John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by

  Pen & Sword Military Classics

  an imprint of

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd

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  Copyright © The Estate of John Masefield 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1922, 1923, 1928, 1933, 1939, 2007

  Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Philip W. Errington 2007

  9781783409051

  The right of Philip W. Errington to be identified as editor of this work

  has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is

  available from the British Library.

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  I dedicate my share

  of this book to my wife.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  A Note on the Texts

  August, 1914

  John Masefield’s Sale

  A Red Cross Lighter

  Untitled Sonnet

  Untitled Sonnet

  A Report on American Opinion and Some Suggestions

  Gallipoli

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  The Old Front Line or The Beginning of The Battle of The Somme

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  The War and the Future - A Lecture given in America January – August, 1918

  St. George and the Dragon - A speech given in New York on St. George’s Day, April 23rd, 1918

  Introduction to Edward G.D. Liveing, Attack - An Infantry Subaltern’s Impressions of July 1st, 1916

  What Britain Has Done - Put Nearly 8,000,000 in Army and Navy – Losses Over 2,500,000

  The Common Task

  London Street Women

  The Most Heroic Effort

  What First? - Mr. John Masefield – Help Belgium and Serbia.

  The Battle of the Somme

  Foreword

  The Battle of The Somme

  1919 – 1920: Signs of the Times

  Disenchantment

  Preface to the Eighth Edition of Gallipoli

  Any Dead to Any Living

  Foreword to E.J Rule, Jacka’s Mob

  Red Cross

  Introduction

  . . . no writing can give any effect of it and no historian know (let alone tell) the truth of it. So much of it all is noise and smell and motion, and shocks to mind and sense, that it cannot go into words . . . 1

  On 4 August 1914, the date on which Great Britain declared war on Germany, Siegfried Sassoon was aged twenty-seven, Rupert Brooke had just turned twenty-seven, Wilfred Owen was twenty-one and John Masefield was thirty-six. The future Poet Laureate was not to fight in the trenches or to be counted among the Great War Poets. He was a generation apart and that period of time had allowed him experience – as homeless vagrant, unskilled labourer, bar-hand and factory-worker – of America. Masefield’s war commenced with work as a hospital orderly in France and then as commander of an ambulance boat at Gallipoli, but it was in 1916 when he undertook a lecture tour of the United States that his unique gifts began to be used. He reported back to the British Government and, aware of the need to counteract German lies about Gallipoli, wrote a book described by Edward Marsh as ‘supreme’ and Neville Lytton as ‘a masterpiece’.2 Gallipoli led to a request from Douglas Haig for Masefield to chronicle the Battle of the Somme. If Masefield failed to contribute to the literary landscape of the Great War, his historical writing, propagandist journalism and lectures demonstrate a writer contributing to the immediate needs of his country at war. Masefield was the historian of the moment and it is through collecting together all his Great War work, published across three continents, that he emerges as a major figure: as historian, propagandist, journalist and best-selling writer. For the modern historian Masefield provides an eye-witness account which helped influence the reactions of a contemporary English and American audience to the Great War.

  Masefield was born on 1 June 1878 in Ledbury, Herefordshire. Orphaned at an early age, he was educated aboard the Mersey school-ship Conway as training for service within the merchant marine. Life at sea proved a disaster, however, and Masefield deserted ship in New York in 1895 turning, instead, to homeless vagrancy. The opening poem in Masefield’s first volume of poetry comprises ‘A Consecration’ in which the author states he will write of the under-dog. It was a sympathy resulting from personal experience. Eventually gaining employment in a New York saloon bar, and then a carpet factory, Masefield learnt of ‘the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth’ at first-hand.3 He returned to England in 1897 and although plagued by ill-health, the would-be poet achieved success in 1899 with the publication of his first poem in a periodical. His first volume of verse, Salt-Water Ballads, was published in 1902 and a second volume, Ballads, followed in 1903. These collections include ‘Sea-Fever’ and ‘Cargoes’ respectively.

  In 1903, Masefield married Constance de la Cherois Crommelin (1867 – 1960), a woman eleven and a half years his senior. The couple were to have one daughter, Judith (1904 – 1988) and one son, Lewis (1910 – 1942).

  The early work of Masefield included poetry, short stories, historical works (Sea Life in Nelson’s Time, for example), novels, plays, children’s books and journalism. It was a time of literary apprenticeship for the writer but Masefield later wrote that his work ‘was not what I had hoped’.4 This changed in 1911 with publication of The Everlasting Mercy when Masefield arrived on the literary scene with a new and shocking voice. This long narrative poem concerning the spiritual enlightenment of a drunken poacher caused a sensation. Lord Alfred Douglas stated the work was ‘nine-tenths sheer filth’ while Masefield was awarded the Edmond de Polignac prize by The Royal Society of Literature and J.M. Barrie called the poem ‘incomparably the finest literature of the year’.5 Masefield continued writing long narrative poetry in 1912 with The Widow in the Bye Street and Dauber in 1914.

  Masefield was therefore a major literary figure when war was declared. He had upset poetic diction (The English Review’s publication of The Everlasting Mercy had printed blank spaces rather than offend the public with the word ‘bloody’); he had published ‘Sea-Fever’ and ‘Cargoes
’ (which John Betjeman later stated would be ‘remembered as long as the language lasts’);6 he had enjoyed some success on the London stage; his novels had achieved cheap reprint status and his friends included Rupert Brooke, John Drinkwater, John Galsworthy, Harley Granville-Barker, Lady Gregory, Thomas Hardy, Gilbert Murray, Arthur Ransome, Charles Ricketts, Bernard Shaw, Jack B. Yeats and W.B. Yeats.

  During the first part of 1914 John and Constance Masefield, whilst retaining their London home in Hampstead, moved their ‘country retreat’ from Rectory Farm, Great Hampden, near Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire to Lollingdon Farm on the Berkshire Downs. It was here that the Masefields entertained Rupert Brooke in July 1914. Masefield later wrote:

  In the first week of July, 1914, I was in an old house in Berkshire, a house built eight centuries before by the monks, as a place of rest and contemplation and beauty. I had never seen England so beautiful as then, and a little company of lovely friends was there. Rupert Brooke was one of them, and we read poems in that old haunt of beauty, and wandered on the Downs. I remember saying that the Austro-Serbian business might cause a European war, in which we might be involved, but the others did not think this likely; they laughed.7

  The events of August 1914 prompted Masefield’s first poem of the Great War. ‘August, 1914’ appeared in The English Review one month later. Masefield was conscious, as ever, of the past. The beauty of the English countryside had been loved by ‘unknown generations’. Into this setting the threat of ‘war at hand and danger pressing nigh’ entered and the men of the past ‘brooded by the fire with heavy mind’ before resolving to join the conflict. Masefield found continuity and companionship with the past and suggests ‘above these fields a spirit broods’. As early as July 1916 Masefield forbade the inclusion of the poem in an anthology stating ‘. . . it is a special poem, about which I have a special feeling’.8 Whilst reciting the poem at Yale University in 1916 he apparently broke down when he reached the line ‘And died (uncouthly most) in foreign land’. Masefield stood silent, unable to continue, before asking to be excused for not finishing the poem.

  But what of Masefield’s own ‘heavy mind’?

  It seems that at the end of 1914 the Masefields stayed in London rather than move to Lollingdon. Masefield was not confident of a short military campaign and, hearing that his friend and journalist H.W. Nevinson was to go to France (probably for the Daily News), he wrote:

  We are glad you are going out; that will give us the truth of the matter. We hope you’ll be able to see a lot and get it through . . . Come and see us as soon as you get back; though I suppose that won’t be till Christmas next year. As was said under Augustus: ‘O my German people, in what slow jaws you will be chewed.’ We hope you will see all the big bites . . .9

  By December 1914 Masefield himself was a corporal, probably in the RAMC. Masefield’s biographer stated he was ‘too old for the army’.10 This is incorrect: Masefield noted in a letter, from 1916, that he ‘was medically rejected, then accepted for the reserve of officers’.11 Writing to Russell Loines in December 1914, Rupert Brooke stated:

  . . . it’s astonishing to see how the ‘intellectuals’ have taken on new jobs. No, not astonishing: but impressive. Masefield drills hard in Hampstead and told me with some pride, a month ago, that he was a Corporal and thought he was going to be promoted to Sergeant soon . . . 12

  For Constance Masefield, the outbreak of war brought the end of the school she had run with her close friend, Isabel Fry. It appears that Fry eagerly wanted to identify herself with essential national work and that early in the war she volunteered as a trainee farm labourer. With little to keep the Masefields in London their country retreat in Lollingdon beckoned. Presumably Masefield gave up his Hampstead drilling.

  By the second week of January 1915 Constance Masefield had started writing a journal. In this she records that she and her husband (known to family and friends as ‘Jan’) left Hampstead for Lollingdon intending to live a ‘quiet life’. On 21 January Constance noted:

  Jan is awfully depressed over the war. So much that he loves of fine thought, and leisure and fineness of life will be destroyed by it. He is uncertain whether he ought to take some more active part. He has declared himself ready if he is wanted and that I think is his right course.13

  The circumstances of Masefield’s early war work are not clear. On 16 February 1915 Constance confided, however, in her diary:

  . . . now that Jan feels he must go out to the French Red Cross I don’t know how I shall get along. I don’t believe any wife will miss her husband so much, but if he is needed it must be done. The sacrifice is terrible. Each day that we live together seems more wonderful.14

  and two days later, Masefield was resolved, for Constance wrote:

  . . . it is decided that Jan is to go out under the Red Cross. He was up in town all yesterday, saw the Secretary, accepted the work, tried on khaki tunics, breeches and caps, found his size, was inoculated and got back to dinner at 8. Oh dear. The pain is very acute.... Jan is very quiet and resolute. Of course I am glad to think he will have been of use.15

  Masefield left on 1 March 1915 for what would become a stay in France of around six weeks. Writing to his wife, Masefield tried to be positive and noted ‘. . . the only pleasure is it has begun now and is therefore coming to an end’.16 Constance, however, took a different view and wrote two days later in her diary:

  Jan has gone. He left two days ago and I can’t yet realise it. I forgot to write to him tonight feeling somehow that he was only gone quite temporarily, and then with a stab of pain I realised the miles and miles of country that lay between, and the sea and the sky and all the misery. Oh dear life is very bitter now. I can’t dwell on the pain or I shouldn’t get along at all. There is no pain like this lonely sense of separateness.17

  From London Masefield went to Folkestone and then Dieppe for Paris. By 3 March he had arrived at the château of Arc-en-Barrois, Haute Marne (to the south-west of Chaumont). As soon as Masefield arrived he was asked ‘to help in taking off a man’s arm at the shoulder’.18 He reported to Constance that:

  . . . I did my part all right, and got a compliment from the chief. I felt too great pity and interest to feel queer. The man is doing well, such a nice fellow . . .19

  The château itself was ‘a well built foursquare place, very big and roomy, but badly built for our work, as the stairs wind, the kitchens are underground and there are no lifts’.20 It had been originally built in the thirteenth century but during the French Revolution the walls were razed to the ground and the property confiscated. By 1814 the ruin had been returned to the owner’s daughter, Princess Adelaide of Orléans, and she rebuilt it for her brother, Louis Philippe, who used it as a hunting lodge. Set among pine forests with a lake at the back and nestling in ‘a sort of crater’, Masefield described it as ‘solid, but not beautiful’.21

  Masefield’s role was that of orderly and he described his work as ‘hard and continuous but it simply has to be done . . .’22 The British Red Cross knew of the hospital and inspected it, but it was partly financed by private funds – by ‘Miss Kemp of the Nurse Missionary League’ – and it was not strictly a Red Cross responsibility.23 Masefield probably went to Arc-en-Barrois due to a personal friendship with R.C. Phillimore (1871 – 1919) of Kendals Hall in Radlett. Masefield’s letters to Constance frequently refer to ‘Bobby’ and Masefield had enjoyed the friendship of this politician and poet for several years. In 1913 Masefield contributed an introduction to Phillimore’s only volume of poetry and, according to Phillimore’s obituary in The Times, ‘when the war broke out he went to work in an English hospital for French soliders’.24 Certainly Bobby Phillimore was at Arc-en-Barrois before Masefield and met the new volunteer off his train at Chaumont. Phillimore himself overstrained a weak heart at Arc-en-Barrois and suffered four years of illness before an early death at the age of 48. Others already at Arc-en-Barrois included Henry Tonks (1862 – 1937) the artist and teacher from the Slade School who had some
medical training and the Impressionist British-American painter, Wilfrid de Glehn (1870 – 1951) and his wife Jane de Glehn (1873 – 1961). Masefield soon settled into this group and identified that one problem with the hospital was staffing with ‘the untrained amateur female “helper” . . .’25 who failed to do hard work and became a nuisance.

  For Masefield his routine included serving dinner, carrying the wounded, attending operations, collecting patients from the supply trains, carpentry, and masterminding a fire brigade (the hospital was, owing to inadequate fire precautions, ‘about the vilest old death trap God ever permitted’.)26 It was highly physical and dirty work. Masefield wrote to Constance:

  Don’t worry about my being over worked, I’m broken in to it now; at first it was very hard. It’s funny: I’m slight and slack-looking and not physically strong, but I can do the stretcher work better than any of the orderlies; perhaps I am younger, or perhaps it is that I learned to use my working muscles while they were strengthening their playing muscles.27

  and later confided

  I’m probably soaked and drenched with dangerous germs from septic wounds . . . my uniform is in a mess; it gets soaked with pus and blood and wine, men’s dinner, water, sawdust, filth of all sorts, grease, sago, soup, jam, and worse things almost daily. Probably we all smell rather gamey, but then the crowning stink of the château rather saves me. On south westerly days like this we waft abroad half across the village.28

  Masefield’s letters to his wife reveal a solid volunteer, able and willing to work with a growing understanding of the horror of modern warfare. He longed to be home but sought fortitude by contemplating a wider picture. After only a few days at the hospital he wrote: