War Poet Jessie Pope by David Beer

By bridge and battery, town and trench,

     They’re fighting with bull-dog pluck;

   Not one, from Tommy to General French,

                        Is down upon his luck.

       There are some who stand and some who fall,

                But how does the chorus go—

                          That echoing chant in the hearts of all?

“Are we down-hearted? NO!”

While reading Jessie Pope’s 1915 War Poems, (published now by Forgotten Books in their Classic Reprint Series) I found myself rather enjoying her work. Visions of a young Maggie Smith singing “I’ll Make a Man of You” in Oh! What a Lovely War came to mind, as did memories of patriotic songs we sang in school many years ago in Devon. Pope’s war poems bring a different attitude toward the war than we’re used to getting from the established war poets. 

It’s not hard to see why her work, consisting of easy rhythm, pleasant rhyme, and pro-war sentiment, was considered simplistic and jingoistic. Also, the fact that Wilfred Owen ironically dedicated early versions of his "Dulce et Decorum Est" to a "Certain Poetess" (meaning Jessie) didn’t help. People assumed that Owen was mocking her simple-minded support for the hideous and brutal war as portrayed in his and other war poets’ work. However, it’s worth remembering that Pope’s poems reflect an attitude in Britain at the start of the war—whereas Owen’s poetry is written as a result of experiencing it.

Born in 1868, she was educated at North London Collegiate School and soon became a regular contributor to Punch, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Express as well as to other high-brow publications—very impressive accomplishments for a woman of her time. Before the war she published humorous light verse and wrote verses for children's books such as The Cat Scouts. She also edited and found a publisher for a novel of social criticism after its author died. 

Jessie Pope

When war broke out, Jessie was ready to take up arms for her country with her light verse just as eagerly as many young men took up rifles. Her two “recruiting poems” are usually all we find of her in an anthology today—if we find anything. These first appeared in the Daily Mail and seem to have established her reputation regardless of what else she wrote. 

“Who’s for the Game?” is typical of her approach, pressuring young men to enlist by piling rhetorical questions on them. Given the context in which it was composed—Britain as it went to war—the sentiment is not, at least to my mind, surprising or overly enthusiastic. Neither Britain nor Pope saw clearly what they were about to get into:

Who’s for the game, the biggest that’s played,
The red crashing game of a fight?
Who’ll grip and tackle the job unafraid?
And who thinks he’d rather sit tight?
Who’ll toe the line for the signal to ‘Go!’?
Who’ll give his country a hand?
Who wants a turn to himself in the show?
And who wants a seat in the stand?
Who knows it won’t be a picnic, not much,
Yet eagerly shoulders a gun?
Who would much rather come back with a crutch
Than lie low and be out of the fun?
Come along, lads— but you’ll come on all right—
For there’s only one course to pursue,
Your country is up to her neck in a fight,
And she’s looking and calling for you.

The other poem, “The Call,” written in 1915, expresses similar sentiments using the same techniques while subconsciously waving a white feather in front of young men who need to be pressurized to join up. The tone again is colloquial with its use of dialect and the repeated word “laddie” to make its message up close and personal. The first of its three stanzas is typical:

Who's for the trench -
Are you, my laddie?
Who'll follow French -
Will you, my laddie?
Who's fretting to begin,
Who's going out to win?
And who wants to save his skin -
Do you, my laddie?

This however isn’t the only war poetry Jessie Pope wrote. Her subjects include pride in Kitchener’s Army, a Cossack charge, Gallipoli, an ANZAC hat, the war budget, German propaganda, and the admirable job women were doing in the workforce. Since she never had any doubt about the outcome of the war, she produced a poem to be sung to the tune of “Marching Through Georgia” as our troops marched into Germany, as she was sure they would. In “To a Taube” she combines a sense of wonder at flying machines (“A dove in flight and shape and hue/The dove of war”) with the horror of aerial bombing. The Taube becomes a bird of prey, and is also

A thirsty hunter out for blood-
Drinking adventure to the dregs-
Where hidden camps the country stud
You drop your eggs,

and the concluding stanza presents us with a far from jingoistic observation:

Thus, man, who reasons and invents,
Has inconsistently designed
The conquest of the elements
To kill his kind.

Jessie Pope could also paint a domestic scene realistically and movingly, a scene played out by countless women in their homes as they sat knitting and thinking of their "boys" at the front. In “Socks” she does this in five short stanzas opening with an image of knitting needles (“shining pins”) and ending each stanza with a refrain consisting of the technical language of knitting:

Shining pins that dart and click 
In the fireside’s sheltered peace 
Check the thoughts that cluster thick - 
20 plain and then decrease. 

He was brave – well, so was I – 
Keen and merry, but his lip 
Quivered when he said good-bye – 
Purl the seam-stitch, purl and slip. 

Never used to living rough, 
Lots of things he’d got to learn; 
Wonder if he’s warm enough – 
Knit 2, catch 2, knit, turn. 

Hark! The paper-boys again! 
Wish that shout could be suppressed; 
Keeps one always on the strain – 
Knit off 9, and slip the rest. 

Wonder if he’s fighting now, 
What he’s done an’ where he’s been; 
He’ll come out on top somehow – 
Slip 1, knit 2, purl 14.

They’re out to show their grit

One more poem will suffice to illustrate the diversity of this poet so often maligned as simplistic and narrowly focused. Those who denigrate her are probably unaware that in her prewar years she was already considered a noted writer of light verse and a successful publisher and journalist. Social historians also see her as a member of a group of significant (but now forgotten) home-front female propagandists such as Mrs Humphry Ward, May Wedderburn Cannan, and Emma Orczy. Some of her work indicates that she was not opposed to the Suffragette movement. Her poem "War Girls," similar in structure to her other poems, expresses sentiment worthy of Sylvia Pankhurst in the way it celebrates how the war has created opportunities not previously open to women:

There’s the girl who clips your ticket for the train,
And the girl who speeds the lift from floor to floor,
There’s the girl who does a milk-round in the rain,
And the girl who calls for orders at your door.
Strong, sensible, and fit,
They’re out to show their grit,
And tackle jobs with energy and knack.
No longer caged and penned up,
They’re going to keep their end up
Till the khaki boys come marching back.

There’s the motor girl who drives a heavy van,
There’s the butcher girl who brings your joint of meat,
There’s the girl who cries ‘All fares, please!’ like a man,
And the girl who whistles taxis up the street.
Beneath each uniform
Beats a heart that’s soft and warm,
Though of canny mother-wit they show no lack;
But a solemn statement this is,
They’ve no time for love and kisses
Till the khaki soldier boys come marching home.

After the war Jessie Pope continued to write poetry and children’s books and even a short novel. In 1926, when she was 61, she married a widower bank manager and moved from London to nearer the east coast of England. She died in Devonshire at age 76 in December 1941, during some of Britain’s darkest hours of the Second World War but fortunately far from the dangers of Germany’s new and more deadly versions of the Taube and its “eggs.”

P.S. You can go to YouTube if you like, search for Jesse Pope, and enjoy several different contemporary readings of her poems.

75th Anniversary of D-Day: The World War One Connections (A Roads Classic)

There are many interesting connections between the D-Day invasion and the Great War. I thought we would share a few today on its 75th Anniversary.

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United States National Guard Memorial,
Omaha Beach, Vierville-sur-Mer

America's National Guard Memorial for both World Wars is located at the west end of Omaha Beach. That section of the beach was where the 29th Division landed on 6 June. This is a sector featured in both Saving Private Ryan and The Longest Day (remember Robert Mitchum as General Norman Cotta?). It was also the place where the Bedford Boys met their fate. The 29th Division, a unit formed with National Guard troops from the Atlantic Coast region, also fought in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive of WWI. The distinguished service of the division in what are the most famous American battles of both World Wars contributed to the selection of this site as the National Guard's National Memorial. The large panel to the left on the photo above describes the contributions of the National Guard to the U.S. victory in WWI.

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Erwin Rommel with Pour le Mérite

Except for Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, almost every senior officer on both sides at Normandy had served at the fronts in the Great War. The most highly decorated of these, however, was Atlantic Wall commander Erwin Rommel. He is shown here wearing his Pour le Mérite, awarded for his service at Caporetto in 1917. Rommel's reputation as a general bounces up and down a bit, but if you are ever able to visit Caporetto and track his actions there, you will undoubtedly conclude he was one fantastic lieutenant.

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Graves of Quentin and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.,
Omaha Beach Cemetery, Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer

There is a single American who fell in the Great War buried at the Omaha Beach Cemetery with all the casualties of the 1944 campaign. It is President Theodore Roosevelt's son Quentin, a former Nieuport 28 pilot with the 95th Aero Squadron. He was shot down and killed in July 1918, then buried near his crash site. His brother, Theodore, Jr., died in 1944 from heart disease shortly after leading the initial assault on Utah Beach as the assistant commander of the 4th Division. At the family's request, Quentin was re-interred to lie in peace next to his brother. The gold star on Ted's grave indicates the Medal of Honor which he received for his actions at Normandy. Ted had also served with distinction and had been seriously wounded in World War I.

Also See Our Article: 
Overlord's Commanders and Their Great War Service
HERE

1914: The Unspoken Assumptions

By Henry G. Gole
From: "The Great War: A Literary Perspective,"  Parameters, 1987

How does one begin to explain the festive reception to war described in virtually all the literature of the time? Certainly part of the answer lies in the fact that the war experienced was not the war expected. War is always filled with surprises, but the sharp contrast between the euphoria of August and the later fatalism of front soldiers invites analysis.

In Redemption By War (1982), Roland N. Stromberg describes the alienation of the artist and the intellectual in the decades before 1914, an alienation caused by the widespread neglect of things of the mind that seemed to accompany mass production, industrialization, and social fragmentation. It seemed to creative and sensitive people that technological progress was bought at the price of some inner core of values whose loss was lamented. The philistinism meant, for example, that Germany's search for a place in the sun would turn the land of thinkers and poets away from philosophy, art, and religion. Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1900) reflects this concern, and Hermann Hesse's Un term Rad (Under the Wheel, 1906) suggests that the new age crushed sensitive souls as boors prospered. Franz Kafka's protagonists confront faceless bigness that denies individuality; Max Weber's sociology characterizes impersonal bureaucratic behavior that regards people as parts of a big machine. The artist and the intellectual reacted to soulless modernism by turning inward, thus demonstrating estrangement from the external world and a tendency to make art or energy or revolution ends in themselves. The literature in the years before the war abounds with phrases suggesting the disconnectedness of a beautiful "inner life" with ugly external life. D. H. Lawrence summed up the mood in 1912—"The last years have been years of demolition." Stromberg's thesis is that alienated intellectuals were ready for the drastic "redemption by war." 

James Joll, the distinguished British historian, offers yet another partial explanation for the ease with which Europe tripped or slipped into war in his 1914: The Unspoken Assumptions (1968). Joll contends that there are unspoken assumptions abroad in any age, assumptions that the historian must discover and bear in mind as he attempts to understand specific events. They are not to be found in archives. All of us are naturally affected by the spirit of the age, especially in our formative years, in ways as automatic as taking a breath. Joll suggests that World War I leadership was probably less influenced by the intellectual currents of 1900 to 1914 than by Darwin and Nietzsche. Perhaps, he speculates, the idea of social Darwinism influenced men in a way that predisposed them to a trial of strength. States, statesmen, soldiers, and certain unspoken assumptions were at work. That these things mattered is probable, but precisely how much they mattered is at best an educated estimate.

Joll joins Stromberg in noting how Europe seemed to welcome the escape from the dull and ordinary of everyday life and the plunge into a great adventure, an experience expected to elevate and purify a generation of Europeans. Something great and wonderful was expected. Further, involvement in war allowed societies temporarily to evade disruptive domestic issues. National values thrust aside class values. Of course, class tensions would return as the war ceased to be a great adventure and took on the character of a grinding man-killer promising no profit and deserving an end.

In Germany the ruling Social Democrats experienced schism and defection; in France the mutinies of 1917 were widespread and not unrelated to class feelings; in Britain strikes broke out on the home front during the war; in Russia two revolutions took place; in Italy defeatism reigned. But as war broke out the tensions were shelved. The unspoken assumption was that Europe would be better for the war. 

Tommy: Best Reads on the British Soldier of World War I

Clark Shilling, Reviewer

The BEF Arrives, 1914

Students of the Great War received a wonderful gift this year with the release of Peter Jackson's movie, They Shall Not Grow Old. Digitizing film footage from the Great War and converting it into color, sound, and 3-D, has given us a remarkably modern view of what life was like for British soldiers in the trenches of the Great War. (One of the lasting images from the movie left in my mind was how many of the men had very bad teeth!)

If you have not seen the movie, or if you have seen it and want to learn more about the British Army in the Great War, please let me recommend the works of several authors who wrote about the experience of the British Expeditionary Force in France in World War I.

My first recommendation would be the book Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front 1914–1918 by British military historian Richard Holmes. In a very interesting interview included at the end of his book, Professor Holmes stated that it was not his intent to write an operational history, describing battles and "tracing lines on maps." Instead he wanted to author a social history of the British soldier in World War I.

One of Holmes's most interesting observations is that the BEF evolved through four distinct phases during the war. The first was the Old Army, the British prewar professional army that landed in France in August 1914. Known as "The Old Contemptibles", it was made up of long-serving soldiers and led by aristocratic officers with strong military traditions. This army was later reinforced by the second army, the Territorials, part-time soldiers whose original job was to protect Britain from invasion while the Old Army served overseas.

The third army was the New Army, also known as Kitchener's Army, consisting of the volunteers who answered Lord Kitchener's call in 1914. This was the army of the pals brigades, groups of men who volunteered together from the same businesses, schools, or neighborhoods and were organized together into units. Their baptism of fire was the Somme Offensive of 1916. The fourth army was the conscript army raised after conscription was instituted in 1916. The conscription army was a younger and more homogeneous army than the previous three, and by 1918, Holmes says, about half of the Tommies were 18-year-olds.

Holmes covers training, deployment, life in the rear areas as well as what it was like to serve in the front lines. There are chapters devoted to such details as trench construction, the equipment soldiers carried into the trenches, and how the front lines were supplied with food and drink. The author devotes chapters to the individual branches of the army including the infantry, cavalry, artillery, engineers, and medical services. Professor Holmes describes how morale was maintained and punishment administered. In a very interesting chapter, Holmes relates how various religious denominations attempted to provide for the spiritual needs of the Tommy.

I found this book to be filled with hundreds of interesting small details about a soldier's experience in the trenches of World War I. Did you know, for example, that the King's Regulations until 1916 prohibited the shaving of the upper lip and that officers who did shave were sometimes subject to discipline? He also claims the term "chatting" originated from Tommies visiting while picking chats (lice) from their clothing. I did not know that.

Passchendaele, 1917

At 631 pages, it is not a quick read, but it is an encyclopedic description of almost every aspect of serving in the British Army in World War I.

My next recommendation is the work of historian Lyn MacDonald. Her books were written over a 20-year period, starting in 1978. At that time, there were still many thousands of surviving British veterans, and MacDonald was able to conduct interviews with many of these former Tommies and incorporate their stories into her books. Some of her books are devoted to a specific year (1914: Days of Hope, 1915: The Death of Innocence) while others focus on specific campaigns (The Somme, They Called It Passchendaele, To the Last Man: Spring 1918). One of her early books, The Roses of No Man's Land was written about the medical services and the nurses who served the BEF. While she includes many details of life in the BEF, in contrast to Holmes's Tommy, MacDonald utilized her interviews with survivors of the war to build operational histories of the campaigns of the BEF.

My third recommendation is the work of Richard van Emden. In 1998, the BBC produced a documentary for the 80th anniversary of the end of the war entitled Veterans, the Last Survivors of the Great War. Steven Humphries was the producer of that program, and Richard Van Emden was the researcher. Together, Humphries and van Emden wrote a book by the same name to accompany the documentary. It consisted of interviews with the handful of surviving veterans still alive in the late 1990s. In addition to Tommies, the interviews included sailors, nurses and even a female munition worker. It is a brief book at 200 pages and has numerous photos of the veterans, both during the war as well as photos taken late in their lives.

Sgt. Alfred Anderson,
Last Surviving WWI
Veteran of the Black Watch

Van Emden continued his work with veterans and in 2005 published Britain's Last Tommies: Final Memories from Soldiers of the 1914–1918 War in Their Own Words. In the years before 2005, van Emden interviewed the last 30 or so survivors of the BEF, and this book records their reminisces, their experiences, and their perspective on the war. The vast majority of this book's 368 pages are filled with these fascinating interviews.

My final recommendation is Max Arthur's book Last Post: The Final Word from Our First World War Soldiers. Also published in 2005, outside of the introduction, the entire work consists of the interviews with the last 21 surviving British veterans of the Great War. It is logical that many of the same contributors to van Emden's book Britain's Last Tommies also contributed to this volume. The works of the other authors listed above are almost exclusively concerned with what the veterans experienced while serving King and Country. What is unique about Last Post is that the veteran's interviews are more autobiographical. The veterans not only comment on their role in the war, they also relate what their lives were like both before they entered the service as well as what they did with the balance of their very long lives after the war. The book includes interviews of soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

The title of the movie, They Shall Not Grow Old, is a line from the poem "For the Fallen" written in 1914 by the British poet Laurence Binyon. The line refers to the thousands of young men who paid the ultimate sacrifice for their country during the war. But millions of their fellow countrymen served and survived the war to return home, to grow old and to die. Now all of them are gone. The last Tommy, Henry John Patch, died in 2009. There will be no more reunions, no more interviews, and no more pictures. This wonderful movie and the books listed here are the best opportunities I know of to learn what it was like to be a British Tommy in World War I.

Reviewed by Clark Shilling

The Liberty Bell Goes to War

At the 1915 San Francisco World's Fair

While I was growing up in San Francisco, one of my dad's fondest memories that he share with me was of viewing the Liberty Bell at the 1915 World's Fair. Later on, when I went to college and worked in Pennsylvania, I ran into some skeptical Philadelphians who doubted it would have been allowed to travel to the West Coast. It all turns out that the Liberty Bell's visit to the Golden Gate had a lot to do with the First World War. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that America got a case of Liberty Bell Fever during those days. Smithsonian magazine provided much of this background on the story.

While popular, the Liberty Bell didn’t truly come of age as a national symbol until World War I. Its rise to glory began with a hastily organized train trip across the country in the summer of 1915 culminating in the stop in San Francisco, as President Wilson, former President Theodore Roosevelt, and other leaders felt the need to stir up patriotism after the sinking of the Lusitania, and the ensuing Preparedness Movement. It was the last long-distance trip by the bell due to concerns about enlarging its famous crack.

However, when America declared war, the Liberty Bell was officially called to the colors. The Treasury was having difficulty financing the war effort. Despite endless appearances by movie stars (who had previously considered explicit politicking taboo), 11,000 billboards, streetcar ads in 3,200 cities and towns, and fliers dropped from planes, bond sales lagged. Treasury Secretary William McAdoo, who also happened to be the son-in-law of President Woodrow Wilson, needed some kind of national loyalty miracle. So he and his propaganda advisers, the Committee on Public Information, who had produced a series of clever posters (the Statue of Liberty using a phone, Uncle Sam carrying a rifle), decided to take one of their most arresting images and bring it to life, no matter how risky.

25,000 Soldiers at Camp Dix, NJ, Form the Liberty Bell

They would actually ring the Liberty Bell. They would ring it even if it meant that the most emblematic crack in political history would split the rest of the way and leave a 2,080-pound pile of metal shards. And the moment after they rang the Liberty Bell, every other bell in the nation would be sounded, to signal a national flash mob to head to the bank and buy war bonds.

Philadelphia Mayor Thomas Smith tapped it first to announce the first war bond drive in June 1917, and the bell’s image subsequently appeared in countless posters advertising Liberty Bonds, which citizens were encouraged to buy to help pay for the war. Despite the concerns for the bell's integrity, it was transported to other sites for ceremonial ringings three other times during the war. The Liberty Bell was now a substantial part of the war effort, and Americans embraced it as national symbol as never before. Songwriters Joe Goodwin and Halsey K. Moore composed “Liberty Bell—It’s Time to Ring Again,” and their song reached the Top Five in 1918.

During and after the war, Allied leaders visited the bell, including the King and Queen of Belgium and Field Marshal Joseph Joffre of France, who said little but kissed the bell on his 1917 stop in Philadelphia. General John J. Pershing visited the bell on 12 September 1919, and was presented with a small golden Liberty Bell in recognition of his leadership of American armies in the world war.

General Pershing on a Visit

One hundred years later, the Liberty Bell returned to duty. The World War I Centennial Commission and the National Park Service designated  the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia as the Honorary Bell of Peace to commemorate the Centennial of the Armistice which was held on 11 November, as part of the Commission's nationwide Bells of Peace project.

Gabriele D’Annunzio: The War Hero… and Fascist

By Luciano Mangiafico
Excerpted from "Nine Ways of Looking at D’Annunzio"
Originally Published at Open Letters Monthly

Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938

On 24 April 1915, Italian customs officers at the Italian-Austrian border engaged in a firefight with Austrian reservists who were burning a small river-crossing bridge. The news that the Italians had suffered casualties prompted the D’Annunzio to address a frenetic crowd with fiery words, spurring the country to enter World War I:

Our vigil is ended. Our exultation begins … The cannon roars. The earth smokes …Companions, can it be true? We are fighting with arms, we are waging our war, blood is spurting from the veins of Italy! We are the last to join this struggle and already the first are meeting with glory … The slaughter begins, the destruction begins … All these people, who yesterday thronged in the streets and squares, loudly demanding war, are full of veins, full of blood; and that blood begins to flow … We have no other value but that of our blood to be shed.

D’Annunzio’s rhetoric was rousing, and he continued his campaign for war with several other speeches in Rome. Mussolini, the former Socialist agitator, also continually beat the war drums from the newspaper, Il Popolo D’Italia, (The Italian People), which he had founded with French money after he was kicked out of the Socialist Party for advocating war.

In the war, which Italy entered on 24 May 1915, D’Annunzio served in the army, the navy, and the air corps. He lost sight in one eye in a plane crash, but this did not deter him from continuing to fight.

On 10–1 February 1918, D’Annunzio participated in hit and run raid against the Austrian Navy. The raid, by three anti-submarine motorboats (each with a crew of thirty) led by Captain Costanzo Ciano, had infiltrated the Bay of Buccari and launched six torpedoes against Austrian ships at anchor; nets around the ships had stopped five torpedoes, while the sixth exploded prematurely and raised the alarm. Tactically, the raid was a bust, but the attendant publicity about the daring action reinvigorated the Italians, who were still demoralized by their 1917 defeat at Caporetto.

In August of the same year, D’Annunzio led a flotilla of seven unarmed airplanes over Vienna, carrying only his violin, and dropped 50,000 handbills (his own composition, naturally), urging Austrians to surrender. After the end of the war, he agitated for a “greater  Italy.” On 12 September 1919, D’Annunzio organized his own small army made up of 2000 discharged soldiers and deserters and led a motorized column into the city of Fiume, whose status was to be the subject of negotiation with Yugoslavia. He made himself, Garibaldi-style, the dictator of what he called The Regency of the Carnaro, organizing a totalitarian republican government, calling himself Duce (Leader), overprinting stamps, issuing some with his own likeness, and otherwise acting as ruler. His soldiers wore black shirts, pledged allegiance to him, and became convinced that they were defending civilization against “a flood of Slav barbarians.”

Mussolini Visiting D'Annunzio in 1935

Evidently, D’Annunzio’s ego was thus satisfied for 15 months, and while the Italian government ordered the city blockaded, it did not prevent the Red Cross from keeping it well supplied. Thus the “legionnaires” were able to enjoy their moment in the spotlight, with endless mass meetings in the public squares, replying to the Duce cry, “To whom Italy?” with “To us!”. One of his “legionnaires wrote: “The city abounded with beautiful girls; the pastry shops were bursting with extraordinary sweets. One ate, one danced, one drank; indeed, it truly seemed that this city, with its life overflowing with gifts, was the reward for all our exertions during the war.”

In November 1920, Italy signed a treaty with Yugoslavia making Fiume for the moment a free city. The new Italian prime minister, Giovanni Giolitti, ordered D’Annunzio to leave and disband his “soldiers.” When D’Annunzio refused to do so, Giolitti had the Italian army and the navy blockade the city. D’Annunzio then declared that he would resist. When Italian army units attacked on 24 December, nearly 50 lives were lost, including five civilians. D’Annunzio knew the game was up when a shell from the battleship Andrea Doria hit his palace and wounded him slightly. He made one final speech about the “Christmas of Blood” and, convinced that he could no longer milk his exploits for publicity, left the city and retired to a villa on Lake Garda, while his “soldiers” evacuated Fiume and returned home.

D’Annunzio’s actions and the failure of the state to stop him promptly and prosecute him afterward provided the behavioral example that Mussolini learned well on his ascent to power: violence and illegality could be used with impunity to accomplish one’s political aims.

D’Annunzio was a supporter of Mussolini and championed his rise to power, although he did not like Germans and Nazism and warned Mussolini against an alliance with Hitler. Perhaps because he was a mountebank himself, although a more refined and cultured one, he could see through the dangerous histrionics of the former Austrian corporal. In 1934 he wrote in pencil on the inside cover of his copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy: “The converted Jew Adolph Hitler with the ignoble face darkened by indelible splashes of the paint or glue that he held in his brush… which has became the scepter of a ferocious clown…”

For his support of (or acquiescence to) fascism, D’Annunzio was handsomely rewarded: at Mussolini’s recommendation the king made him Prince of Monteneveso and gave him a substantial pension. He was made an honorary general in the air force, and an integral edition of his writings was published at state expense. In 1937, after the death of sitting president of the Academia d’Italia Guglielmo Marconi, D’Annunzio was appointed to the post, and he was provided with funds to restructure and enlarge the villa he had purchased in Gardone Riviera on the shores of Lake Garda.

Also see Roads to the Great War articles on:

D'Annunzio's Vittoriale

D'Annunzio's Flight to Vienna

December 1912: Intimations of Coming Armageddon

Magazine Cover of 1 December 1912

December 1912 had a number of signals impending peril that should have alarmed the governing classes in Europe. On 2 December German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg told the Reichstag in a speech that Germany would go to war if Austria-Hungary was attacked by any other nation as a matter of defending Germany's future and security. A few days later Kaiser Wilhelm met with his military leaders and reportedly speculated on the inevitability of war with Russia and the prospect of facing a Russian-French and British coalition. The very next day (9 December) unrepentant war advocate Conrad von Hötzendorff returned to influence as Austro-Hungarian minister of war and the empire's military forces were almost immediately mobilized in response to the turmoil in the Balkans. 

If the politicians missed these portents, not everyone did. At the end of the month Russian poet Alexander Blok sensed a gloomy future:

Now at this hour of dejection
Like magic, firmly, desperation
Dismays me filling me with remorse. . .

Amazing Drone Footage: The Mine Craters of Les Eparges Spur

Remembering a Veteran: Leutnant Ludwig Wittgenstein, K. u. K.

By James Patton

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” 

― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1952) was born in Vienna to one of middle Europe’s richest families, and he inherited a fortune from his father in 1913. Despite being eligible for a medical exception, at the outbreak of World War I Wittgenstein immediately left Cambridge University in England and reported for duty in the Austro-Hungarian Army. 

He served first on a ship and then in an artillery workshop several miles behind the front lines, where he was wounded in an accidental explosion and hospitalized in Krakow. 

Following his return to duty, in March 1916 he was posted to the Russian front, as part of the Austrian 7th Army, where he was involved in the Brusilov Offensive. 

Wittgenstein frequently directed artillery fire from a forward observation post, a very dangerous job as he was a special target of enemy fire. He was decorated on several occasions during his service.  In January 1917 he returned to the Russian front, where he earned several more medals, including the Silver Medal for Valor, First Class. In later action against the British, he was decorated with the Military Merit Medal, with Swords on the Ribbon for his exceptionally courageous behavior. 

In 1918, Wittgenstein was promoted to lieutenant and sent to the Italian front. For his actions during the Austrian offensive of June 1918, he was recommended for the Gold Medal for Valor, but it was subsequently downgraded to a second award of the Merit, with Swords. Captured by the Italians on 3 November, he spent nine months in a prison camp.  

Wittgenstein had survived the war, and in 1919 he renounced his inheritance, dividing it among his remaining siblings. Then he spent several years as a school teacher in Austria, all the while resuming his philosophical writing.

After Wittgenstein’s opus work Tractatus (which he had substantially completed when he was a prisoner of war) was published, his former tutor at Cambridge persuaded him to return there, and he stayed on until 1947. He then visited in Ireland and the U.S. until his final illness. His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously in 1953 under the title Philosophical Investigations, which has since been regarded as one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. 

Wittgenstein is credited with inventing the "truth-table," a method of determining in a mechanical way whether an argument is valid, and as well (although this claim is hotly contested) he may have been the first to use the "emoji," in his 1938 work The Brown Book, where he showed how simple face-like drawings could convey feelings and emotions. 

100 Years Ago: The Third Anglo-Afghan War Breaks Out

Fort Robat and the Kabul River, Afghanistan

By Edward Proctor, Duke University Libraries

The Third Anglo-Afghan War was one of Britain’s briefest, lasting just over three months during the summer of 1919, from 6 May to 8 August. It was surprisingly poorly reported, with fewer than a dozen articles appearing in the Times of London, several consisting of editorials and letters to the editor, and all of them buried in the back pages—even the announcement of the commencement of hostilities, “British Enter Afghanistan. Strategic Point Seized,” appeared as a small item consisting of just two brief paragraphs on page 12.  As a contemporary magazine put it, “So little has appeared in the newspapers about the Third Afghan War that probably most respectable citizens do not know there has been one.” 

Unlike the two previous Anglo-Afghan Wars (the first of which lasted the better part of three years, from 1839 to 1842, and the second for two years, from 1878 to 1880), this conflict began as the result of Afghan incursions into British-occupied territory across the border with India, rather than the other way round (as was historically more usual). According to the New Statesman for 16 August 1919:

The reasons that led the new Ameer [Amanullah Khan, the King] of Afghanistan to begin war on India are obscure, and the version of his motives given by the Indian Government make him out to be little better than a fool. One feels that there must be another and more reasonable side to the whole business.

The Times speculated that:

Some of the causes of the Afghan troubles are still obscure, but there is reason to suspect that Russian intrigue has had something to do with them. A friendly Russia which recognizes her duty to the rest of the world would have no motive to stir up trouble of this kind. But a Russia with its hand against everyone, like the present Bolshevist Government of Russia, can create endless mischief.

A British Tommy Stands Guard Over the Battleground of 11 May 1919

British interest in Afghanistan was long-standing, since it was viewed as a buffer between Russia and their Indian Empire. It was feared that Russia might attack India in order to gain access to a warm-water port. This rivalry, known as “The Great Game,” ran from most of the 19th century through the first half of the 20th century.

It was also theorized that the Amir felt that the time was ripe for fomenting unrest in India following the massacre by British forces of hundreds of unarmed civilians in the city of Amritsar the month before; but this explanation, like that of Bolshevik intrigue, is currently discredited. It is now believed that he was attempting to assert his country’s independence, both as an end in itself and due to domestic political considerations which compelled him to demonstrate his strength to opposition forces in Kabul. Previously, Britain controlled all aspects of Afghanistan’s foreign policy, and paid the Amir a subsidy of £120,000 [more than $4,000,000 in today’s currency] for the privilege. 

Over 10,000 British-Indian troops were mobilized. Casualties on both sides were heavy: 1,751 killed or wounded (including over 500 deaths from cholera) on the British side, and an estimated 1,000 deaths among the Afghans. British tactics included what was colloquially referred to as “butcher and bolt” operations, in which villages would be destroyed, their inhabitants killed, and troops would immediately return to their base, making no attempt to occupy any territory. Kabul and the Afghan fort at Dakka were successfully bombed using the relatively-new technology of biplanes, resulting in the following editorial comment in the Times: “[T]his is the first proof that we have had of the immense military value of the aeroplanes in small wars with semi-civilized peoples.” 

The war was ended by the Treaty of Rawalpindi, with both sides claiming a measure of victory—the Afghans successfully asserting their right to conduct their own foreign affairs (one of the first acts of which was to recognize the new Bolshevik government in Russia), and the British re-establishing the ante-bellum border and discontinuing their subsidy to the Amir.   

Kurram Valley Militia Post

Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier Province of India occupied a disproportionately large place in the psychology of British imperialism, largely because these areas were never successfully colonized or "pacified" by military force. Numerous stories of conflict in these regions, ranging from books and magazine articles, such as the more-or-less factual drawings and text in the Illustrated London News, to highly romanticized novels and heroic tales of daring-do in schoolboy magazines such as the Boy’s Own Paper were extremely popular, as were the works of Rudyard Kipling, unofficial poet laureate of the British Empire, who captured and shaped popular attitudes with his frequently jingoistic short stories, novels, and verse:

“The Young British Soldier”

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

The first line of “The Ballad of East and West” is often quoted out of context:

OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

 “Arithmetic on the Frontier”

A scrimmage in a Border Station-
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail [handmade long barrel rifle].
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

Sources: Website and Randolph Bezzant Holmes Photograph Collection, 1910–1919, Duke University Libraries

The War Poetry of John Allan Wyeth

This Man's Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets by John Allan Wyeth.  The University of South Carolina Press, 2008.  First published in 1928.

Before the Clangor of the Gun: The First World War Poetry of John Allan Wyeth by BJ Omanson. Monongahela Press, 2019.

Reviewed by David F. Beer

Wyeth's 33rd Division in the Line During the Argonne Offensive

We rarely come across a volume of World War One poetry that hasn’t seen the light of day for 80 years, but this is the case of John Wyeth’s This Man’s Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets. 

Order Here

These poems were unearthed by military historian BJ Omanson and reprinted in 2008 by Matthew Bruccoli, in his University of South Carolina Press Great War Series. BJ Omanson’s own book on Wyeth, Before the Clangor of the Gun, adds interesting information on Wyeth’s life and poetry. The two books are all you’ll need for an excellent background and appreciation of this little-known poet.

Wyeth’s work consists of 55 sonnets and we suspect his use of "odd" in his title has a double meaning: "more-or-less fifty" plus a hint that his sonnets are not "normal" ones. A traditional sonnet is 14 lines that follow a ten-beat meter (iambic pentameter) and has a consistent rhyme scheme. Numerous poets over the centuries have used the form and it’s still quite popular. A perfect example of a WWI sonnet (in my opinion) is Charles Sorley’s “When you see millions of the mouthless dead/Across your dreams in pale battalions go…”

Many poets have taken liberties with the traditional sonnet form. Wyeth frequently breaks his up to include conversation in English or French, as in number 42 where he relates his fruitless attempts to deliver some maps

A dusty sunset in a smoky sky,
And soldiers idling over the dry terrain.
“Stop here—they’re somewhere out by Harbonnières,
Give me the maps.”
          A rush of foaming flanks,
Australian caissons rattling, galloping by… (Sonnet 42)

These lines also reveal the poet’s tone and subject matter. His entire collection documents his personal experiences while serving in the AEF, from training to eventually joining the headquarters staff of the 33rd Division. He was never in combat but was at times quite close, and each poem describes a specific experience without any further analysis. We’re simply given very concrete vignettes:

Our sidecar jolted and rocked, twisting between
craters, lunging at every rack and wrench.
Through Bayonvillers—her dusty wreckage stank
of rotten flesh, a dead street overcast
with a half-sweet, fetid, cloying fog of stench. (Sonnet 41)

Another example of a "conversational" sonnet is number 30, where the confusion of divisional maneuvers is recounted:

“How’s the liaison, Major?”
         “Not so warm—
The General’s been ringin’ me up all day—‘G-2?
Hello!—Well Major, are you functioning?”
‘Yes sir, I’m functionig’—and here I set
All dolled up in my brand new uniform
And not one goddam message going through!” (Sonnet 30)

Order Here

An introduction to This Man’s Army by poet and scholar Dana Gioia, who served as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts between 2003 and 2009, gives interesting information on Wyeth’s life and poetry while annotations to the text by BJ Omanson helpfully describe the background situation of each poem. As mentioned above, Omanson’s own book on Wyeth adds additional insight into this long-neglected poet and his work. A citation from Before the Clangor of the Gun gets right to the point:

Wyeth is above all an astute witness—whether of natural phenomena, the peripheries of battle, or the idiosyncrasies of soldiers. His description of everything from the sound of gas shells hurtling overhead, to the reckless banter of enlisted men playing craps, to the drifting perfume of dead men in a ruined village, are as precise and revealing as any in the literature of war. They are his distinguishing feature and what chiefly sets him apart from every other major poet of 1914–1918 (p. 70).

Days before the end of the war Wyeth found himself in an evacuation hospital in Souilly, diagnosed with influenza. This didn’t kill him, however, and he went on to live a long but sparsely recorded life. We do know he lost interest in poetry and took up painting, spending a lot of time in Europe. His penultimate poem (54) gives us a glimpse of his hospital experience:

Fever, and crowds—and light that cuts your eyes—
Men waiting in a long slow-shuffling line 
with silent private faces, white and bleak.
Long rows of lumpy stretchers on the floor.
My helmet drops—a head jerks up and cries
wide-eyed and settles in a quivering whine.
The air is rank with touching human reek.
A troop of Germans clatters through the door.
They cross our line and something in me dies.
Sullen, detached, obtuse—men into swine—
and hurt unhappy things that walk apart.
Their rancid bodies trail a languid streak
so curious that hate breaks down before
the dull and cruel laughter in my heart. (number 54)

If you’re interested in the unique rhyme scheme Wyeth employs you can easily determine it from this sonnet. If you’re not interested in poetical technicalities, that’s OK too. We can all enjoy reading these poems and short books to gain insight into the mind and experiences of a WWI poet who has been happily rediscovered after lying in obscurity for so many years.

David F. Beer




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The Inscriptions for America's National World War One Memorial

Memorial Day 2019

Detail from Main Sculpture by Howard Sabin

In the late summer of 2017 at the request of the United States World War One Centennial Commission, I asked our readers to propose appropriated inscriptions for the National WWI Memorial planned for Pershing Square in Washington, DC. Subsequently, I forwarded nearly one hundred suggestions to the commission's Vice-Chairman, Edwin Fountain.  This week Mr. Fountain shared the final selections with me and ask me to pass these on to you. While none of our proposals made the final list, he expressed great appreciation and thanks for our efforts.  In future postings, I'll  also be sharing some of our readers ideas, but for now—here are the quotes that will appear on the memorial when it is completed.

Informational Kiosk with AEF Campaigns & Victory Medal Inscribed

From General Pershing

In their devotion, their valor, and in the loyal fulfillment of their obligations, the officers and men of the American Expeditionary Forces have left a heritage of which those who follow may ever be proud.

• From General Pershing's Memoir, My Experiences in the World War

From  Veteran Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish

We leave you our deaths: give them their meaning: give them an end to the war and a true peace: give them a victory that ends war and a peace afterwards: give them their meaning. We were young, they say. We have died. Remember us.

• From the  poem "THE YOUNG DEAD SOLDIERS DO NOT SPEAK," written in 1941 for a memorial service for staff members of the Library of Congress who died in the war
• MacLeish served as an ambulance driver and then artillery officer in WWI; fought in the Second Battle of the Marne
• His brother Kenneth was a naval aviator. Shot down over Belgium in October 1918, buried at Flanders Field American Cemetery.
• Librarian of Congress, 1939–44, then assistant secretary of state for public affairs.
• Also served as director of the War Department's Office of Facts and Figures and assistant director of the Office of War Information.  Developed the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS, which became the CIA.
• Three-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize (twice for poetry, once for drama)

How President Wilson's Words Will Be Inscribed

From President Woodrow Wilson

Never before have men crossed the seas to a foreign land to fight for a cause which they did not pretend was peculiarly their own, but knew was the cause of humanity and of mankind.  

• Woodrow Wilson, Memorial Day address, 30 May 1919
• Delivered at the American cemetery at Suresnes outside Paris, during the Versailles peace negotiations

From Author Willa Cather

Willa Cather

They were mortal, but they were unconquerable.

• From Willa Cather, One of Ours (1922:453), which also won the Pulitzer Prize.
• Protagonist Claude Wheeler is partly based on Cather’s  cousin, Grosvenor Cather, who was killed at Cantigny in May 1918 and received the Distinguished Service Cross.

Display of Willa Cather's Quote

From Nurse Alto May Andrews

Alto May Andrew's ID Card

If it has to be that this world must be embroiled in a tremendous “War to end Wars,” I am glad that I, too, may play a part in it.

• Alta May Andrews (quoted in Andrew Carroll (ed.), "My Fellow Soldiers" (2017: 230))
• From Illinois; shipped to France in April 1918, first as an American Red Cross nurse and then in the Army Nurse Corps
• Worked the night shift at American Hospital No. 1 in Neuilly outside Paris, caring for 70 men at a time
• Treated wounded soldiers from Belleau Wood and other battles
• Met President Wilson in December 1918 when he visited her hospital
• Served for two years; continued nursing WWI soldiers after she returned to the U.S. in April 1919—and re-enlisted during WWII at the age of 51

Recommended: Did the End of the Great War Come Too Soon?

11 November 1918, London

Presented at New Statesman America 

By David  Reynolds

Excerpt:

One hundred years ago, the war ended. But had it lasted into 1919 the future of the world might have been very different. . .

[D]uring Hitler’s war of 1939–45, President Franklin D. Roosevelt demanded Germany’s “unconditional surrender” and complete demilitarization and democratization. He wanted to rub German noses in the reality of Nazism’s utter defeat.

Since we in Britain take the Armistice for granted, it is worth noting that some senior Allied commanders in November 1918 seriously pondered a similarly hard policy. The German Army, though still on Allied soil, was now a shadow of what it had been and would probably not be able to resist. Foch sought armistice terms that required Germany to evacuate France, Belgium, and Alsace-Lorraine and allowed the Allies to occupy the west bank of the Rhine and bridgeheads east of the river—from which they would be in a position to march on into Germany.

Pershing was even more extreme. He wanted to continue the offensive and compel what he explicitly called Germany’s “unconditional surrender,” rather than accept a ceasefire now and “possibly lose the chance to secure world peace on terms that would insure its permanence.”

Some policymakers soon regretted not heeding Foch and Pershing. “Had we known how bad things were in Germany,” mused the British politician Eric Geddes on 12 November, the day after the Armistice was signed, “we might have got stiffer terms.” French prime minister Georges Clemenceau spoke in a similar vein the following year. Yet for the Allies to impose their will on Germany to such a degree would have required more fighting and more casualties.

Read the full article here:
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2018/10/did-end-great-war-come-too-soon

Remembering a Veteran: George Wright Puryear, 95th Aero Squadron

Lt. Puryear

World War I U.S. Army Air Service pilot was the first U.S. officer prisoner of war to escape from his German captors. He was the youngest of seven sons born to William Pressley and Fannie Mildred Wright Puryear in Hendersonville, Tennessee. He graduated from Vanderbilt University with a law degree in 1916 and moved to Memphis to work in his brother David's law practice.

During World War I, George joined the Aviation Section, U.S. Army Signal Corps (which would become the Army Air Service in 1918) and served in the 95th Aero Squadron. In July 1918, he was captured by German forces and sent to several different prisoner of war camps in Germany over the course of several months, before managing to escape from the camp at Villingen on 6 October 1918, swimming across the Rhine River to reach Switzerland. His heroic escape was chronicled in newspapers across the United States, and George traveled to various Air Service units to relay his experiences in the German prison camps.

Upon his return home, George was reassigned to the 9th Aero Squadron based at Rockwell Field, San Diego, California. From April to May 1919, he was a pilot with the No. 3 (Far West) Flight of the Victory Loan war bond campaign. When this campaign ended, George returned to the 9th Aero Squadron.

While on border patrol on 20 October 1919, the engine of his DH-4 cut out, causing it to crash. George died from his injuries within minutes of the crash. The airfield at El Centro/Calexico was named Puryear Field in his honor.

Source: Find a Grave

Who Was the Doughboys' Favorite Pin-Up?

Here's a question for you, dear readers. If Betty Grable was the favorite pinup of WWII's GIs, who held that honor for WWI's Doughboys? The answer could be one of the earliest sex symbols of the silent cinema, Theda "The Vamp" Bara.

Theda in The Stain, Her Film Debut 

She grew up in Cincinnati as Theodosia Burr Goodman and became an actress on the New York stage. Fox Studios discovered her and she went on to become their biggest star by the time of America's entry into the war, which was the same year her most famous film, Cleopatra, was released. Theda's brother volunteered for army service, and she responded graciously first to his buddies and then to other units that requested her sponsorship. As with other stars like Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, Theda was also a wholehearted supporter of the war bonds programs and went on to set records for sales. 

Theda Honored on a Nieuport Fighter

But her most notable connection to WWI might be that she is believed to be the first female personality adopted for aircraft nose art. The image above, courtesy of theaerodrome.com, shows a U.S. training aircraft with Theda's name. Theda got married in 1921 and made her last film in 1926. There are no talkies featuring Theda, and, sadly, most of her silent films have been lost.

The Grandeur of the Elks National Memorial

Built after the Great War to honor the 70,000 members of the association who had served in the struggle, the utterly magnificent Elks Memorial in Chicago is today little visited. It is reported that it receives about ten visitors a day. I once spent a day at nearby Lincoln Park and probably walked right past the building, oblivious to its importance and quality. I hope to make amends someday and get back to Chicago and visit the building. You'll see from the details and images below that the finest architects and artists in American contributed to its construction.  

1.  Elks National War Memorial,  Chicago, Illinois

Some details from the Elks website:

A monument in the truest sense, the Elks National Memorial was built in 1926 to honor Americans whose profound sacrifices for the nation can never be recognized by mere words. With its massive dome, heroic sculptures, and intricately detailed friezes, the memorial is a distinctively American interpretation of classical greatness.

Following World War I, there was a strong desire throughout the Elks organization to erect a fitting memorial to those brothers who had laid down their lives in the name of loyal patriotism and devotion to country which they had assumed at their fraternal altars. At the Grand Lodge session convened in Chicago in 1920, a special committee was created and assigned with the task of planning the design and construction of this new memorial. The commission invited seven of the country's most distinguished architects to participate in a competition that would determine the design of the new building.

After careful consideration, the commission unanimously decided on a design created by New York architect Egerton Swarthout. Swarthout's design was selected over the competition because it was the most beautifully distinctive, while still fulfilling its practical purpose as both a memorial to fallen Elks and a national headquarters for the organization. After an exhaustive search for the most qualified builder, the commission entrusted New York's Hegeman-Harris Company with the task of building a monument that would inspire Elks and captivate the public.

Some images from the memorial: (Click on them to enlarge.)

2.  View Inside the Entrance

3.  Partial View of the Balcony Murals

4. "The Armistice" by Eugene Francis Savage

5.  "Fidelity" (A Cardinal Virtue of the Elks), by James Earle Fraser

6. View from Ground Level of the Dome and Colonnade

7.  "Theirs Is the Kingdom of Heaven" (L) and 
"They Shall Be Called Children of God"(R )
 by Eugene Francis Savage

8.  Grand Reception Hall