Gallipoli poetry

[bobpike]

A new book I can highly recommend -

BRITISH AND IRISH POETS OF THE GALLIPOLI CAMPAIGN, 1915: HEIRS OF ACHILLES by David Childs and Vivien Whelpton – Cecil Woolf, London 2011 (ISBN 978-1-907286-17-9) @ £9.00

[PMHart]

I have put a full review of this book on the Great War Review Page on Facebook which can be seen at

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/photo.php?fbid=126726404060734&set=a.119157818150926.18097.119140851485956

I would endorse the view that it is an excellent book,

Pete

P.S. If you have a Facebook account you can get regular updates from the review page by clicking on the 'Like' button thingy! You will find other linked pages on Gallipoli, Hucknall and Douglas Haig that I thoroughly recommend!

[bobpike]

Thank you, Pete. There will also be a review in the next "Gallipolian." It is also worth noting that this book is the latest in the series "The War Poets Series" which includes volumes on Leslie Coulson, Frederic Manning and Edgell Rickword.

[michaeldr]

Peter,

On a point of historical accuracy: His friend was Second Lieutenant Douglas Jerrold of Drake Battalion, who was to survive to write the a history of the RND.

I stand to be corrected on this, but was not Jerrold in the Hawke Battalion? He certainly wrote their history.

Then, to depart from fact and to enter into the realm of mere opinion: Poetry and the poets of the Great War have acted as a lightning rod for the frustrations of historians trying to counter the collective dribbling of the 'Butchers and Bunglers' school… … … These frustrations have boiled over into open public attacks on the poets by the likes of Pete Simkins and, I fear on certain occasions, myself.

I have never understood why it should be thought that all poets are wrong, and all (modern) historians right on this. If the modern historian is indeed making a valid point, then where are all the poets who in 1918, still thought and wrote as Brooke did in 1914:

"Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with this His Hour

And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

To turn, as swimmers into cleaness leaping,

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,

Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,

And half-men, their dirty songs and dreary,

And all the little emptiness of love!"

Was it not the case that the war-poets in their later writing, simply reflected the brutal facts of Attrition;

the grinding down of flesh and bone, until one side had no more sacrificial lambs to offer?

There is also a quick summary of the Gallipoli campaign which is not offensive (indeed) although it is entirely based on a school of scholarship that I thought had ended with Robert Rhodes James of blessed memory, but still I note, passively endorsed by Dr. Bob Bushaway of the Birmingham School who checked the military details of the campaign for the authors.

Oh! I do look forward to this tome reaching my address

regards

Michael

[PMHart]

Hi Michael,

I'm really sorry I don't know how I put Drake Battalion - it is of course the Hawke Battalion. I think I may be losing my marbles! I will change the review accordingly at once! Thanks chum!

As to the poets as I think I make clear I am pointing out that they provide a purely personal reaction to conditions and events which cannot be wrenched out of context, treated as the one true source of historical facts and then used by history teachers to comment on the strategy and tactics of the Great War - as it so often is!

I fully understand that criticism of the 'blessed' Robert Rhodes James is still a hanging offence to many Gallipoli afficianados! But at least he wouldn't have put Drake Battalion like I did!!!!

I am sure you will enjoy the book - it is great!

Pete

PS I have put a note on the Great War Reviews Page thanking you for your correction. That kind of error wrecks confidence in the reviews!

[michaeldr]

Peter,

I was hoping for a comment on my

I have never understood why it should be thought that all poets are wrong, and all (modern) historians right on this. If the modern historian is indeed making a valid point, then where are all the poets who in 1918, still thought and wrote as Brooke did in 1914:

regards

michael

[PMHart]

Peter,

I was hoping for a comment on my

I have never understood why it should be thought that all poets are wrong, and all (modern) historians right on this. If the modern historian is indeed making a valid point, then where are all the poets who in 1918, still thought and wrote as Brooke did in 1914:

regards

michael

I can't comment Michael because I have not the slightest idea what you mean which is probably my fault! Right about what? I haven't said all poets are wrong! I have merely said that a very narrow selection of their poems are not the basis a hundred years later for teachers to use in the classroom as the sole arbiter of opinion on the strategy and tactics as employed in the Great War. Poets comment largely on what appertains to themselves; even larger issues are inevitably seen through the prism of their life expereinces up to that point. How can it be otherwise? It is this personal element that gives their work value! But war is a rather bigger picture beyond an individual's personal response.

I don't disparage more than half the war poets, nor more than three-quarters of their poetry! That is just a personal reaction - as it should be! I merely don't condone any tendency to see them as the fountains of all knowledge on the Great War.

And I certainly haven't said all modern historians are right - J. P. Harris for instance is a bit of an idiot!

Sorry chum!

Pete

[George Armstrong Custer]

Poetry and the poets of the Great War have acted as a lightning rod for the frustrations of historians trying to counter the collective dribbling of the 'Butchers and Bunglers' school. The widespread tendency of secondary school history teachers to assume that only poets have anything of relevance to say about the war has proved extremely difficult to counter: to put it bluntly factual accounts of the number and nature of gas casualties have no impact compared to the endless recitations with a sad face of Wilfred Owen's masterly Dulce et Decorum Est! These frustrations have boiled over into open public attacks on the poets by the likes of Pete Simkins and, I fear on certain occasions, myself. Yet even I have often admired the writings of poets; particularly when they eschew poetry and write prose: some of my favourite writers have been what I like to think of as 'recovering' poets: Blunden, Graves and Sassoon for example.

Yet looked at on their own terms and away from the pernicious influence of half-witted teachers, there is much enjoyment to be gathered from poetry, particularly when it gets away from the oft-anthologised 'standards' from the Western Front.

Having for once been able to make sense of something Pete wrote, I'm able to comment on this! It seems to me that his opening paragraph and a bit (above), when not edited, is saying that a good poem is not a substitute for good historical enquiry. His example of why this may be so also seems pretty clear, with its reference to a poetic account of gas compared to factual accounts of the number and nature of gas casualties. None of which is to say that an examination of the reaction of some individuals to the war through poetry cannot be given consideration in a factual history. But the poems on their own do not a factual history make.

Water Carrier George

[truthergw]

I am very hesitant to enter into debate on the merits of poetry and poets. Of course there are valid criticisms to be made, as in all art but I have not the technical knowledge to make them. That does not stop me reading war poets along with other poetry and liking or rejecting them on the rather weak ground that that is how I react. I do not believe however that a poet can be right or wrong except from a very shallow point of view. We surely do not read poetry to learn facts? Criticising Tennyson for getting the number of the Light Brigade wrong would be to miss the point of his poem entirely. In the same way, a history teacher who bases his or her analysis of the Great War on poets, be they Brookes or Owen, Joe Lee or Violet Jacobs, is surely committing a grave error. A teacher who refers to a TV comedy series as THE picture of what the war was about and how it was fought is failing in his duty. Poetry and performance art has a place in education but it is not in the history class.

[michaeldr]

Sorry Pete; I should have made expressed myself more clearly. And likewise your clarification is much appreciated.

Poetry and the poets of the Great War have acted as a lightning rod for the frustrations of historians trying to counter the collective dribbling of the 'Butchers and Bunglers' school.

And then

I haven't said all poets are wrong! I have merely said that a very narrow selection of their poems are not the basis a hundred years later for teachers to use in the classroom as the sole arbiter of opinion on the strategy and tactics as employed in the Great War. Poets comment largely on what appertains to themselves; even larger issues are inevitably seen through the prism of their life experiences up to that point. How can it be otherwise? It is this personal element that gives their work value! But war is a rather bigger picture beyond an individual's personal response.

I would have thought there were enough poets spread across the various fronts and formations, for the wider picture to have been seen and experienced by them. Generalisations are unsatisfactory and of course not all commanders can be lumped together with the Butchers and Bunglers. But it does seem sometimes that those who would defend the lot are scratching around for someone else to blame.

[The politicians were wrong because they could not provide enough men for both the factory and the front. The poets were wrong because they painted the picture that they saw, and not the one which the generals or their apologists could see.]

If the poets have succeeded in getting their story across, then perhaps it is because that was how the war was recognized by the vast majority of their readers. The public with whom the war poets first became popular, was the same one which had served at the front or who had sat at home reading the letters from there.

Perhaps the question is really 'What is the history of a world war'?

Is it the general's diaries which he, his staff and his family have carefully prepared?

Or is it the bigger picture beyond an individual's personal response: the picture which was recognized by the masses.

There is no doubt that the historian has a hard, up-hill task on his hands

Good luck,

Michael

[michaeldr]

How are you chaps getting hold of this book?

Amazon & Abe turned up zero

as did a search of the publisher's own web-site

Thanks for pointers

Michael

[PMHart]

How are you chaps getting hold of this book?

Amazon & Abe turned up zero

as did a search of the publisher's own web-site

Thanks for pointers

Michael

See facebook reference! But here it is!

Cecil Woolf Publishers (to whom cheques should be made out: the £9.00 cover price includes postage)

1 Mornington Place

LONDON

NW1 7RP

Pete

PS Note to publishers and authors, who clearly won't see this: a nil internet presence is not the greatest sales tool!!!!

[michaeldr]

Thanks Pete

e-mail sent

[salesie]

Peter,

I was hoping for a comment on my

I have never understood why it should be thought that all poets are wrong, and all (modern) historians right on this. If the modern historian is indeed making a valid point, then where are all the poets who in 1918, still thought and wrote as Brooke did in 1914:

regards

michael

There is no doubt that the mood of Great War poetry changed as the war went on (the Somme being a watershed for poetic mood as well as the country's as a whole). And, the poetic voice we so often see is a middle-class voice, full of middle-class angst stemming from the suffering inflicted at the front; a voice picked up by the "ee-aw brigade" as being the "true-voice" of those who fought. But is this voice wholly representative of those who actually fought the war? I would say definitely not.

Firstly, "the butchers and bunglers" school have been highly selective in their choice of poetry from WW1 by pushing a small number of soldier-poets who tend to be the better few (in literary terms), but should the voice of "lesser" poets be ignored on the grounds of literary merit if using poetry alone to judge the overall mood of the men who fought? And, secondly, the poetry of the "chosen few" contains much more descriptive comment on the suffering than it does political views about the rights and wrongs of the war (except for Sassoon, of course); it seems to me, in the minds of some, that a poet being appalled at the suffering automatically equates to rabid criticism of those above him.

And, in my opinion, the whole basis of the ee-aw brigade's "selected few" stance throws up a paradox i.e. two examples, Wilfred Owen clearly despised the war from the core of his being, yet something dragged him back to fight and die in it even when an honourable escape had been offered to him. Siegfried Sassoon appears to have been willing to have been shot as a traitor, but he was a courageous, indeed heroic officer who went back to active service after his famous public declaration against the war. Two of the finest pacifist poets of the First World War were awarded the Military Cross for gallantry in action. Yet judging by the poems which appear in most anthologies (highly selective in content to follow a certain agenda), these men should never have joined up, and never have carried on fighting.

If the sentiments found in many poetry collections are the whole and only truth about the Great War, it is difficult to explain why there was no mass desertion, no sustained and extensive mutiny amongst British troops. These men and their officers - numbers which included scores of poets and writers - returned to the trenches and went into action again and again.

Cheers-salesie.

[truthergw]

One of the questions raised in my mind is why work like that of Frank Richards, George Coppard et al does not get equal coverage? I think that these give a more balanced view. Far from enamoured by the Top Brass but much more even in their criticisms. Could it be that the War Poets, or at least as Salesie points out the select few of the war poets who star in the presentation, are in fact chosen to further an agenda? My comment and criticism still stands. Name me another historical period which is studied through a selection of its poetry. Do the children of today study the Civil Wars through the Cavalier Poets? Do they study Elizabethan history through Shakespeare? Blackadder did a great series on the Elizabethan era. Why do we not see Nursie portrayed as the epitome of Elizabethan child care?

[michaeldr]

The widespread tendency of secondary school history teachers to assume that only poets have anything of relevance to say about the war has proved extremely difficult to counter

It seems that the blame-the-teachers school is not so new. This from Lyn Macdonald ten years ago:

"…the study of the War Poets in the school curriculum has resulted in a popular view of the War (invariably expressed in the vocabulary of horror) which tends to obfuscate the facts and impede understanding of the spirit of the times."

All of which reminds me of my first days at work, when there were still those around who thought of themselves as Major (Land Agent) and Commander (Chairman) and Wing-Commander (Purchasing Director) etc. etc. Even though it was 18 or 19 years after the war and the general election which had brought in the Atlee government, these people still could not grasp why the majority of the British public had voted differently to them. The only explanation which they had to offer was that it was down to indoctrination. Specifically I was told, it was all the fault of the Army Education Corps.

[salesie]

The widespread tendency of secondary school history teachers to assume that only poets have anything of relevance to say about the war has proved extremely difficult to counter

It seems that the blame-the-teachers school is not so new. This from Lyn Macdonald ten years ago:

"…the study of the War Poets in the school curriculum has resulted in a popular view of the War (invariably expressed in the vocabulary of horror) which tends to obfuscate the facts and impede understanding of the spirit of the times."

All of which reminds me of my first days at work, when there were still those around who thought of themselves as Major (Land Agent) and Commander (Chairman) and Wing-Commander (Purchasing Director) etc. etc. Even though it was 18 or 19 years after the war and the general election which had brought in the Atlee government, these people still could not grasp why the majority of the British public had voted differently to them. The only explanation which they had to offer was that it was down to indoctrination. Specifically I was told, it was all the fault of the Army Education Corps.

It seems to me, Michael, that your "Colonel Blimp" analogy is more apt in describing those responsible for the school curriculum and the teachers who readily agree with it rather than those who criticise the so-called school educators of the Great War. For decades now, the message of the "selected" War Poets has been shown, by more than ample evidence, to indeed "obfuscate the facts and impede understanding of the spirit of the times".

Usually we shouldn't "shoot the messengers", but when those "messengers" are stuck in a time-warp and refuse to carry any other "message" despite mountains of strong evidence that they should (same as the "Colonel Blimps" you mention) then they deserve to be shot. Especially when the poetry they selectively present is far from being wholly representative of the views of the vast majority who fought - and, as Tom so cogently puts it, when there is no other period of history taught mostly through the poetry of its time.

Cheers-salesie.

[michaeldr]

See facebook reference! But here it is!

Cecil Woolf Publishers (to whom cheques should be made out: the £9.00 cover price includes postage)

1 Mornington Place

LONDON

NW1 7RP

Pete

PS Note to publishers and authors, who clearly won't see this: a nil internet presence is not the greatest sales tool!!!!

Prompt reply received this morning from Mr. Woolf. They have recently had a problem with hackers, so the preferred purchase route is a cheque in the post to the address as given by Pete above. I will attend to it this next week

regards

Michael

[PMHart]

Hi Michael,

I think you will enjoy it! We should all encourage small publishers as they attend to areas and interests that mainstream operators ignore.

Pete

[George Armstrong Custer]

Thucydides, writing in his history The Peloponnesian War some two and a half thousand years ago, left us a succinct summary of the difference between an historian and poets and novelists:

I do not think that one will be far wrong in accepting the conclusions I have reached from the evidence which I have put forward. It is better evidence than that of the poets, who exaggerate the importance of their themes, or of the prose chroniclers, who are less interested in telling the truth than in catching the attention of their public, whose authorities cannot be checked, and whose subject-matter, owing to the passage of time, is mostly lost in unreliable streams of mythology. We may claim instead to have used only the plainest evidence and to have reached conclusions which are reasonably accurate.

Sir James Edmonds, the British Official Historian of the Great War, might reasonably have claimed at least as much for the magnum opus which he oversaw.

George

[michaeldr]

My cheque is even now winging its way to the good Mr. Woolf, and till the Gallipoli poetry arrives I have taken down something else from my shelf, only to find that some themes are eternal. This from a blind, Greek fellow, three thousand years ago

'Tis ours, the chance of fighting fields to try;

Thine to look on, and bid the valiant die:

(the English is that of the late Mr. A. Pope)

Where were the historians when Homer was telling us of Troy?

My own education in History ended with the reign of Queen Anne, and English touched upon Shelley and Keats, but did not make it as far as Tennyson. From my own experience therefore, I do not recognize that teachers are responsible for any unpopularity re the views of some current historians.

The picture conjured up by the assertions made in some quarters, brings to the mind's eye the picture of a muscle bound bully (the English master) entering the Staff Common Room and the frail, slight figure of the History master cowering by the coffee tray, in anticipation of being threatened, again, for not toeing the line on the Great War.

My English masters were indeed bullies: one picked me up, and held me aloft, by the ears (I don't recall what for) another made (il)liberal use of a leather strap when verses were not committed to memory. (Perhaps he would have had more success if he had explained that developing the memory delays the onset of Alzheimer's) However, neither of them could have faced down the History master; the estimable 'Buck' Ryan was also the Deputy Head.

How does one prove that educators are at fault in their teaching? The mere repetition of something does not make it true. What evidence can be brought forward? Can someone cite a (down-loadable) report by HM's Inspector, berating the teaching of English and further, particularly mentioning where it transgresses into the sacred fields of History.

[PMHart]

Michael,

I would like to apologise unreservedly. Your wise words have convinced me that the overuse of certain poets in schools has had no impact whatsoever on the perceptions of school children as to the futile nature of the Great War, the dreadful performance of our High Command and the deadly, always fatal, threat of gas shells.

I therefore can only suggest that as the poets' emotive efforts have by your account no effect whatsoever on the children, then we should stop wasting their time using them in history lessons? There happy now?

Pete