Poet – Edward Shanks (1892 – 1953)
He was born in London, and educated at Merchant Taylors' School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He passed his B.A. in History in 1913. He was editor of Granta from 1912-13. He served as a Second Lieutenant with the South Lancashire Regiment until he was gassed in 1915 and medically discharged. For the rest of the war, he worked in clerical support positions in the War Office in London. He published several volumes of war poetry. His poem ‘Armistice Day, 1921’ was not published until 1925. 'Perhaps it was too real, too disheartening to print before that time.' (1)
After the war he was an academic, he lectured for a short while at the University of Liverpool in 1926, journalist, he was the chief leader-writer for the Evening Standard from 1928 to 1935. Literary critic, he wrote for the London Mercury from 1919 to 1922, and biographer. He also wrote some science fiction, ‘The People of the Ruins’ was written in 1920 and was essentially an anti-communist piece of fiction. He died on 4 May 1953.
Poem Armistice Day, 1921
The hush begins. Nothing is heard
Save the arrested taxis throbbing
And here and there an ignorant bird
And here a sentimental woman sobbing.
The statesman bares and bows his head
Before the solemn monument:
His lips, paying duty to the dead
In silence, are more than ever eloquent.
But ere the sacred silence breaks
And taxis hurry on again,
A faint and distant voice awakes,
Speaking the mind of a million absent men:
‘Mourn not for us. Our better luck
At least has given us peace and rest.
We struggled when our moment struck
But now we understand that death knew best.
‘Would we be as our brothers are
Whose barrel-organs charm the town?
Ours was a better dodge by far—
We got our pensions in a lump sum down.
‘We, out of all, have had our pay,
There is no poverty where we lie:
The graveyard has no quarter-day,
The space is narrow but the rent now high.
‘No empty stomach here is found:
Unless some cheated worm complain
You hear no grumbling underground:
Oh, never, never wish us back again!
‘Mourn not for us, but rather we
Will meet upon this solemn day
And in our greater liberty
Keep silent for you, a little while, and pray.’ (2)
The cost of Remembrance: £1 for Every Life Lost
Every town and village in Falkirk District have a war memorial. The Town of Falkirk had 1,100 war dead, Blackness village, in the east, lost eight and in the west, little Longcroft had 87 war dead. In all, 2,400 men from Falkirk District died in the First World War from over 10,000 who enlisted, with 521 men from Falkirk District either buried or commemorated in the Ypres Salient.
In 1919 returning soldiers were honoured by the Town Council for their service while congregations and town officials laid plans for memorials to the fallen. Between 1920 and 1924, seventeen memorials were raised by public subscription - crosses, obelisks and plain blocks of stone, each one a reminder to the community of its sacrifice. Falkirk Town Council chose a plain cenotaph situated on the Camelon Road in Dollar Park, designed by local architect Leonard Blakey at a cost of £1,100, ironically just £1 for each life lost from the town of Falkirk. It was unveiled on 13 June 1926 by the Duke of Montrose in front of a crowd of 10,000. The guard of honour was provided by a party from the 7th Battalion Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, Falkirk’s Territorial Battalion.
Jay Winter, in his book ‘Sites of Memory Sites of Mourning’, places war memorials in context: ‘War memorials were places where people grieved, both individually and collectively. To find them one simply has to look around. The still visible signs of this moment of collective bereavement are the objects, both useful and decorative, both mundane and sacred, placed in market squares, crossroads, churchyards, and or near public buildings after 1914. They have a life history, and like other monuments have both shed meanings and taken on new significance in subsequent years. The local war memorials arose out of the post war search for a language in which to reaffirm the values of the community for which soldiers had laid down their lives. The communities devoted themselves to the task of commemoration after 1918. The resulting monumental art provided a focus for ceremonies of public mourning beginning in the decade following the Armistice, and continuing to this day.’
Their Loss Was a Noble Cause
Families also commemorated their dead father, brother, son or husband in their own homes. After the war, the family received a commemorative medal known as the ‘dead man’s penny’ a printed scroll and a message from the King. All of this was to give the family comfort and to emphasise that their loss was in a noble cause. From the beginning of the war the government had fostered the propaganda that the war was being fought in a just and noble cause in order to ensure public support for the war and to comfort the bereaved. From the 1930’s the growing literature about the war presented it as a terrible slaughter waged by incompetent generals and this reached its height in the 1960s. Since the 1960s this view has been debunked by countless military historians in books and publications yet the ‘lions led by donkeys’ still frames the attitudes of the present day.
How were those who survived remembered
Fifteen million men from all sides of the conflict received wounds that left them permanently disabled. In Britain, over 41,000 British soldiers had arms or legs amputated, while 65,000 received disability pensions for mental health problems diagnosed as ‘neurasthenia.’ (3) Many more British and Commonwealth veterans had disfiguring facial wounds that, despite advances in reconstructive surgery by men such as Sir Harold Gillies, were left permanently disfigured.
The Unknown Warrior
Another symbol of remembrance was to bring the unidentified remains of a British soldier from the Western Front to rest among the kings and queens in Westminster Abbey. This soldier represents all the fallen, all those who gave their lives in the service of their country. As with the cenotaph, the Unknown Warrior was seen as replacing the dead relation that the bereaved could not mourn over. Women were given some priority at the ceremony with 1,600 seats made available by MP’s giving up their seats in the Abbey to accommodate the mothers and widows. The ticket allocation was by ballot with various categories of loss deciding who did and did not get a ticket with the priority going to women who had lost their husband and sons, mothers who had lost all their sons, with the rest going to widows. The ballot being announced to close to the ceremony and this affected the number of applications for tickets with only 14,000 applications being received for the available 12,000 tickets with 7,506 going to mothers who had lost all of their sons, 4,042 to widows and 99 going to women who had lost their husbands and sons. (4)
Remembrance of the dead today
In London the Cenotaph stands in Whitehall, unveiled in November 1920, as the national war memorial for the United Kingdom. In Edinburgh Castle, the Scottish National War Memorial was unveiled as the national war memorial for the people of Scotland. Across the United Kingdom there is estimated to be 100,000 war memorials commemorating the dead of the First World War. The cenotaph memorials in London, Glasgow and Falkirk symbolise an empty tomb for the missing dead and became, in the post war years, sites of remembrance for the families who were not able to bury their dead husbands, sons, brothers, and sisters. Today, the Western Front Association holds its annual, since 1998, Armistice Day act of remembrance at the Cenotaph in London. This was resurrected to keep Armistice Day alive, as it had been up to the Second World War, and for it not to be consumed within the 'official' Remembrance Sunday national day of remembrance. (4)
Notes
2. Poetry of the Great War An Anthology, 1986, P.186
3. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War, Basic Books, 1999, P.437.
4. https://www.theypressalient.com/post/remembering-the-dead-2-400-from- falkirk-district-died
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