War, the Liberator, and Other Pieces

Front matter

<> <> <> <> Lt. SEAFORTH HIGHLANDERS (51st Division) <>

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXVIII

Printed in Great Britain

A Voice from the Front

A VOICE FROM THE FRONT BY CONINGSBY DAWSON, LIEUTENANT C.F.A. Author of “Khaki Courage,” etc.

SOME months ago a young American poet, wounded between the French and German lines, blew his brains out to avoid being captured. “I have a rendezvous with death,” he exclaimed dramatically. “I shall not fail that rendezvous.”

Very un-English! Yes, as a nation we suspect eloquence; it leaves too much room for over-statement. We never see ourselves as silhouetted against the sky-line of eternity—our dislike for self-advertisement prevents that. We rarely invent fine phrases to accompany fine actions; we distrust the sincerity of words. Instead, we camouflage our deepest emotions with humour and slang. We are so disdainful of hysterics that we mask our exaltations with indifference. In our dread of striking attitudes our very indifference becomes a pose. Hence in our moments of supreme crisis, when self-justice demands that we should speak out, we find ourselves inarticulate. Not wise, perhaps, and yet rather splendid, this cheerful reticence of the British soldier! To whomsoever else he is a hero, he is no hero to himself. He would rather be taken at his Piccadilly worth. He does nothing by his speech to help people at home to realise the hell he has lived through. When he comes on leave and is asked what kind of a time he has had, “Oh, a ripping time,” he says, “it’s a nice little war. Couldn’t do without it.”

Examples of this national characteristic are not far to seek. Other nations before an attack spur their troops to keener patriotism by recalling former glories and present injustices. Our Army Orders are to the point; they contain no bugle-calls. “On April the —th the Canadian Corps will capture Vimy Ridge,” ran the Army Order for one of the most important of the spring offensives; it can scarcely be beaten for brevity. Our Tommies are equally matter of fact. They go over the top to meet wounds and death, shouting, “This way for the early doors.” While a new patriotic poetry is being born in the trenches of the French, the songs composed by our battalions are burlesques on their own bravery. The solitary art-contributions we have to place beside the moral indignation of a Raemaekers are Captain Bairnsfather’s comic portrayals of Old Bill. Our pose of light-heartedness has succeeded too well; we have almost persuaded the world that we are incredible schoolboys out on a picnic. And so we are in a fashion; but it is a picnic with death.

The man at the Front is chiefly responsible for this impression, and yet he has a right to resent its acceptance. It is one thing to crack jokes about your own dying—quite another for the people whose lives you are preserving to laugh at them. The man at the Front is consciously risking his all for ideals. I have heard him called a spiritual genius. There has been nothing like him for pugnacity of faith since the Christian martyr. Whatever difference there is is in his favour. The Christian martyr was not a pleasant person; he took the consequences of his conscience sadly. Your British soldier accepts them with a jest. His jest rather belies his white-hot sincerity; it comes as a shock to him when on leave to discover that people at home have not realised his fervour and share his principles less passionately. They do—there is no doubt about that. He listens with contempt to wailings over sugar-shortage and the inadequate protection against air-raids—mere pinpricks to the winged tortures of the trenches. He forgets that inconvenience is less easily endurable than calvary. He tries to argue; tries to explain; gets angry; gives it up. ‘‘They don’t understand,” he says. “They make excuses for slackers. They think I’m unjust when I despise non-combatants. Because I’m anxious to get back to do my ‘bit’ they think I like living in the trenches.” Then he turns away to play the rôle that is expected of him—the rôle of the irresponsible boy out of school hours. The point he doesn’t realise is that why people are ignorant of his vision of sacrifice is because he has said nothing to mirror it to them. He can’t. It isn’t in his nature. His silence works an injustice both to others and to himself.

“I have a rendezvous with death!” Those words of Alan Seeger’s utter the true heart of the Front. Every khaki-clad figure has the same sure foreknowledge of the stern privilege of the rendezvous which awaits him. It is only his dumbness that causes him to conceal that knowledge.

But it is not of Alan Seeger that I wish to write. I only quote his last words because they are significant of the heart and mind of another poet—a Highlander who was brave enough to break through the curse of reticence and express the beliefs which to him appeared most shining. Lieutenant E. A. Mackintosh, M.C., belonged to the Seaforths and was killed recently near Fontaine-Notre-Dame while observing enemy movements under heavy shell-fire. He was twenty-four when he died. The war created him into bigness of soul; previous to that he had been a pleasant versifier with nothing important to say. He left behind one published volume, “A Highland Regiment,” and numerous scraps of mud-stained manuscript, including his finest achievement, “War, the Liberator,” which are here for the first time printed. It is not my purpose to write of him critically; he interests me solely as a soldier who managed to get said in a few words some of the poignant things that we have all felt.

His biography is brief. His mother is the daughter of the well-known preacher, Guinness Rogers, who was an intimate friend of Mr Gladstone, from whom he received his first name of Ewart. He was educated at St Paul’s School, from where he won a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford. He was in the middle of his “Greats” course when war broke out and immediately tried to join the Army. At first he was rejected on the score of eyesight. Finally he got a commission in the Seaforth Highlanders, and was in France from July 1915 to August 1916, when he returned to England after having been wounded at High Wood. For eight months following his recovery he was at Cambridge, training cadets and eating his heart out to get back. In September last he returned to France, where he was killed on November 21st, 1917.

The first writing of his that I wish to quote is a letter; it expresses so inadvertently the inherent valour of the man—his cool, dutiful, take-it-for-granted and yet pitiful attitude towards the dreadful job he had on hand. It is written to his sister, describing how he won his M.C., and runs as follows:—

“You will probably have noticed in the official report that a raid was made on the 16th on the trenches at 4. That, my dearest, was me and I don’t want to do another. We killed seven Germans in the trench and about thirty or forty more in their dug-out. I should say they would have lost about thirty more by our artillery. Our losses were slight, but three of my men had their legs blown off in the Boches’ trench and we had to pull them out and get them back. I and Charles M3 and Sergeant G3 were alone, and I can tell you it was no joke pulling a helpless man a yard, and then throwing a bomb to keep the Boches back—then pulling him another yard and throwing another bomb.

“Charles was guarding our left while Sergeant G3 and I got our man up on the parapet with both his legs pulped. Then I went back for the next. Poor devil! He screamed, ‘Ma airm and ma leg’s off’ to me again and again. I was wasting no sympathy just then. Said I, ‘Crawl on your other arm and leg, then,’ and lugged him up. Sergeant M3 had got back to our own trench, but he returned to us and helped me get my man up into the open. We went back for the next man and he said, ‘Leave me. I’m done.’ Both his legs were off, so I said, ‘None of that, my lad, you’re coming with us.’ He died on the Boche parapet and we had to leave him. We got the other two home.

“Sergeant M3 and Charles got wounded, but they both came back to us again until the men were in. I just gave myself up. The shrapnel was bursting right in my face and the machine- guns—ugh! I wasn’t touched except for a hole in my hose-top. I didn’t stop swearing the whole time, except when I was praying—but I’d promised the men that I wouldn’t leave the Boche trench while there was a man alive in it and I kept my word. One poor devil was a Catholic; he started confessing to me, thinking I was a priest—I meanwhile praying, ‘O God, let us get these poor beggars in.’ All the men I have brought in have died.

“I believe I’ve been recommended for the Military Cross, but I’'d rather have the boys’ lives. If I get one, I'll get home on special leave soon. I’ve had my taste of a show. It’s not romantic. It’s hell.”

The British soldier is nothing if not inconsistent. When he’s in the trenches, sharing magnanimously and doing noble things with a will day and night, he likes to pose as a grumbler. One of his chief topics of conversation is the way he’ll “swing the lead” if ever he has the luck to be wounded and get out to Blighty. But when he does get back to Blighty, he isn’t content to stay there. He can’t rest. The heroism of the hell “out there”—a hell that has nothing romantic—shouts to him. It isn’t the fascination of the horror that draws him. It certainly isn’t the love of fighting. I think it is the love of the men he has left behind, the knowledge of what they are enduring and the desire by his little help to afford some tired fellow an hour’s rest. To do that, even though he lasted no more than a week, would make death worth while.

“I’ll get home on special leave soon,” wrote Lieutenant Mackintosh. “I’ve had my taste of a show. It’s hell.” He got back wounded and found himself kept perforce in England as an instructor. The knowledge that his life was secure for a little while, that he could sleep in clean white-sheeted beds, that he could wash whenever he liked meant nothing to him, when contrasted with the loss to his self-respect that his courage was no longer tested and challenged. In the poem “From Home” he expresses this disgust for personal ease when friends are dying. He had just had news of an engagement in which his battalion had taken part. In his imagination he saw what must have happened:—

“The veil is rent with a rifle-flash And shows me plain to see, Battle and bodies of men that lived And fought along with me. Oh God, it would not have been so hard If I’d been in it too, But you are lying stiff, my friends, And I not there with you.”

Besides that picture in bitter self-contempt he places his own warm peace:—

“So here I sit in a pleasant room By a comfortable fire,

With everything that a man could want But not my heart’s desire. So I sit thinking and dreaming still, A dream that won’t come true, Of you in the German trench, my friends, And I not there with you.”

I suppose it is almost incredible to the civilian mind that any man who has experienced the Judgment Day of an attack can speak truly when he says that he wants to go back. Lieutenant Mackintosh explains the soldier’s attitude in one line, “And I not there with you.” Each man feels that the war cannot be won without him; if he shirks, the next man may shirk, and the example of duty will be lost.

It has been said that the war has divided the world into two nations—the man of military age and the others. This was never more true than at the time when middle-aged gentlemen were writing recruiting-songs, feeling perfectly confident that they would never be recruited themselves. These songs too often took the form of insulting the younger generation into making up their minds to die; they were sung chiefly in music-halls by people who were paid to be patriotic. Again Mackintosh utters the voice of the Front when he expresses his resentment for such methods. He seems to me to have preserved the wholesome faculty for hatred which most of us Englishmen have lost—the same faculty which has made Raemaekers such an Elijah in his cartoons. I’m not sure that his “Recruiting” is poetry; but it’s Truth and it’s what many a lad in khaki has thought. Its inspiration was a frenzied poster, of which the intent was to shame men into enlisting. It made Mackintosh picture the people who had framed it:—

“Fat civilians wishing they Could go out and fight the Hun. Can’t you see them thanking God They are over forty-one?

Help to keep them nice and safe From the wicked German foe. Don’t let him come over here! Lad, you’re wanted! Out you go!”

Then he paints the picture of how the poster ought to have read:—

“There’s a better word than that, Lads, and can’t you hear it come From the million men who call You to share their martyrdom.

Leave the harlots still to sing Comic songs about the Hun, Leave the fat old men to say, ‘Now we’ve got them on the run.’

Better twenty honest years Than their dull threescore and ten. Lad, you’re wanted! Come and learn To live and die with decent men.

You shall learn what men can do If you will but pay the price, Learn the gaiety and strength Of the gallant sacrifice.

Take your risk of life and death Underneath the open sky. Live clean, or go out quick— Lads, you’re wanted. Come and die.”

The impulsive injustice and pride of youth! Yes, but it’s what millions are thinking at the Front. Whether you like to acknowledge it or no, the supreme value of Mackintosh as a poet lies in the fact that he was articulate, where others are silent and, above all, that he spoke the Truth.

He had a strange, almost womanly tenderness for his men—not for Kipling’s red-coats, but for the civilians in khaki who fight because of duty, with hatred in their hearts of shedding blood. His attitude towards them was a good deal that of a chieftain. War brought out in him his pride of race; he remembered increasingly that he was a Highlander. It speaks volumes for the new equality which has grown up among those who have shared “the gaiety and strength of the gallant sacrifice” that one of his noblest poems should have been addressed to the father of David Sutherland, a private in his company who was killed in action:—

“You were only David’s father, But I had fifty sons

When we went up in the evening Under the arch of the guns, And we came back in the twilight— O God! I heard them call To me for help and pity That could not help at all.

Oh, never will I forget you, My men that trusted me, More my sons than your fathers’, For they could only see The little helpless babies And the young men in their pride. They could not see you dying, And hold you when you died.

Happy and young and gallant, They saw their first-born go, But not the strong limbs broken And the beautiful men brought low, The piteous writhing bodies, The screamed, ‘Don’t leave me, Sir,’ For they were only your fathers But I was your officer.”

To Sylvia

<> TO SYLVIA

Two months ago the skies were blue, The fields were fresh and green, And green the willow tree stood up, With the lazy stream between.

Two months ago we sat and watched The river drifting by— And now—you’re back at your work again And here in a ditch I lie.

God knows—my dear—I did not want To rise and leave you so, But the dead men’s hands were beckoning And I knew that I must go.

The dead men’s eyes were watching, lass, Their lips were asking too, We faced it out and payed the price— Are we betrayed by you?

The days are long between, dear lass, Before we meet again, Long days of mud and work for me, For you long care and pain.

But you’ll forgive me yet, my dear, Because of what you know, I can look my dead friends in the face As I couldn’t two months ago.

October 20th, 1917

Memoir

MEMOIR

EWART ALAN MACKINTOSH

THE only surviving son of the late Alexander Mackintosh, formerly of Teaninich House, Alness, Ross-shire, Alan Mackintosh was born on 4th March 1893 at Brighton. He was the grandson of Dr Guinness Rogers. He received his early education at Brighton College, from which he won a scholarship at St Paul’s, going straight into the Middle VIIIth. He was already a writer of verses, and for a period he edited the Pauline. Two years later, in October 1912, he came to Christ Church as a Classical Scholar. At Christmas 1914 he joined the 5th Seaforths as a subaltern, and after training at Golspie he crossed to France with his battalion in July 1915, and bore his share of fighting. In May 1916 he carried out a successful raid, which was described in the Press at the time, and which brought him the Military Cross. He returned to England in August 1916, having been wounded and gassed at High Wood. For eight months he taught bombing to the corps of cadets at Cambridge; and while at Cambridge he became engaged to Sylvia Marsh, daughter of a Quaker family, with whose traditions and ideals he had much in common. They planned to make their home in New Zealand. In October last he returned to France, joining the 4th Battalion of the Seaforths, and on 21st November, in the fighting about Cambrai, he fell, shot through the head.

Alan Mackintosh looked the Gael he was, loose-limbed, muscular, tall and dark. He carried a fine head well. His roving eye, merry, tender, cautious, penetrating, bold by rapid turns, epitomised the richness of his nature and his still rarer force of self-expression.

He spent two happy years at Oxford. For study, and especially the routine study of the schools, he cared little. Native power and a felicitous exuberance in literary things gained him his place in honour classical moderations. He played with Socialism, to the point of having scruples about the possession of wealth. He read poetry enthusiastically, and notably French poetry, in which his répertoire was very large. Both in term and out of term he cultivated, above all, the sentiments and the arts of the Highlands. He learned to play the pipes and to speak Gaelic, things which later endeared him to his regiment. His friendships were many and ardent. Of his bosom friends, Andrew Fraser of Christ Church was reported wounded and missing in the same Cambrai fighting, E. J. Solomon of Exeter College, who is commemorated in “Gold Braid,” was killed in August 1917, while Ian M‘Kenzie of Balliol has fallen in the present battle.

In the army the Gael in him, artist and man, ripened quickly. With growing strength and health he grew in the control and the use of his own powers and in influence over other men. He cherished political ambitions, whether to be fulfilled in the Colony or in England he scarcely knew. As a soldier he united brilliant courage with gentleness, and humour with resolution. His vivid and affectionate nature remained undulled through the years of warfare.

The present volume contains a number of pieces, some early and some late, which the author, had he lived, might have omitted. His many friends, and those who will know him only through his two books, will alike feel that from a last volume as little as need be should be excluded. It is difficult for one who knew him very intimately to estimate his work, for in each poem the author’s personality speaks with engaging and engrossing clearness. There is much in this volume and in “A Highland Regiment” (1917) that is already peculiarly complete and rounded in idea and also finished in form. There is much, too, of great promise. “The Remembered Gods,” which was written at Oxford, shows his poetic power with the great spaces, the long-ranging time, the brooding significance which are as a home to the highland imagination. In this direction, perhaps, his work might have developed notably. The shorter pieces exhibit remarkable concentration of mood and mastery of technique. The keynote varies: here the lightest play of fancy, there the broadly comic, again a haunting pain, sentiment, reverie, grimness, and unforced irony, but everywhere melody and sure movement and a delicate rightness. The war pieces, unlike many that have been written since 1914, evade the circumstance and horror of war. There is strangely little, indeed, about the war in any of them, but much about the minds and hearts of those who wage it. There shines through them a very triumph over war. This much loved gallant poet is of those whose living martyrdom rises whole-souled above the storm of violence and is humanity’s true victory. And not that martyrdom only.

JOHN MURRAY

Christ Church, Oxford

April 1918

Part 1

I

War, the Liberator

WAR, THE LIBERATOR

(To the Authoress of “Non-combatants”)

SURELY War is vile to you, you who can but know of it, Broken men and broken hearts, and boys too young to die, You that never knew its joy, never felt the glow of it, Valour and the pride of men, soaring to the sky. Death’s a fearful thing to you, terrible in suddenness, Lips that will not laugh again, tongues that will not sing, You that have not ever seen their sudden life of happiness, The moment they looked down on death, a cowed and beaten thing.

Say what life would theirs have been, that it should make you weep for them, A small grey world imprisoning the wings of their desire? Happier than they could tell who knew not life would keep for them Fragments of the high Romance, the old Heroic fire.

All they dreamed of childishly, bravery and fame for them, Charges at the cannon’s mouth, enemies they slew, Bright across the waking world their romances came for them, Is not life a little price when our dreams come true?

All the terrors of the night, doubts and thoughts tormenting us, Boy-minds painting quiveringly the awful face of fear, These are gone for ever now, truth is come contenting us, Night with all its tricks is gone and our eyes are clear. Now in all the time to come, memory will cover us, Trenches that we did not lose, charges that we made, Since a voice, when first we heard shells go shrilling over us, Said within us, “This is Death—and I am not afraid!”

Since we felt our spirits tower, smiling and contemptuous, O’er the little frightened things, running to and fro, Looked on Death and saw a slave blustering and presumptuous, Daring vainly still to bring Man his master low. Though we knew that at the last, he would have his lust of us, Carelessly we braved his might, felt and knew not why Something stronger than ourselves, moving in the dust of us, Something in the Soul of Man still too great to die.

Recruiting

RECRUITING

LADS, you’re wanted, go and help,” On the railway carriage wall Stuck the poster, and I thought Of the hands that penned the call.

Fat civilians wishing they “Could go out and fight the Hun.” Can’t you see them thanking God That they’re over forty-one?

Girls with feathers, vulgar songs— Washy verse on England’s need— God—and don’t we damned well know How the message ought to read.

“Lads, you’re wanted! over there,” Shiver in the morning dew, More poor devils like yourselves Waiting to be killed by you.

Go and help to swell the names In the casualty lists. Help to make a column’s stuff For the blasted journalists.

Help to keep them nice and safe From the wicked German foe. Don’t let him come over here! “Lads, you’re wanted—out you go.”

<> • • • • •

There’s a better word than that, Lads, and can’t you hear it come From a million men that call You to share their martyrdom,

Leave the harlots still to sing Comic songs about the Hun, Leave the fat old men to say Now we’ve got them on the run.

Better twenty honest years Than their dull three score and ten. Lads, you’re wanted. Come and learn To live and die with honest men.

You shall learn what men can do If you will but pay the price, Learn the gaiety and strength In the gallant sacrifice.

Take your risk of life and death Underneath the open sky. Live clean or go out quick— Lads, you’re wanted. Come and die.

The German and the Gael

THE GERMAN AND THE GAEL

WHEN they go out to battle They march with pomp and show, And all the fruits of victory Before them as they go. Because they dream the fight is theirs, Therefore they will not flee, But we go darkly out to meet The fate we cannot see.

Their officers and generals Have nourished them with lies, And waved the torch of victory Before their blinded eyes. But we go grimly forward, Believing—come what may, We shall not tread the grass again Nor see another day.

Not for the hope of glory, Nor for desire of loot, Not for the pride of conquest, Nor dream of wild pursuit; But because ancient battles Stir in our memory, Hopeless as went our fathers And stern as they, go we.

Maybe that we shall drive them, Maybe we fight in vain, We care not now our fathers Are born in us again. When the old voices called us We heard them and obeyed, Whether we die or conquer We have not been afraid.

Beaumont-Hamel

BEAUMONT-HAMEL

Captured, November 16th, 1916

<> 1 DEAD men at Beaumont In the mud and rain, You that were so warm once, Flesh and blood and brain, You’ve made an end of dying, Hurts and cold and crying, And all but quiet lying Easeful after pain.

<> 2 Dead men at Beaumont, Do you dream at all When the leaves of summer Ripen to their fall?

Will you walk the heather, Feel the Northern weather, Wind and sun together, Hear the grouse-cock call?

<> 3 Maybe in the night-time A shepherd boy will see Dead men, and ghastly, Kilted to the knee, Fresh from new blood-shedding, With airy footsteps treading, Hill and field and steading, Where they used to be.

<> 4 Nay, not so I see you, Dead friends of mine; But like a dying pibroch From the battle-line I hear your laughter ringing, And the sweet songs you’re singing, And the keen words winging Across the smoke and wine.

<> 5 So we still shall see you, Be it peace or war, Still in all adventures You shall go before, And our children dreaming, Shall see your bayonets gleaming, Scotland’s warriors streaming Forward evermore.

Farewell

FAREWELL

To Sergeant H. Fraser and L.-Sergeant G. M‘Kay

WELL, you have gone now, comrades, And I shall see no more The gallant friendly faces Framed in my dug-out door. I had no words to tell you The things I longed to say, But the company is empty Since you have gone away.

The company is filled now With faces strange to see, And scarce a man of the old men That lived and fought with me. I know the drafts are good men, I know they’re doing well, But they’re not the men I slept with Those nights at La Boiselle.

Oh, the old days of friendship We shall not see again, The bitter winter trenches And the marches in the rain. Bécourt, Authuille, Thiepval, Henancourt, Avelay, Their names are keys that open Remembered doors to me.

Doors that will open never Upon this tortured land. I shall not see you ever, Or take you by the hand. Only for ancient friendship, For all the times we knew, Maybe you will remember As I remember you.

High Wood

THREE BATTLES

To the 51st Division

High Wood, July–August 1916

OH gay were we in spirit In the hours of the night When we lay in rest by Albert And waited for the fight; Gay and gallant were we On the day that we set forth, But broken, broken, broken Is the valour of the North.

The wild warpipes were calling Our hearts were blithe and free When we went up the valley To the death we could not see. Clear lay the wood before us In the clear summer weather,

But broken, broken, broken Are the sons of the heather.

In the cold of the morning, In the burning of the day, The thin lines stumbled forward, The dead and dying lay. By the unseen death that caught us By the bullets’ raging hail Broken, broken, broken Is the pride of the Gael.

Three Battles

THREE BATTLES

To the 51st Division

High Wood, July–August 1916

OH gay were we in spirit In the hours of the night When we lay in rest by Albert And waited for the fight; Gay and gallant were we On the day that we set forth, But broken, broken, broken Is the valour of the North.