Showing posts with label WW1 Battlefields. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WW1 Battlefields. Show all posts

Wednesday, 22 June 2016

Genesis of a poem

Today is the centenary of the Red Dragon blow, in Givenchy, Pas de Calais. A visit to the spot and many others in 2011, in the company of military historian and battlefield guide, Jeremy Banning, sparked not just the draft of a novel, but poetry.
       Perhaps it might be of interest to see the story behind a poem? So here, tweeted this morning by Jeremy, and with his permission, is the story of William Hackett and Thomas Collins. Then, my thinking, and finally, my poem.









































I found it impossible to stand and look at that field without feeling that time is wobbling,  folding in on itself, and that those men are somehow there below ground, and not there, at the same time. See the field after harvest, after ploughing, and there is an almost imperceptible depression in the furrows.     Below that, all those layers down, the space where a hugely brave man sacrificed himself for a fellow tunneller. On both sides of my family in south Wales not that long ago, there were miners. Maybe there is something echoing down the years?

But how to respond to this particular place in poetry, when I was working on a collection of poems responding to WW1 memorials and places? Maybe my background as a writer of prose, stories, allows me to imagine, try to share for a second the horror those men would surely have experienced, the fear, the pain, the hope, then the despair when they realised that rescue efforts had stopped? But then what? What words would be good enough? I didn't write for some time. For a couple of years at least.

My grandmothers, both of them from Merthyr Tydfil, lived in two of the many rows of terraced houses that cling to the valley sides. They both had great pride in their back gardens, little patches of dark soil. One grew produce, fruit trees along an old brick wall, and in the borders there were shallots, herbs, potatoes  - the other had a rose or two, a straggle of flowers, a tiny lawn. An apple tree. What would I do if I knew time was short, and I was entombed underground? If I knew I was close to death. If all was dark, no light anywhere?

I had the poem.

So this is for both men, but in particular for Thomas Collins from Swansea. Who got no awards, but died in the most awful way in his efforts to do his bit. And whose injuries led to William Hackett's extraordinary, extraordinary comradeship and bravery, for which he was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. Here's to them both.




To a Welsh tunneller killed in 1916 in France, whose body still lies 40 ft below ground
                                                                               
Did you prefer your garden wild, 
all edges softened, scented? Did grasses 
seed for you 
in the evening light, and 
Spanish daisies dance 
                                    down the old brick step? 
Did shallots wait in untidy rows, with 
chives and parsley frills and leeks, and 
on your two apple trees, did russets grow?

Was all stone mellow, 
none bright, and in the ivy 
were dunnocks nesting year on year, 
and robins too, wood pigeons in the ash?

Everywhere was light, everywhere 
the kindest shadow,
and when it rained 
at night
did you stand at your open window,
                       the sweet air on your skin,
and listen
to the small sounds, 
                                as though


you could hear the whole world, greening?






From Memorandum, poems for the fallen. Published Feb 2016 by Cultured Llama.  http://www.culturedllama.co.uk/memorandum





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Saturday, 20 October 2012

Thoughts on visiting the cemeteries of The Great War

Panorama, Sunken Road Cemetery, Fampoux
Monday 8th October. 
A rainy mid-day, Sunken Road Cemetery, Fampoux, near Arras, listening to a description of the action that took place in the amphitheatre of fields in front, fierce fighting for the heavily defended village of Roeux and its chemical works - battles that raged throughout April and May 1917.  
Three specifics: 
First, the terrific experience of hearing the detail of a battle from such a vantage point. The terrain now looks so benign... and yet anyone with half an imagination will see far more than crops. And, of course, many of the men who fell in the action are here, below your feet. 
Second - the immaculate solemn beauty of this and indeed all the Commonwealth cemeteries. Their uniqueness. Large and small, every one is different. The planting - English country garden - roses, asters, lavender, you name it, it’s there. Tended with huge care and pride often by generations of the same family. 
Third - it was lunchtime. Some of us sat on the wall to eat their sandwiches. I had mine by the grave of a 20 year old, and texted my son, the same age, to tell him. He texted back, ‘Good stuff.’ 

Those three observations just about sum it up, for me. Carnage happened. The evidence is right here. Paying my respects is the least I can do, giving those who fell a little of what they had taken from them. Time.  
       What about the sandwiches? Isn’t that disrespectful? I don’t think so.

Before The Last Post, Menin Gate
 I am reminded of a  service of the Last Post under the Menin Gate at Ypres recently. 
        A wreath was laid by a young airman, and in support, a whole group, uniforms immaculate, marching in perfect order. To see the wreath laid, the last post ringing out, the young man snapping to attention and saluting before wheeling on his heel and returning to his comrades - was wonderful. As was the normality of passing them no more than six or seven minutes later, as, having marched  out of the Gate, they’d now relaxed. ‘Right, take me to the nearest pub,’ one said. ‘I need a drink....’ They all walked away chatting and joking, into the city.    

That’s about right. Job done. Life goes on, for some. To do otherwise is to try to make the men who fell into saints, when actually, weren’t they all ordinary blokes? Not saints at all. Respect is of course due in immeasurable quantities, but I get the sense that it is more than OK, as far as they would be concerned, for you to eat your sarnies alongside, bringing a sliver of the everyday to those who lost their everydays on our behalf. That is not overstating it, even nigh on a hundred years later. Britain would not exist were it not for the outcome of this war. Whatever one thinks of the strategists and their plans, every man who fell, named on a headstone or not, is part of the sometimes faltering juggernaut that ultimately crushed Germany. 
        I have a strong sense too, that it is important for women to visit. Important for the fallen, not us. This woman has many many roles - wife, mother, colleague, friend, writer, teacher, editor - as well as daughter of a much-missed decorated WW11 veteran - but when I’m there the most important role is that of a mother. Of sons. So in a sense, I’m not only there saying a quiet hello to the fallen, I’m also there for all the mothers who couldn’t go across to see where their lad was. For all the mothers who aren’t here any more. Maybe they know. Maybe not. That's OK.
Morval Cemetery
How do I feel after visiting the battlefields and cemeteries, six days on the Somme, Arras, then Ypres? Wrung out, still. But I think that’s natural. We talk about ‘paying’ our respects. This act is not cheap - it’s something that costs. Maybe it is the mix of response that is so exhausting. Sadness, for every single man who fell, for their families and friends. A determination that we who follow on must not forget. The deep peace of these places - every response builds into a mesh of emotion that is impenetrable at first. It lifts after time. 
         
 “Battlefields are one thing, cemeteries another. I wouldn’t bother with the cemeteries.” A quote, from someone gloriously unaware of the effect of what he was saying.  I was just sad for the speaker.  The effect was to shriek his ignorance. It was to reduce a battlefield visit to a disneyesque experience, sanitised and two-dimensional. You might as well draw up lines of opposing plastic soldiers on a model of the terrain, knock them over with pea-shooters in order of battle-history. 
           What did he think he would find in the cemeteries? I don’t know. But for my money he was ignoring some of the biggest reasons to go to the battlefields. Those reasons are not those things you can pick up in text books. To avoid visiting the cemeteries is not to allow yourself to be overwhelmed by many stark realities.  Not to allow yourself to feel. If we seek to protect ourselves from our feelings - and that may be one reason for my colleague ‘not bothering’ with the cemeteries - is that not a little dangerous?  
Asters, Essex Farm Cemetery, at the grave of Pte. E Wynne, Leinster Regiment.
 It is hard not to feel sadness standing by the grave of a lad who went to his death on the battlefield from a farm in Sussex, or a terrace in a Welsh valley town.  One of the realities of war is the vastness of the numbers. Vast numbers of graves of lads like this, headstones with names, dates, inscriptions.  Vast numbers of graves alongside, holding remains that were un-nameable. Name after name after name on the many memorials to the missing. 
          


Thiepval Memorial
We had an interesting difference of opinion on the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval. To many, it is the ultimate memorial, the best. Not to me. It is majestic, yes, overwhelming, yes - but it is something else. It sits astride the ridge like some gigantic alien, no lack of hubris, a definite air of triumphalism. It lacks beauty. Contrast it with the Canadian Memorial at Vimy Ridge, the Menin Gate at Ypres, Memorials to the Missing at Ploegsteert, at Arras, at Vis en Artois or Tyn Cot. There, beauty melds with sadness to produce an extraordinary, deep peacefulness. Thiepval holds no peace. It just shakes its fist at the world. I wonder whether the triumphalism of Thiepval might have been an additional thorn in Germany’s side during the mid 1930s...provocative? Who knows?
Langemark German Military Cemetery 
          
Visiting Langemark German cemetery is a very different experience to spending time in Commonwealth cemeteries. In comparison it is dark, stolid, Wagnerian in character.  At its heart is a mass grave holding some 25,000 soldiers, guys who, just like our own, fought for something they believed in, most of the time - you can’t forget that. There are also two British soldiers buried here, as there are often German soldiers buried in Commonwealth Great War cemeteries. My writer’s imagination with can’t help but create irreverent fictions in both settings - unsettled after-hours conversations. Black humour and war go hand in hand. It helps to salve the harshness.
           Apparently, some time into the war, our cinemas screened newsreel footage showing bodies on a battlefield. Beforehand, only ‘managed’ information had been screened - propaganda-led. Sanitised. There was uproar. ‘But people are dying...’. Well, yes. That’s what war does.
"Let me like a soldier fall..."
        Maybe at the tail end of the Victorian era with its predisposition to sentimentality, the lads now in these graves might have written letters home busting with sugary cliches, but meaning every single word. 

 Then, they’d turn on the black humour and belt out trench songs they’d never in a million years sing in front of their mothers, giving a V sign to the reality they faced:

 When old Jerry shells your trench, never mind
And your face may lose its smile, never mind
When the sandbags bust and fly, you have only once to die
If old jerry shells your trench, never mind
Under the Menin Gate- one of the many walls covered in names
 Here you go lads - a new verse or two:
When you get blown to bits, never mind
and your arse flies through your tits, never mind
If you make the Sargeant linger to pick up your little finger
When you get blown to bits, never mind

When you’re just a word at Wipers, never mind 
Bleedin’ bugles, bleedin’ pipers, never mind 
You’ll be so high up the wall, Mum won’t find your name at all,
when you’re just a name at Wipers, never mind

Tyn Cot, sundown

My 20 year old lunch partner at Sunken Lane was Private A Law, 47117, 10th Bn, West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own). He died on 28/08/1917 and was the son of Alfred and Jane Elizabeth Law, of 53, Joicey St., Sherburn Hill, Durham. 
Writing this is akin to why I go - quite apart from finding the cemeteries and memorials to the missing deeply moving places, and feeling a strong sense of 'Be yerself Missis, that's all we want...' - each time I read a name or stand by a headstone saying ‘A Soldier of The Great War’ I am acknowledging that person existed and while he did, even if it was for a short time, he accomplished something far more extraordinary than I ever will.


Pics of Sunken Road Cemetery and Langemark German Military Cemetery are by Jeremy Banning.
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Monday, 15 October 2012

The La Boisselle Project


Overgrown shell hole, La Boisselle, 2011


How many tourist coaches to the battlefields of The Great War have slowed in the village of La Boisselle and turned up the side road to the Lochnagar crater?  How many visitors have been so stunned at the magnitude of Lochnagar that once back on the coach they are lost in thought. But a stunned visitor might have noticed, close to the junction of the side road and the main road, an unkempt piece of land. Uneven, covered with scrub and small trees, you would probably not have given it a second thought as the coach took you to the next must-see site.  Unless your guide pointed it out, that is, and on my visits in the 90’s, no one did...even though one was a fairly eminent historian.
          This unkempt ground at La Boisselle, in the sector known as The Glory Hole, was and is a gem. Few examples remain of virgin Great War battlefield - most of the terrain has been returned to the plough.

Over the years, the scars of conflict have softened. The chalk downlands of the Somme and Ancre valleys, the broad open sweep of their fields, today exude a stillness that belies their history, punctuated only by solitary cemeteries. 


 Visit the infamous Somme woods, and you will find another story. Go to Delville Wood for example, and watch the sunlight playing through the trees on the remains of trenches, firing pits and shell holes. 
Delville Wood

Out in the open, most of the land has returned to agriculture. The trenches and the shell holes were backfilled as soon as the farmers could. Nothing remains - apart from the imprints of those trenches and shellholes, which rise up in chalky  ghosts when the crops are harvested. The towns and villages that were flattened have been rebuilt. 

But in La Boisselle, a village whose name resonates through the years for its position on the front line, the fiercest of fighting during July 1916,  the owners of this little piece of land did not level it, or develop it. And now, much has been preserved thanks to an organisation of volunteers called The La Boiselle Study Group. 

Excavation of L'Ilot, or Granathof - On 28 September 1914 the German advance was halted by French troops at La Boisselle. There was bitter fighting for possession of the civilian cemetery, and for farm buildings on the south-western edge of the village known to the Germans as the Granathof or ‘Shell Farm’ and to the French as the ‘Ilôt’. 
More than preserved - it is being carefully explored, everything recorded, as the site and its treasures are gradually revealed. From the website:
Working alongside landowners, archaeologists, local and regional specialists and authorities, museums, archives and international partners, the project has several objectives: to encourage the long-term preservation of the historic landscape for the benefit of future generations, to introduce fresh generations of archaeologists into the new discipline of First World War battlefield archaeology, to integrate the local population and wider public into the project, and to produce the most complete and multi-faceted examination of a Western Front battleground ever undertaken. 
I was lucky enough to visit in April 2011. Then, the ground was being cleared by a few of the group - all volunteers - a long and painstaking process of removing the bushes, brambles and trees that obscured the main features of the site, especially the mine craters. But the Great War was already returning to the contours in the form of coloured flags planted along the trenchlines - yellow for British, red for German. So close in places you could catch a cold if the enemy sneezed.

From the German lines, 2011 - British trenches lay where the path now leads, where the yellow flags are...
mine craters to left and right.
 Peer between the trees and you could just about see how the land fell away into substantial craters.  If this was No Mans Land, you wouldn’t have had a hope of getting from one side to the other in the dark. But there was another way, and that was to use the ground. To tunnel. There was no small sense of excitement as a corrugated iron sheet was lifted to show me  a small hole in the ground, chalk beneath weeds, one of the just-rediscovered entrances to the tunnel system beneath La Boisselle. 

 One of the founder members of The La Boisselle Study Group is military historian Jeremy Banning. In the winter of 2010/11 I had been trying to find a historian who would take me to the battlefields for novel research purposes, and who would help me to follow in the footsteps of The Swansea Pals , the 14th Welsh. The resulting trip with this terrific guide, during which my first visit to the La Boisselle site took place, is written up here. 
Petrol can - perhaps used to bring water down to the tunnellers. Shell cases used to weigh closed the gas doors.
W adit
       Last week I returned in the company of four other writers, our guide again Jeremy Banning. Our first stop on a tour of the Somme and Arras battlefields was the La Boisselle Project, soon to be closed up at the end of the season. I posted a few photos a day or so back - the excitement of going a short way underground, possibly down the very incline beneath that corrugated iron. The fun of having a BBC News team far below us, recording an impromptu service in remembrance of tunnellers buried in an explosion in November 1915.  Seeing an extraordinary calvaire, found in backfill when the trenches here were excavated - perhaps carved in chalk by Breton tunnellers then embellished by a British sapper’s pencil - looking as if it was both carved and written on yesterday. Fascinating, wonderful and very moving, all of it. 
      One sight that will stay with me, is the brick floor of l'Ilot, or Granathof - the farm so fiercely fought over, which was finally flattened in a mine explosion. The floor is anything but flat. It looks like the sea, as if the ground beneath is still heaving upwards.
Historian Jeremy Banning talks to our group of visiting writers, 2012. Not far from the spot where the photo above, of the  trench lines, was taken. Granathof in the background

 But most of that is, if I can use an appropriate metaphor, surface stuff.  Below the surface of  La Boisselle, and the tireless work of this group, is something that seems to chime with the men who fought in the great war. Firstly, a doggedness. The group carried on, even though to begin with there was precious little funding, and they were unsure how long this piece of land would remain available. It’s good to discover that the land is protected now. That financial and practical help is far more in evidence than it was last year - although funds are desperately needed.  Secondly, that team thing, so hard to define: look at the makeup of the group - you will find ex-Royal Marines, an ex-investigator with the Royal Military Police. Academics. Historians. An archaeologist. Researchers. Cinematographer. A pooling of expertise to accomplish an objective. 
       Underpinning everything is a deep respect for the men who went before them.  To ensure that what they did will not disappear into the faceless pages of text books, but be visible. To ensure they will not be forgotten - see for example the story of tunneller Ezekiel Parkes, who still lies entombed, here. One among many.
To keep faith. 

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 Next post: Why visit the battlefields? Why visit the cemeteries?
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Saturday, 13 October 2012

WW1 Battlefield Trip - Somme and Arras - 5th to 8th October 2012

 We all met at Lille. Some of us came on Eurostar, two were already in France. Military Historian Jeremy Banning, who would be leading the trip, drove us to our first stop - The La Boisselle Project, where we were lucky enough to be taken underground a short way.

 The tunnels were dug by French sappers, then British, in 1915/16. Re-discovered recently, they are an extraordinary testament to the dogged ingenuity, bravery and skill of those who created them. In places, the chalk walls still show the friction marks where the passing of men left the rock smooth. In others, soot-trails give away the places where candles were lodged.
While we were there, further down, accessible only by winch, were a BBC News crew, filming a quiet memorial ceremony for two miners lost in October 1915, which would be going out on the 6 o'clock News that day. We could hear the voices - historian Peter Barton among others - rising up the shaft. 
Discovered in a spoil heap many metres below the ground - this seemed to be simply a lump of chalk, until it was turned over.  A calvaire, perhaps carved by a French tunneller, then decorated by a British one later, the pencil markings might have been done yesterday. 'God is Love' is pencilled on the left,  'Christ giveth Life' is written sideways on the trunk of the cross. A most wonderful object - the La Boisselle Project team were visibly moved to have discovered this - quite a treasure.
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