I was visiting the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and picked up a leaflet that broke the museum down into ten items, each item in a different part of the museum. It was when following the map around the museum and viewing each item that I had the idea of doing something similar with the Ypres Salient. Each of my ten themes are around the main themes that run through the history of the Salient. The poems, paintings, and photographs are intertwined with the stories of the men from Falkirk District who are buried or commemorated in the Salient. The ten themes have been designed to be read as bite size pieces and cover Death, Wounded, Last Leave, Trench Life, Behind the Lines, Prisoner of War, Clearing Station, Pilgrims, Remembrance, and Toc-H. See the links at the bottom of the page.
The selection of the poem in each theme will give you some idea of the poet’s intensity of feeling. Featured in the theme ‘Trench Life’ is W. W. Gibson’s ‘Breakfast’ which is often used as an experience of trench life on the Somme. It was printed in the ‘Nation’ in October 1914 and Gibson never actually saw any action. It was a piece of imaginative realism. The theme Clearing Station features the German poet Wilhelm Klimm who was a German army surgeon who served with the Third Army in Flanders. I have included Eileen Newton's 'Last Leave' she is also best known for writing the lyrics for 'Somewhere A Voice Is Calling' with the composer Arthur Frank Tate, published in 1911. Featured are several artists, ranging from C.R.W. Nevinson, Bernard Meninsky, Gilbert Rogers, and Eric Kennington, and I have included one German artist, Otto Dix.
Poetry
Society’s vision of the First World War is shaped by the war poets such as Owen, Sassoon, Yeats, Blunden, Rosenberg, and Brooke. Their vision has dominated the narrative and popular image of what the war was to those who fought in it and lived through it. The reality was very different. John Terraine in the Introduction to Graham Greenwell’s ‘An Infant in Arms’ (1972) wrote of the poets Owen and Sassoon ‘If even a substantial number, let alone a majority, of these men had been permanently in the condition of nerves expressed by, say the poems of Owen and Sassoon, it is quite clear that the daily round could not have gone on.’ AJP Taylor said that Owen and Sassoon ‘spoke only for a minority.’ Both Sassoon and Owen accepted that only fighting could end the war.
Of the sixty-six poets who were killed in the First World War there are twelve who are buried or commemorated in the Ypres Salient and their profile reflects the sixty-six. https://www.theypressalient.com/post/the-twelve-poets-of-the-ypres-salient-1
Two of the twelve are recognised poets the others going into obscurity. There are ten officer poets and two other ranks, and three of the officers hold the Military Cross. Indeed, Lt Col John Ebenezer Stewart, listed on the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing, was glad of the MC he had won, if only to prove that ‘fellows who write verse are not softies.’
The Artists
The First World War has an enduring resonance within the visual arts. In the case of Britain, it was Britain’s war artists whose work played a decisive role in the representation of the conflict. They produced a formidable array of powerful images that prompted John Rothenstein in his autobiography ‘Summers Lease’, he was director of the Tate Gallery from 1938 to 1964, to write that they were ‘barely escapable’ during and after the war. Their work was commissioned by the British government during the First World War in what was an unprecedented act of government sponsorship of the arts. The first scheme was started by Charles Masterson, he was head of the governments propaganda unit which was then based at Wellington House in London. The intention was to produce images for publication in books and other publications and this was later expanded to include social history and commemoration. The aim was to show Britain as a bastion of liberal, social inclusion and not to show nationalist, bombastic images that glorified war. Establishment artists included Orpen, Singer Sargent, and Lavery and they were joined by artists who brought their experience of front-line service such as Nevinson, Nash and Kennington. Many commissions continued long after the war had ended and by 1920 some 3,500 works had been acquired under the scheme.
Myths and Reality
Myths have grown up around the First World War such as the public schools as great factories of cannon fodder, the lost generations, the uncaring Generals, Haig being singled out, and the ‘Lions led by donkeys’ narrative. Rudyard Kipling’s epitaph ‘Common Form’ captures the mood of those who felt the First World War was a waste:
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
Or Godfrey Elton’s War Graves in 1925:
Tell the Professors, you that pass us by,
They taught Political Economy,
And here, obedient to its laws, we lie
The reality is somewhat different. Andrew Robertshaw and David Kenyon in their book ‘Digging the Trenches, The Archaeology of the Western Front’, calculated that 7.61 per cent of the wounded and less than 1 per cent of the sick died after reaching medical care. Consequently, they estimated that 82 per cent of the wounded returned to their units and that 9.3 per cent of sick did likewise. Around 11 per cent of those who served in the British armed forces died. The total number from the United Kingdom who were mobilised numbered some 5.7 million. Therefore, 5.07 million came home. In the case of the Ypres Salient, the cemeteries and memorials to be found there represent a significant minority of those who died there however, not the millions that are regularly presented in the post war narrative. https://www.theypressalient.com/post/death-in-all-its-forms
I hope you enjoy reading my ten themes. Perhaps, if you have not been to the Salient in a while, they inspire you to visit once again.
The Ten Themes
Death
Wounded
Last Leave
Behind the Lines
Trench Life
Clearing Station
Prisoners of War
Pilgrims
Remembrance
Toc-H
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