Casualty Poet
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"SHALL LIFE RENEW
THESE BODIES?
OF A TRUTH
ALL DEATH WILL HE ANNUL" W.O.
LIEUTENANT WILFRED EDWARD SALTER OWEN MC
A hundred years after his death Wilfred Owen is one of the most famous casualties of the war, certainly the most famous poet to have been killed, even the most famous of all the war poets. However, at the time, few people had ever heard of him. Two weeks after his death, his parents inserted an announcement in The Times but there was no follow-up obituary. Whereas three days after Rupert Brooke's death a headline in The Times read, 'Death of Mr Rupert Brooke', the article accompanied by an appreciation written by Winston Churchill, then still First Lord of the Admiralty.
But as Brooke's reputation has diminished, somewhat unfairly as he died before his poetry could reflect his experience of warfare, Owen's has soared. Yet Owen too could write like Brooke in the early days; his first poem of the war concluding with the verse:
O meet it is and passing sweet
To live in peace with others,
But sweeter still and far more meet
To die in war for brothers.
Owen's post-war fame was fostered by those members of the literary world who saw his quality, people like Harold Munro, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edith Sitwell. Sitwell was the first person to publish a collection of Owen's work. The 1919 edition of Wheels, the magazine she edited with her brother, Osbert, not only carried seven of his poems but was dedicated to the memory of 'W.O.' By the late twentieth century his reputation had reached iconic status, where it remains. Owen is the anti-war poet of all anti-war poets, the man who portrayed war in its full repulsiveness.
Yet, when offered the ability to escape the war, as he was in the summer of 1918 following his treatment for shell shock at Craiglockhart, Owen decided he must return to the front. As he wrote in The Calls:
For leaning out last midnight on my sill,
I heard the sighs of men, that have no skill
To speak of their distress, no, nor the will!
A voice I know. And this time I must go.
Owen did not return to the front just so that he could give voice to the voiceless soldiery but to fight. The Military Cross he was awarded for his actions on 1st/2nd October 1918 was for not only assuming command when his company commander became a casualty but for personally manipulating a captured enemy machine gun and inflicting 'considerable losses on the enemy'. He was killed just over a month later, shot as he encouraged his men to face the German machine guns as they desperately tried to prevent the British army crossing the Sambe-Oise canal.
Wilfred was the eldest child of Tom Owen, Assistant Superintendent of the Joint Railways [the LNWR and GWR], and his wife, Susan. The news of his death reached the family home on 11 November, just as all the church bells were ringing to celebrate the Armistice.
When, some time later his parents were asked to choose an inscription, they chose a line from one of their son's own poems, The End. His father actually signed the form confirming the inscription although his mother is always blamed for curtailing the quotation and so giving it a meaning diametrically opposed to the one her son intended. The poem, which people have tried to see as a comment on the war, has to be a comment on the idea of resurrection, the Day of Judgement. Owen asks:
Shall Life renew these bodies? Of a truth
All death will he annul, all tears assuage?
There are two questions here. The inscription, as chosen by the parents, contains a question and an answer:
Shall life renew
These bodies?
Of a truth
All death will he annul.
Owen questions the resurrection, his parents assert it. Their action is no different from the many other families who took lines out of context and in so doing altered their meanings. Mr and Mrs Owen could never have envisaged that their son's poetry would become the subject of such minute study, and in any case - it's what they wanted to say.
AND AFTER THE SUNSET
IN THE UNKNOWN NIGHT
JOY CANNOT CEASE
D.G.C. 5.4.16
PRIVATE DAVID GEOFFREY COLLINS
The initials at the bottom of the inscription are D.G.C. They are the initials of the casualty, David Geoffrey Collins, and since Collins' parents described him as a 'poet, botanist, mathematician and peace lover', this would suggest that Collins wrote the words himself - on 5 April 1916. I haven't been able to find anything else Collins wrote but his name is included on the Forgotten Poets of the First World War website.
Collins had an unusual upbringing. His father, Edwin Hyman Simeon Henry Collins, was a highly erudite man who spoke several languages and had a very original mind. Although his name is now unknown, he was quite well known at one time as the man who befriended the exiled Chinese nationalist leader, Sun Yatsen, and tried to help him get his work published in the English language. Edward Collins was even better known, however, as a radical educational thinker who believed fervently that children shouldn't begin formal edcation before they were nine or ten, that they should never be taught to read but should learn to read themselves when they were ready, and that all their lessons should be held outside at all times.
To Collins, the real object of education was not the acquisition of knowledge but the preparation of the mind to receive, assimilate and use knowledge. By this means children would acquire the ability to think and the power to express their thoughts and feelings in appropriate language, either spoken or written. Collins brought his children up according to these beliefs. He refused to let them go to school, which caused him to be prosecuted for child neglect. But Collins used the witness box to gain publicity for his ideas, claiming that his methods would make his children "more useful, more independent, more robust in character, better in physique and with greater powers of assimilating knowledge" than other children.
David was obviously something of a prodigy and by his late teens was teaching in a prep school. He was called up when he was 18 and sent to France in August 1918, just after his nineteenth birthday. He served with the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards and died three months later of wounds received in the capture of Delsaux Farm, a German strong point.
David Collins' headstone is inscribed with the Star of David. His father, who had been born a Jew, and had trained and practised as a rabbi, had then preached for some time as a Christian Unitarian minister before returning fully to the Jewish faith. It was Edwin Collins who chose his son's inscription, using his son's own words to express his belief that death is not the end:
And after the sunset
In the unknown night
Joy cannot cease
[Much of the information for this post comes from Patrick Anderson's 'The Lost Book of Sun Yatsen and Edward Collins' Routledge 2017.
BE VERY PROUD TO NUMBER ME
AMONG THE DEATHLESS DEAD
J. DE L.S.
MAJOR JOHN DE LUZE SIMONDS
If, as I believe, yesterday's casualty was a gardener at Audleys Wood, today's was his employer's son. Both John Pardey and John Simonds are listed on the war memorial in St Leonard's Church, Cliddesden, Hampshire. Major Simonds heading the list of six men as befits his rank and social position rather than alphabetic order.
Simonds was a professional soldier. Educated at Winchester, where he had been the top scholar, he went from there to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, after which he joined the Royal Garrison Artillery. On the outbreak of war he was in India and arrived in France with an Indian Mountain Battery in December. When the Indians were relocated to warmer climes in 1915, Simonds took a staff appointment. In April 1917 he was in charge of a siege battery when he was killed by a shell.
All this information, and that on the house, Audleys Wood, comes from a website recently compiled by a member of the family. By chance, the website also provides the source of the inscription. As the initials indicate, the words were written by Simonds himself, not in a letter but in a poem.
After his death, his family privately published a collection of his poetry. This can be read on the above website where it has been uploaded as a flipping book. Most poems appear to have been written before the war, during his postings to Malta and the Far East. One was definitely written during the war: 'In Memoriam - W.H. Johnston VC, Killed in Action 7-vi-15'. The poem begins:
Very tall beside his grave the Flemish poplars grow,
Bearing the heart to Heaven, that rests in peace below,
The shrieking shell his requiem, the guns his funeral hymn,
A fitting harmony of death for us, whose eyes are dim.
There's an echo here of the opening lines of John McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields':
In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row
That mark our dead, and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
And also of some of the imagery in Owen's 'Anthem for Doomed Youth':
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
- Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers or bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
Simonds could have known McCrae's poem, which was published in December 1915. However, it was only in August 1917 that Owen showed Siegfried Sassoon his as yet unpublished poem and Simonds was already dead.
Simonds' own epitaph comes from another of his poems, which appears not to have been included in the collection but was printed on a separate sheet of paper. It has no title. The reference to the opening line of Rupert Brooke's 'The Soldier' is totally intentional. Brooke wrote:
If I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England ...
Simonds' poem opens:
If I should die, be very full of pride
That I have died for England ...
and continues (I have written out the whole poem here as it is not easy to find other than on the linked website):
... shed no tears
Because unhallowed ground enshrines my bones.
Think of me rather in some orchard plot
At peace with God, where some tall poplar tree
Uplifts my soul to Heaven - my weary soul
That looks for ever star-wards, nor avails.
For France is hallowed by your English dead
Where blaze the poppies like a scarlet wound,
Sprung from the blood of heroes: yesteryear
They led their little lives in shop and mart,
Thinking no evil and content to live
At peace with all around, but this year
The poppy springs above their grave: a wound
Which they have died to salve. Be very proud,
To number me among the deathless dead.
Along the trench the cornflower shimmers blue*
Like eyes bestarred with tears: so long ago
We wore its bloom in pride of victory,
Where called the deep Cathedral chimes to prayer.
Oh the grey walls and warm red-tiled roofs,
The Itchen's purling stream and velvet meads,
Where we have played together - never more
To lie beneath the trees and drink the sun.
* The cornflower is Winchester's flower because it was said to be the favourite flower of the founder, William of Wykeham.
I DO NOT KNOW
WHAT GOD'S VAST MEANINGS ARE
BUT PEACE IS HERE
G.W.D.
LIEUTENANT GEOFFREY WINDEATT DAMAN
Geoffrey Daman was the author of a small collection of poems privately printed in 1915 under the title, 'A Few Verses'. From the initials G.W.D. at the bottom of this inscription I am assuming that the words come from one of his own poems. It has to remain an assumption as the book is incredibly rare and I have so far not found a copy of it other than in the library of Magdalen College, Oxford. It would be good to see this as it might help explain what exactly Damon meant. Perhaps he was saying, what many other young men said in one way or another, that he felt calm knowing that by participating in the war he was doing the right thing.
Geoffrey was the eldest of his parents' three children. In the 1901 census he was 7, his sister Katherine was 4 and his brother John was 1. By the 1911 census John must have been dead because the census asks ask how many children have been born alive, how many are still living and how many have died. The answers are 3,2 and 1 and we can tell that both Geoffrey and Katherine are definitely still alive.
Educated at Repton and Magdalen College, Oxford - which explains why they have a copy of his book of poems - Damon joined up on the outbreak of war without finishing his degree. In September 1914 he was commissioned into the Seaforth Highlanders and went with them to France on 5 November 1914. He fought in the battle of Neuve Chapelle and was killed by a sniper on 24 May 1915.
THE WORLD WAS SWEETER
FOR HIS LIFE
AND LIFE LIVES -
POORER BY A FRIEND. A.V.R.
LIEUTENANT ALFRED VICTOR RATCLIFFE
Alfred Ratcliffe wrote his own epitaph - not for himself but for a friend, 'G.C.H.', who died in 1912. The poem, 'A Broken Friendship', was first published in 1913 in 'A Broken Friendship and Other Verse" and then anthologised with some of his later poetry in several collections of soldier poets. Ratcliffe's mother chose the lines for his inscription although very oddly the family later placed a private stone in front of his War Graves Commission headstone, which obscured the original inscription. The plaque reads, "A very dearly loved son and brother".
The verse from which the original inscription comes is the last verse of the poem:
And through the darksome ways of strife
This thought shall lustre till the end,
The world was sweeter for his life,
And life lives - poorer by a friend.
[Harrogate August 1912]
The way the words are laid out in the inscription has led some people to think that the lines were written "by a friend" but no, it's that Ratcliffe's life is poorer by the loss of a friend.
There is an echo of a poem by Gerald Massey, 'In Memoriam, Earl Brownlow' in this last verse:
And Life is all the sweeter that he lived,
And all he loved more sacred for his sake,
And death is all the brighter that he died,
And Heaven is all the happier that he's there.
Ratcliffe, educated at Dulwich College and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, was killed on 1 July 1916. His senior officer having been killed earlier in the day, Ratcliffe was commanding the company at the time of his death. A fellow officer told his mother that "from where we found his body he must have led it pluckily and well".
... FRIEND JUST SAY
"HE TRIED"
CAPTAIN HENRY EVELYN ARTHUR PLATT
This seems rather a half-hearted inscription until you realise that it's a quote from a poem written by Henry Platt himself. By chance, the poem was published in the Eton Chronicle just after he had been killed but before the announcement of his death. The poem makes clear that the writer wouldn't want any elevated language to surround his own death.
"Say not of him 'he left this vale of tears,'
Who loved the good plain English phrase
'He died,'
Nor state he nobly lived (or otherwise),
Failed or succeeded' - friend, just say
"He tried"
Captain Platt was a very popular officer both with his men and his fellow officers. He had been out at the front since August 1914, originally with the 19th Hussars. However, following a series of clashes with a senior officer, he asked for a transfer to the Coldstream Guards. He was killed whilst out wiring on a bright moonlit night.
"A GRIM GRAY TRIBUTE
OF MEMORY
IS ALL WE HAVE LEFT TO GIVE" CMH
CAPTAIN CYRIL MORTON HORNE
Cyril Morton Horne was an Irish writer and music hall performer. His inscription is a quotation from one of his own poems, Aftermath, taken from his book, Songs of the Shrapnel Shell:
A grim, gray tribute of memory
Is all we have left to give
To those who have fought and fallen
From those who sorrow and live.
Memory lives and we wonder
If the law of the gods was kind,
For the hardest battle was fought by
The somebody-left-behind.
Cyril Horne made his debut on the London stage in 1910 and then later that year he went to Broadway where he spent three years. He was killed trying to rescue a soldier lying out in the front of the trenches. He was close to succeeding when a shrapnel shell exploded overhead and killed them both.