Office on 01992 70635501992 706355 in school hours.

The Forest Poems

Manuscript of The Dark Forest

Forest is one of the most  frequent symbols in the poetry, but he disliked obvious symbolism and the 'forest' meanings change with context.  'and our explanations tend to sound heavy and clumsy compared to the poet's touch' (Coombes)

The Green Roads, The Dark Forest, Lights Out.

Spencer Gore, The Icknield Way, 1912.                                                 creative commons.wiki

Edward Thomas was specific about the 'forest' in the Green Roads.

'a fragment left 6 miles from here. (Hare Hall Camp), the best of all this county. I go there every time I can.... You can't imagine a wilder, quieter place.'

 

It is a fairy-tale, emblematic landscape with  old man and child, goose feathers and the Hansel and Gretel -ist track.

The second line has an interesting internal rhyme structure which has a sense of wandering, but because of the dominance of forest, we seem to be getting drawn in under the forest canopy more and more.

An oak tree ages and dies, but there is memory and the present  and future repeating moment of thrush song.

 

The Green Roads

The green roads that end in the forest
Are strewn with white goose feathers this June,

Life marks left behind by someone gone to the forest
To show his track. But he has never come back.

Down each green road a cottage looks at the forest.
Round one the nettle towers; two are bathed in flowers.

An old man along the green road to the forest
Strays from one, from another a child alone.

In the thicket bordering the forest,
All day long a thrush twiddles his song.

It is old, but the trees are young in the forest,
All but one like a castle keep, in the middle deep.

That oak saw the ages pass in the forest:
They were a host, but their memories are lost,

For the tree is dead: all things forget the forest
Excepting perhaps me, when now I see

The old man, the child, the goose feathers at the edge of the forest,
And hear all day long the thrush repeat his song.

 

 

The Dark Forest

Dark is the forest and deep, and overhead
Hang stars like seeds of light
In vain, though not since they were sown was bred
Anything more bright.

And evermore mighty multitudes ride
About, nor enter in;
Of the other multitudes that dwell inside
Never yet was one seen.

The forest foxglove is purple, the marguerite
Outside is gold and white,
Nor can those that pluck either blossom greet
The others, day or night.

 

{Not even beloved and lover or child and mother,

One from within, one from

Without the forest could recognise each other,

Since they have changed their home.}

 

This last stanza he omitted - it was presumably too obvious. It does make it clear that the poem is elegiac and the separation of living from dead, the war dead, is absolute.

 

 

LIGHTS OUT

 

 

I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.

Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink.

Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends,
All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.

There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter and leave alone
I know not how.

The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.

More Thomas Trees.
The soldier's poems, after enlistment. These have trees of significance and perhaps portent. The associations seem to have more of death in them.

Aspens:  The Cherry Trees:Cock Crow: October: The Ash Grove: The Wind's Song: The Team's Headbrass: The Gallows:  and later the Forest Poems - The Green Roads:   The Dark Forest: Light's Out.



Elderly ash trees.       wordpress.com

The Ash Grove is a poem I don't remember having read before. The long lines are unfamiliar and perhaps rather uncomfortable at first. Then I remembered  the song and it read better.  Better still after listening to Laura Wright Songs, YouTube, The Ash Grove.

folksongcollector.com

Edward Thomas loved these old English and Welsh songs and sung beautifully himself - at least Helen thought so. The  Ash Grove tune is a traditional Welsh harp melody to which English and Welsh words have been set. The ash was his favourite tree.

 The Ash Grove

Half of the grove stood dead, and those that yet lived made
Little more than the dead ones made of shade.
If they led to a house, long before they had seen its fall:
But they welcomed me; I was glad without cause and delayed.

Scarce a hundred paces under the trees was the interval -
Paces each sweeter than the sweetest miles - but nothing at all,
Not even the spirits of memory and fear with restless wing,
Could climb down in to molest me over the wall

That I passed through at either end without noticing.
And now an ash grove far from those hills can bring
The same tranquillity in which I wander a ghost
With a ghostly gladness, as if I heard a girl sing

The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed,
And then in a crowd or in distance it were lost,
But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die
And I had what I most desired, without search or desert or cost.
                                                         *
The intervals of a hundred paces  between the trees bring tranquillity, space and rhythm, and it is as Edna Longley points out 'tranquillity recollected in tranquillity' and made poetry.

Someone could set Thomas's  'Ash Grove' to music, perhaps.

By contrast, the short, one or two beat lines of  'Bright Clouds',  (The Pond) which Longley describes as a 'metrical sorbet' after three poems 'weighted with war.' But the 'Nothing to be done' she believes, suggests his impatience for action, and the scum of may-blossom has a darkness to it.



naturalistsnotebook.com

	Most people including the Oxford University digitalisation project call the poem The Pond. Longley being a scholar says there is no justification for that except for a letter to Eleanor Farjeon asking if she'd received his 'poem about the pond?' I think she's losing that particular argument.
	Original wood engraving by Yvonne Skargon. From the Edward Thomas Fellowship notecards . Do see the edwardthomasfellowship website to order these  and eleven more lovely notecards.

4th August, the date 100 years ago of the declaration of war.

The art  of Nick Hedges, and Thomas's War Diary.

Stitched face, Nicholas Hedges

Today I choose the work of the artist Nicholas Hedges.

 Nick is concerned with our ability to  re-encounter and  to empathise with the past; he shows  artefacts  of  the 1914 - 18 war -  old postcards, maps of trench systems, the iconic splintered trees, but worked on  in a modern idiom.

- Faces from old photographs, scarred by Nick's stitching, sensitively done and very moving.
-Old maps reversed, with images of shell burst created with ashes, canvas stitched to show a vast complex of trenches
- Words cut for images - the  trees of war artists like Nash are there, but transformed:

' shattered trees are those of family trees, planted in the broken ground, grown out from a soldier now made nameless and anonymous to the world....It's often the case that we know nothing of those who died; all too often it's as if they were always victims, individuals who never experienced the 'everydayness' of life as we do today.'                                                                     NH

Reading Nick's blog, I found that visitors to the Gallery immediately thought of First World War poets and poetry when they met these works; then I read that Nick himself has recently become very interested in Thomas and had blogged about him two days before! He kindly sent me these images.
It is so good to find these circles of interest and support.
What struck me most in relation to Edward Thomas  were the series of images of bursting shells.

 No sound - I was glad that the exhibitors hadn't  added a sound-track as they might have done, for  the images were powerful enough to evoke an aural as well as a visual sense of shelling.






  Shells: exploding, passing overhead, firing  shells, the noise of shells, their effect on the air, constantly feature in Thomas's ten-week war diary:

'Some 4.2's coming over at 10. Air flapping all night as with great sails in a strong gusty wind(with artillery).....Beautiful pale hazy moonlight and the sag and flap of air.'

He had acute vision and acute hearing and had lived most of his life in rural quiet. It's hard to imagine a greater contrast but he does not complain, he simply observes, though I remember he describes that flap of air as 'grisly', that effect of the vacuum which killed him by stopping his heart.
Oh - I just noticed this for the first time:

'As I was falling asleep great blasts shook the house and windows, whether from our own firing or enemy bursts near, I could not tell in my drowse, but I did not doubt my heart thumped so that if they had come closer together it might have stopped.' 

Now I find my thoughts going towards diagnosis - atrial fibulation? - and that sense of  'couldn't something be done, can't we intervene', which is I think one aspect of empathy with the past.
 'The past is not dead. It's not even past.'  I heard that recently but forget  who said it - was it Ford Madox Ford? No, William Faulkner.

 I read the war diary in my old RG Thomas Collected Poems, 1978, now hard to find. The small leather-bound notebook was found by Thomas's grandson, another Edward, son of Merfyn, in 1970, some time  after Merfyn's death.

,

It was very hard for Edward to transcribe, being written in small handwriting in a pocket-sized notebook, but you can try too, as it can be seen on the First World War digitalised Archive, University of Oxford. Professor George Thomas worked from a magnified version.

The note-book was exhibited at the Imperial War Museum, in 2004 I think, all creased by the shell-blast that killed Edward Thomas.


The 1914 centenary commemoration is of course bringing  about a resurgence of interest in the war, . It is good  that as well as the familiar documentaries and exhibitions, there will be responses from  contemporary artists like that of Nicholas Hedges, and from writers too.

                                                                         *


A war poem, Edward Thomas style:

February Afternoon

Men heard this roar of parleying starlings, saw,
A thousand years ago even as now,
Black rooks with white gulls following the plough
So that the first are last until a caw
Commands that last are first again,---a law
Which was of old when one, like me, dreamed how
A thousand years might dust lie on his brow
Yet thus would birds do between hedge and shaw.

Time swims before me, making as a day
A thousand years, while the broad ploughland oak
Roars mill-like and men strike and bear the stroke
Of war as ever, audacious or resigned,
And God still sits aloft in the array
That we have wrought him, stone-deaf and stone blind.