Robert Ernest Vernede - Novelist/Poet

[Guest geoff501]

Only just found this interesting thread.

In this post:

http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/forums/i...ndpost&p=270142

The unanswered question (unless I missed it, still reading the thread):

Hi Marina,

Unfortunately I am not near my SDGW at the moment, but it woulld be a Sergeant in the 3rd Battalion, The Rifle Brigade on 16th June 1916.

Andy

This must be the one.

As per CWGC:

Name: ROGERS

Initials: A J

Nationality: United Kingdom

Rank: Serjeant

Regiment/Service: Rifle Brigade

Unit Text: 3rd Bn.

Date of Death: 16/06/1916

Service No: 4009

Awards: MM

Casualty Type: Commonwealth War Dead

Grave/Memorial Reference: I. 12.

Cemetery: MAPLE LEAF CEMETERY

From SDGW

born Maidstone, Kent

enlisted Chatham, Kent

residence Gillingham, Kent

Died

[Ozzie]

Somehow I lost track of this. Great work Andy.

Good to see it revived.

Cheers

Kim

[marina]

Thanks!

Marina

[stiletto_33853]

Good to see Robert's thread revitalised after a long time and thanks for that reference Geoff.

Andy

[marina]

Came across this poem in Malcolm Brown's '1914', quoted from the Times,19th August, 1914. A poem by Robert, written when the big recruitment drive was on:

Lad, with the merry smile and the eyes

Quick as a hawk's and clear as the day,

You, who have counted the game as the prize,

Here is the game of games to play.

Never a goal - the captains say --

Matches the one that's needed now:

Put the old school blazers and cap away -

Engand's colours await your brow

Hark once more to the clarion call -

Sounded by him who deathless died -

'This day Engand expects you all.'

Not his best, perhaps, but an interesting contrast to the thoughts that appear in his letters to Caroline. I have often wondered what Rupert Brooke's poems would have been like if he'd lived. He has the same patriotic tone as Robert's in 'If I should die...' but of course never lived to develop as Robert did.

Marina

[stiletto_33853]

Thanks Marina,

Just seen this posting.

Andy

[stiletto_33853]

In the thread on Andrew Buxton another couple of references to Robert have emerged which I had completely forgotten about until entering them on Andrew's thread and thought it appropriate to place them here.

Andrew's letter to his Mother on April 22nd, 1917.

".........Arthur told me yesterday of Vernede being killed. I am troubled to hear of it. I shall write to Mrs. Vernede, though I have never met her................. Life has sometimes been very unhealthy for us both, but nothing has touched us."

[stiletto_33853]

Andrew's letter to Mrs. Vernede after hearing of Robert's death.

Monday, 23-4-17.

H.Qrs. 73rd Brigade (Infantry), B.E.F.

"I hardly know how to write to you in this most grievious news of Mr. Vernede's death. For some time I have been very much cut off from everything except just what was happening around me, but yesterday I saw my Brother Arthur, who told me the news of his having been killed in action. You know how tremendously fond of him I was, and with his wonderful abilities and mind. I have a feeling of it being altogether wrong for me to be still alive and he no longer so. We so often in C. Coy were given by him, usually most unexpectedly, some extraordinarily sound and what must have been carefully thought out ideas with reference to tactical, disciplinary or other Army matters, and there is no doubt he should have been O.C. Coy. rather than me. But our time together was the most splendid imaginable, and I shall always look back on it with recollections that can never be forgotten. What Mr. Vernede's death means to you I just dare not think, as you have lost one whom you must have loved so much. My Sister Rosamond, whom I have just heard from, speaks of you as giving the impression of being so extraordinarily brave, so I comfort myself that you will not allow your loss to be too overwhelming. When I mention the word brave, I must speak - though you doubtless know from many sources - of your husband's extraordinary bravery - over and over again undertaking and carrying through the most unhealthy bits of work with, as far as I could see, every thought for the men he was with, but with none for himself.

He just loved the N.C.O.'s and men, and if at any time anything happened to one he was connected with he felt it immensely.........Again my deepest sympathy at your great loss. Of course don't write, but just accept this thought of you."

[Ozzie]

Ta mate.

Kim

[marina]

Watching the BBC programme 'The Raj' the other night, I was pleased to see Nancy Vernede, wife of Raymond Vernede, recounting her memories of life in India. Raymond was the son of AH Vernede who I think is Robert's brother.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._V._Vern%C3%A8de

http://www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/Handlist_U-V.htm

I note that Raymond was something of a writer too.

I also learned from Nancy how to pronounce Vernede properly!

[Terry_Reeves]

OK Marina - how do you pronounce it? BIG grin

TR

[marina]

Ver- NADE with the stress on the second syllable.

I have been pronouncing it Ver- need- e.

Oh, well...altogether now - Ver - NADE!

[stiletto_33853]

Just seen this, thanks for the links Marina, interesting stuff.

Andy

[marina]

It was, Andy. Although not directly to do with Robert, it made him more real somehow if that makes any sense.

Marina

[stiletto_33853]

Whilst going through the 12th Rifle Brigade's War Diary for another member came across these which I had forgotten to place here.

[stiletto_33853]

Robert

[stiletto_33853]

Robert made me think a little today of him and the circumstances of his unfortunate death, with the 91st Anniversary of his death tomorrow.

R.I.P. Robert.

Andy

[marina]

Yes, God bless Robert. He has a fine memorial here.

Marina

[stiletto_33853]

Raising a glass to you and you memory tonight Robert, not forgotten.

Andy

[marina]

I had a little read of the letters to his wife to remember that dry wit and courage. Odd to feel the loss of someone I never knew.

Marina

[liverpool annie]

I was thinking of Robert today for some reason and then came here and saw it was his anniversary !

God Bless Robert .... we still think of you !

Thank you Andy for introducing us ..... I agree Marina ..... it always seems strange to me - how we can be so emotionally involved with soldiers who died so long ago and aren't even related !

Annie

PS It's still the 9th here !!

[salesie]

Here's a photograph of Robert, and a handwritten note by Robert's wife (Carol Howard Vernede) to a Mrs Stanley (in the next post) - both taken from the book, War Poems and other Verses, R.E.Vernede, published by Carol after Robert's death. Also, a copy of the introduction to "Robert's" book of verse, which in my opinion pays a fitting tribute to Robert.

Cheers-salesie

INTRODUCTION

Too much can never be said in praise of the generous beauty of the gesture with which the youngest of Englishmen, just emerging on the tihresboid of life, have greeted the sacrifice of their hopes and ours. It has filled our history with new and magnificent figures which will excite the enthusiasm and awaken the gratitude of our race for centuries to come. But while we admire this miraculous courage of the very youthful paladins of the war, something should still be reserved for the praise of those who had been brought face to face with the illusions of peace-time and who had, if we may say so, got into the habit of not being soldiers, but who yet, at the call of duty, sprang to the height of their disinterested patriotism. The poet whose verses we collect to-day was one of those who might well believe that their age absolved them from an active part in the profession of arms. He was indeed, above the limit then set upon military service when the declaration of war disturbed him among his books and his flowers. Nothing in his past life had prepared him for such an activity. He was, as he said himself, " a dreamer," yet when the call to national duty came, he suddenly awoke, as a sleeper under the trumpet, to the utmost activity of enterprise. This is a case of the class of heroism which is most easily ignored, and which it is yet stupid and ungrateful of us to undervalue. Here we are invited to contemplate an aspect of the higher energy, even in the martial order, which is not included among the "roses and myrtles of sweet two and twenty."

Vernede's attitude towards the war is worthy of par-ticular notice, because the nature of his occupations and tastes had led him to his fortieth year without any predilection for military matters and without any leaning to what are called "Jingo" views. But when once the problem of the attack of Germany on the democracy of the world was patent to him, he did not hesitate for a moment. He accepted, completely and finally, the situation. Nor did he ever doubt the righteousness of the cause of the Allies, nor hesitate in his conviction that it must be conducted to victory with full resolution. A few weeks before his death he wrote, in terms of scrupulous courtesy, to a " pacificist" who had asked leave to include "England to the Sea" in an anthology designed to exclude verses " which might contribute to a continuation of ill-feeling between the various nations." To this visionary, Vernede replied:— "Not for generations to come will there be any need to fan the embers against a people whose rulers have found logic in brutality and have urged their own necessities as an excuse for oppression. I do not think there is much hatred out here [in France] among our fighting men, but there will be memories among those who have seen what Kultur has inflicted on their comrades. I believe that if we had been fighting against men less filled with this logic of devilry, the mere horrors of modern war would have brought about a peace. Whatever historians or statesmen may make of it, we are fighting against the spirit that exults in such horrors."

ROBERT ERNEST VERNEDE was born in London 4th of June, 1875. He was of French extraction representing the younger branch of a southern family, the Vernede de Corneillans, who were driven from their estates in 1685 by the of the Edict of Nantes. The family dropped the " de Corneillan," and settled in Java, whence the poet's grandfather, Henri Vernede, proceeded in the early part of last century, marrying an Englishwoman and becoming a British citizen. Robert Louis Stevenson mentions the ancestral castle of the Vernedes in his Travels with a Donkey. The family coat of arms, for those interested in these things is an orange-tree on a golden field with a raven clutching at an orange that falls from the tree. Essentially English in sentiment, the English branch of tbe Vemedes has never ceased to pride itself on its pure French ancestry.

After passing through St. Paul's School, R.E. Vernede went to Oxford, where he took a classical exhibition at St. John's College. He left Oxford in 1898, and four years later he married Miss Carol Howard Fry, who survives him, and he settled down to a quiet country life at Standon in Hertfordshire. He occupied his abundant leisure in reading and writing, with a continual increase of ambition to succeed. He published several novels, The Pursuit of Mr. Faviel, in 1905, Meriel of the Moors, in 1906 ; he visited Bengal in the company of his wife, and produced on his return An Ignorant in India, which has received high commendation. Success came slowly to him, but he was beginning to be recog-nised as a writer of solid promise when the outbreak of war transfigured his whole vision of life.

It has been seen that the temperament and habits of Vernede had not in any way prepared him for fighting, and that yet, when the crisis came, he faced it at once. Though his years were mature, he was one of the earliest to dedicate himself with-out reserve to the service of the State, and to pre-pare to be a soldier. He had playfully complained that life was " humdrum" ; it suddenly became perilous and splendid. One who knew him well describes the way in which Vernede faced the new conditions,—"with the airman's far-away vision "; he took "his fine headlong plunge to inspire us on our creep to death." In more prosaic language, at the beginning of September, 1914, he enlisted as a private in a Public Schools Battalion, the 19th Royal Fusiliers, although he was so much above the highest limit for enlistment; and he received a com-mission in the Rifle Brigade early in 1915. Before going to France, he had six months' commissioned service in the 5th Battalion of the same regiment, in the Isle of Sheppey. In France he was attached to the 3rd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, one of the four Regular battalions of that regiment.

Vernede's earliest experience of actual warfare was made in the trenches on the evening of Friday, January 7th, 1916. From that time, until his death fourteen months later, he was constantly in the thick of the fighting, save for a short time at the end of 1916 when he was at home, wounded. He was with the infantry the whole time, resisting all sug-gestion of transference to more comfortable billets. He started in the ill-famed Salient. One of his first turns of duty in the trenches was taken during a pro-longed and very violent bombardment of our lines ; on coming out, the battalion received the thanks of the General Officer Commanding the Division. At the end of March the battalion was moved slightly south to the neighbourhood of Ploegsteert Wood. In the early autumn it went further south again to take part in the battle of the Somme. During this fighting the captain commanding Vernede's company " went sick" for a short time, and Vernede was put in temporary command. He was so acting when a shrapnel wound in the thigh, on September 1st, 1916, sent him home to England.

After a quick recovery at Oxford and in his own Hertfordshire home, and a short time of light duty in Sheppey—having absolutely refused to let a friend in the War Office try to find him even temporary work there, for fear it might impede his return—he went back to the front in the last days of 1916. The battalion he joined, though of the Rifle Brigade, was not the one he had left: I am told that rarely happens. This was a service battalion, and in actual length of experience, apart from its quality, Vernede had probably the advantage of most of his brother officers ; but the commands had all been lately filled up, so he became merely the newest-joined subaltern. He was disappointed, being full of ideas which thus had no outlet, but accepted the arrangement as natural and unavoidable, and his captain has testified to the unselfish loyalty and modesty which made it possible for others to do the same.

He was back again in very much the same region in which he had been before his wound. Later, he saw, and was deeply moved by, the ravages committed by the Germans in their retreat. On Easter Day he wrote as usual to his wife, and spoke of the summer at last coming on, and that perhaps the war would end this year and he would see his home again. Early the next morning, the 9th April, 1917, he was leading his platoon in an attack on Havrincourt Wood, when he was mortally wounded and died the same day.

The circumstances of his death repeat the story of a thousand such events in this prodigious war. Vernede was in charge of his platoon on the advance, and was in front with a couple of his men when they suddenly came upon a concealed enemy machine gun. He was hit, and it was immediately seen that the wound was serious. His men carried him back alive to the aid station, but he died upon the further journey. He was buried in the French cemetery at Lechelle. His friend Captain F. E. Spurling put up a cross and planted around it a large bowl of daffodil bulbs which had been the joy of the poet when they flowered in the company mess. They now, in their long sleep, watch over his rest.

He greatly endeared himself to those by whose side he worked and fought. From a sheaf of private tributes from his fellow-soldiers I am permitted to quote one or two passages. Capt. G. Tatham says : "We served together in the same company from November 15th [1916] to last May, and we were a very happy party, as happy, at least, as it is possible to be in such circumstances. That we were so was in no small measure due to Vernede. He was a delightful companion and an excellent man to have in a battalion,—always cool and collected in the trenches, and always ready to lighten the dull monotony of billets with his quiet sense of humour. I now remember, sadly, that we used to accuse him of making notes for a future book in which all the weaknesses of his brother officers were to stand revealed!" The late Capt. Andrew Buxton speaks of Vernede's " extraordinary bravery, over and over again under-taking and carrying through the most ' unhealthy ' bits of work with all his thought for the men he was with and none for himself. He loved the N.C.O.s, and whenever any misfortune happened to one of his men, it was manifest that Vernede felt it intensely. Our time together was the most splendid imaginable, and I shall always look back on it with recollections that can never be forgotten."

Vernede's closest friend, Mr. F. G. Salter, to whom I am indebted for much of the preceding information, gives me the following impression of him :— "In physical appearance Vernede was of rather more than average height, dark, with olive com-plexion ; his face very regular and oval. He was strikingly good-looking, and his movements the most graceful of any creature's I have seen. He was a good skater, swimmer, and lawn-tennis player, and could walk enormous distances, when he chose. He never seemed to change at all from what he was like at Oxford. His manner was quiet and reserved, or what might have seemed reserved to people first meeting him. Underneath this lay a keen observation of human nature, in all kinds and classes, and a humour which on occasion could be sarcastic. Anything pretentious or pompous was a sure target: a lesser condemnation was reserved for conduct which was not perfectly natural and easy. Except among intimates, he would often sit silent while others talked, and then, unexpectedly, say something from an unwonted angle which lit up the whole question. He was entirely without affectation, and certainly not disposed to put the artist on a pedestal above ordinary men. Every form of life interested him: he had the solidest stand on his mother earth. His temper was quite impossible to ruffle: I don't think in all these years I have ever once known him put out or moody. It is not surprising that he became popular with the young officers among whom he was thrown, and with his men, especially when the latter were in any sort of trouble. To his friends he gave a generous and never-failing sympathy. They have lost the best man they have known. His hatred of war was intense, and positive. He hated the cruelty it inflicts, and denied it as a test of efficiency, but his feeling went beyond that: he loved ardently the things which war destroys, the good human life of fellowship and adventure, the kindliness between man and man, the ' thousand labours under the sun.' To him it was a clear-cut issue of right and wrong when Germany let loose this evil upon Europe. Neither did he feel any hesita-tion as to his own duty. The greatness of England had always been the background of his thought: now he—' dreamer,' as he calls himself—could serve her. He was a poor man, and enlistment meant for him the immediate cutting off of the greater part of his and his wife's livelihood ; it meant too, of course, subordination, as a private, to all sorts of stupid duties and persons. But he at once enlisted, and only took a commission when it had become clear that that was the greater need. He was not at all indifferent to death. He loved life, with a solid, English love ; he loved his garden, his art, his friends ; above all, he loved the wife who for all the years since their betrothal had been the inspirer and en-courager of everything he did, and who was so in this decision also, and to the end. He very greatly desired to come back alive after the war. But it seemed to him that such a desire was, for the present, simply irrelevant."

Found among his papers, after his death, were the opening lines of an unfinished poem ; he had noted it as one intended to be included in a collection he was contemplating, but if ever finished, the completion remained in his head alone. The lines are as follows:

I seek new suns : I will not die;

Earth hath not shown me half her store.

From an eloquent tribute written by another former school-fellow and friend, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, on receiving the news of Vernede's death, I quote a confirmatory passage :— "He always remained, even in face and figure, almost startlingly young. There went with this the paradox of a considerable maturity of mind, even in boyhood ; a maturity so tranquil and, as it were, so solitary as to be the very opposite of priggishness. He had a curious intellectual independence; I remember him maintaining in our little debating club, that Shakespeare was overrated ; not in the least impudently or with any foreshadowing of a Shavian pose, but rather like a conscientious student with a piece of Greek of which he could not makesense. He was too good a man of letters not to have learnt better afterwards ; but the thing had a touchof intangible isolation that surprised the gregarious mind of boyhood. He had in everything, even in his very appearance, something that can only be called distinction ; something that might be called, in the finer sense, race. This was perhaps the only thing about him, except his name and his critical temper, that suggested something French. I remember his passing a polished and almost Meredithian epigram to me in class : it was, I regret to say, an unfriendly reflection on the French master, and even on theFrench nation in his person ; but I remember think-ing, even at the time, that it was rather a French thing to do. There was a certain noble contradiction in his life and death that there was also in his very bearing and bodily habit. No man could look more lazy and no man was more active, even physically active. He would move as swiftly as a leopard from something like sleep to something too unexpected to be called gymnastics. It was so that he passed from the English country life he loved so much, with its gardening and dreaming, to an ambush and a German gun. In the lines called ' Before the Assault,' perhaps the finest of his poems, he showed how clear a vision he carried with him of the meaning of all this agony and the mystery of his own death. No printed controversy or political eloquence could put more logically, let alone more poetically, the higher pacifism which is now resolute to dry up at the foun-tain-head the bitter waters of the dynastic wars, than the four lines that run :—

'Then to our children there shall be no handing

Of fates so vain, of passions so abhorr'd . . .

But Peace . . . the Peace which passeth under-standing . . .

Not in our time . . but in their time, O Lord.'

The last phrase, which has the force of an epigram, has also the dignity of an epitaph ; and its truth will remain."

To this admirable judgment I can add nothing, except to say that the great quality of Vernede's war-poems seems to me to reside in that directness of which Mr. Chesterton speaks. He is filled by a consciousness of the fine plain issues of the struggle between darkness and light. Hence, his verses emphasise our love of England, our veneration for her past, our confidence in her future, our steady and determined purpose. Moreover, he insists on keeping sharp the blade of indignation, whose edge is for ever being rubbed down by sentimentality. Vernede indulges in no absurd diatribes or " hate-songs "; but his poems and his letters show that personal acquaintance with the dreadful accidents of his new profession had convinced him of the necessities of the moment. They had convinced him, beyond all disproof, that the peculiar Teutonic effort,—exercised, for instance, as at Arras or in Belgium,—was, to put it plainly, infamous. To punish, and for the future to prevent, such wicked-ness as this was the object, and the entirely sufficient object, of the self-sacrifice which had brought the farmer from Canada and the shepherd from New Zealand, and incidentally had drawn Vernede himself from his Hertfordshire garden. No doubt it is the evidence of this directness in his verses which has given them their first popularity.

EDMUND GOSSE.

July, 1917

[salesie]

Here's the note from the front of the book (too big for the last post).

Cheers-salesie.

[marina]

Very fitting, Salesie,

Marina

[stiletto_33853]

Salesie,

I could not agree more, a very fitting tribute. I have not been able to tie in the signature from my copy.

Andy