November 2020 -- A whole Heap of Other Stuff -- No4 -- All Saints to Armistice

My 2018 editorial from 'The Sorrow'   which is a beautiful collectable issue of The Linnet's Wings and would make someone a lovely gift of words and images.

On “Everyone Sang”: Editorial by Oonah V Joslin

Everyone Sang

by Siegfried Sassoon

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

Winging wildly across the white

Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:

My heart was shaken with tears; and horror

Drifted away ... O, but Everyone

Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Has it ever happened to you? A spontaneous combustion of song? It has to me and I have never forgotten the wonder of that experience. We were a family of singers, and maybe that’s part of why love this poem. But as I became more familiar with it, I was struck more and more by an essence it embodies. I’ll call it ‘birdness’.

At the beginning of the 20^th Century, it was an accustomed thing that communal singing took place. The men in the trenches would have sung around a piano at home or in the pub, sung marching songs in training, and popular songs like Pack Up Your Troubles and of course hymns in church. Church attendance was high. Belief in God and Country walked hand in hand. It was only natural then, they should sing to lift their spirits and Siegfried Sassoon would have been familiar with this so:

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight

probably really happened at some point. On the face of it, this is a simple statement of joy, and the poem reads almost as an armistice celebration taking place on the battlefield, but it is not that. “Everyone Sang” is dated 12/4/19.

On 13 July 1918, Sassoon was wounded by friendly fire near Arras. As a result, he spent the remainder of the war in England. The poem plays to an audience of people celebrating the end of the war and a return to normal life but there is something much rarer, more poignant, more telling in this poem.

Before the war he led a fairly privileged life. He left Cambridge without a degree. He had a small private income. He liked to write poetry. In A Mystic as Soldier he says:

I lived my days apart, 
Dreaming fair songs for God; 

not of God but for God, mind you. He believed in God and Country and took his beliefs as seriously as any other. The war changed all that. It made him question what happened to ‘love thine enemy’ (Matt 5).

Now God is in the strife,
And I must seek Him there, 
Where death outnumbers life, 
And fury smites the air. 

Men on all sides were fighting, killing each other for God and Country and that didn’t make sense. In Siegfried Sassoon’s Diaries 1915-1918 he asks:

“The agony of France! The agony of Austria-Hungary and Germany! Are not those equal before God?”

By now he’d served at The Somme, seen men mown down, witnessed the carnage on both sides, lost his brother and a best friend to this war. We see him sometimes tread a fine line between prayer and blasphemy in To Any Dead Officer and again in Attack:

O Christ when will it stop?

O, Jesus make it stop!

Siegfried Sassoon was a good soldier – rather reckless in fact. He was decorated for bravery. Yet Sassoon ended up questioning everything he had been brought up to believe in. This was slaughter on the grand scale, sanctioned by church and state, and he could not reconcile it, and it pained him. Being an officer he dared not speak of this. It would have demoralised the men and he cared deeply about the men. He expresses this frustration in the third stanza of Mystic as a Soldier:

I walk the secret way 
With anger in my brain.

That anger eventually burst forth when he published his very open protest in The Times newspaper July 1917 which was subsequently read out in parliament.

“I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.”

“I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insecurities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.”

Sassoon was aware of the consequences of an officer issuing this statement. True, he had been encouraged in this by Bertrand Russell and the Bloomsbury set but he was not a pacifist and he was no coward. At this point he felt he could no longer be silent and for this he might face court martial and pay the ultimate penalty. His friend and fellow poet, Robert Graves intervened to save his skin, persuading the authorities that Sassoon was suffering from shell shock, and so he was sent to Craiglockhart Castle near Edinburgh for ‘treatment’ in the hope that, after a period of reflection, he might be persuaded to retract. He was not suffering from shell shock. However in that place he was surrounded by many men who were. Many suffered from severe speech impediments or mutism due to the condition. These were men who, through extreme trauma, had lost the ability to communicate or voice their distress. They literally had been silenced by horror. Their fears had been rendered wordless. It was ironic that Sassoon faced the stark choice, in this setting, to stand by his statement and take the consequences, or to affirm that he was suffering from a mental condition, censor himself and his protest, and return to active service, seemingly cured. It was made clear to him by psychiatrist Dr Rivers, whom he admired, that neither of these courses would be of benefit to the troops on whose behalf he’d lodged the protest. Either way he would be silenced. This and the thought of skipping out of a battle, made him question his own motives.

It was ironic too that it was whilst at Craiglockhart he met Wilfred Owen and they became friends. Sassoon became his mentor and encouraged him in his poetry and in many ways gave us one of the greatest voices of all the war poets. Owen went back to active duty and so did he. Though he still thought it futile, he very much wished to acquit himself well in this war. When Owen was killed Sassoon tirelessly promoted his work.

Another irony is that it was only through Wilfred Owen that I for one, came to Siegfried Sassoon. How many other voices were silenced forever by that war? We’ll never know.

The final line of Mystic as Soldier says:

O music through my clay, 
When will you sound again?

‘through my clay’ has interesting sociological and religious connotations. For many war dead there would be no grave. They were lost in the field. How could they then ‘rise again’ according to Christian belief? After that war, attitudes towards cremation drastically changed. The logic could not be tolerated that men who fought for their country would be lost forever to God!

Sassoon answers his question at last, in Everyone Sang. He said that the poem ‘came to him’ and certainly Graves and others didn’t regard it as very good poetry, perhaps a little naive. But when a poem ‘comes’ to a poet, it doesn’t just appear out of a blank page and a blank mind. It comes from somewhere deep within and is informed by an evolved sensibility of expression. It is honed by experience. In this case the essence of birdness began in the innocence and birdsong of his Kent childhood (you can trace birds and music through many of his poems) and culminated post war, in this sudden chorus, a release of all the sorrow, joy and passionate anger brought on by such waste of life. It is a poem about making voices heard.

First of all the song lifts his spirits:

I was filled with such delight

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

Winging wildly

Here were men who longed to fly away, home to their loved ones, away from danger, sickening fear and the horrors of war. They were caught up in a situation they could not escape. Death was a release. The landscape of ‘white orchards’ like Eden and ‘dark fields’ Sassoon speaks of is reminiscent of his childhood Kent, but here it emblematic. Heaven was home and the battlefields were darker than Hell. In death this struggle between light and dark is left behind and so in the song, which lifts the spirits of the living and raises the dead. One can almost see a vast host of souls soaring together heavenward:

on - on - and out of sight

still singing.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:

The military day ends with the bugle call, Sunset also known as Retreat. In the trenches there was little respite, or sleep even at night and Sassoon was known for his night raids. They all longed for rest and the final retreat. When Sassoon writes,

My heart was shaken with tears; and horror

Drifted away …

despite the punctuation here, as a page poem one sees tears; and horror on the same line and it echoes his 1917 statement: I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops. For no good reason, they had drifted into war and now seemingly drifted out of it.

Sassoon came from an anglo-catholic and Jewish background. He was familiar with the bird as sacrifice. And when he says:

O, but Everyone

Was a bird;

He truly means ‘Everyone’ which is why he uses a capital letter. Men on all sides had been sacrificed in, in his opinion, an ‘evil and unjust’ war and he asks:

“Did Christ not die for these as well?”

the living and the dead, Irish, Scots, Welsh and English, French, Indian, Belgian, Austrian, Hungarian, Polish, German...

and the song was wordless;

of course. Which language would represent them all? How could the dead speak? How could those who’d lost the ability to speak be heard? What language can describe the horrors of that war? Many who served never spoke of it to anyone. Language is wholly inadequate. The song must be wordless. But he says:

the singing will never be done.

I don’t think it’s just the heavenly choir, Sassoon refers to here though that is certainly there. To sing like a bird also means telling it like it is.

Sassoon had been effectively gagged by the war office in 1917 and now that the war was at an end, he thought the truth would out! History would examine the causes and outcomes of that war. The horror and suffering would be revealed and never be forgotten. He made sure Wilfred Owen was not forgotten. Of course Siegfried Sassoon was delighted that the war was over but he was also eager that Everyone should now be heard so he gave them all a voice in Everyone Sang. Out of the birdness, after all has been swept away, rises this poem, a symbol of peace, a beacon of freedom, a protest against futility. And yes, that war brought about sea-changes in society and in religion but 100 years on, I think there is still little criticism of the conduct of that war, the 'political errors' of which Sassoon wrote, nor acknowledgement of the pity of it. Four years ago a rash of programmes were aired about beginning of WW1 but since then they’ve all gone quiet. WW11 seems to have taken precedence. Best not to dwell on the futility and carnage, I suspect -- lest we remember. This was a politician's war and had nothing to do with the people who did the fighting and dying but the establishment always closes ranks to maintain power. One will always need people who are prepared to fight.

In November this year all the so called great and good will show up, sombrely attired, at the cenotaph but with no apology on their lips for those who died unnecessarily and brutally one hundred years ago in a cause that was not their own. No anti-war poems will be read. There will be no thought for those who, for the rest of their lives, saw before their waking eyes, the dismembered and dead. Who will bend an ear for the silenced voices? Will there be sorrow for the spinsters and widows made or the unborn of a generation of craftsmen, doctors, artists and poets unmade? No. It will be a celebration of patriotic duty. And

“The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori”

that Owen and Sassoon and many others so hated, will be perpetuated. The establishment is as it ever was, willing to sacrifice people to its own ends whilst we... we twitter, we tweet but do we sing? Siegfried Sassoon was fond of this poem that ‘came to him’ in April 1917. He read it out often. It came from a place inside him, deep as death. It sprang from a well of profound and long held melancholy and horror and it sang “through his clay”. How could it do otherwise? And if anyone reads it aloud this November, mistaking it for what it is not, it will be because Siegfried Sassoon was a clever man and a great poet and I will smile and say:

Siegfried, this one’s for you.

Oonah

I would like to thank James Graham for his helpful comments and input to this editorial.

I found “Siegfried Sassoon A BIOGRAPHY” Max Egremont (2005) Picador: ISBN 978-1-4472-4328-1 very useful in providing background information for this essay.

                                                      BUY THE SORROW

November 2020 -- A whole Heap of Other Stuff -- No3 -- All Saints to Armistice

Two poems for you: 'We will remember them.'

“No words of mine can soften the blow. There is one consolation for you - your daughter became unconscious immediately after she was hit, and she passed away perfectly peacefully.” - From the letter written by matron Minnie Wood to the parents of staff nurse Nellie Spindler, 1917.

Women of Passchendaele

For the Passchendaele nurse there was no drill,

no readiness for what she must confront

trying to keep her uniform pristine

negotiating boards from tent to tent

she saw the soldier, half his face blown off,

looked on him as might mother, sister, wife

she dragged him from a shell hole still alive

and gave him sips of water ‘til he died

one day she was a surgeon in the field

the next she scribed a diary for the dead

her knees would not stop trembling but her hand

wrote words of consolation to his kin

unconscious moments after the blast

she passed away peacefully at the last

First published in The Linnet's Wings THE SORROW  2018 WWI Centenary Issue 

Men of Passchendaele
 
See, the flood flows under a crazy moon
and warps the planks we laid across the mud.
Eyes loom perpetual, watery in the gloom
beneath the stars amid the smell of blood.

Tree stumps like empty signposts yield
nothing; but stand like sentries at hell's door.
Entrenched, abandoned in the field
our hopes that wars should be no more.

We trample the knowledge that death is unkind.
Life is the next cigarette and a hard won mile.
Impervious now to shellfire, eyes forever blind
meet ours that cannot weep and cannot smile.

First Published in Bewildering Stories Issue 741: 2018

November 2020 -- A whole Heap of Other Stuff -- No2 -- All Saints to Armistice

This one is a ghost story but it was written as a response to a painting. 

Memoire

This corner is my favourite haunt, as the warmth of terracotta gives back heat from the day, and shadows lengthen and pool in corners, underneath arches, behind stones, beneath greenery, and sacred scents of basil, rosemary, thyme and geranium blend and mingle in the evening air.

I remember as a girl, sipping the sharp lemonade my grandma always made, listening to grandpa, uncle Jacques and their old comrades telling tales of how they won the Great War almost single-handed, nothing left but cigarettes, a letter from home and a shred of hope, as they fought through mud and doom to get back home, and how despite it all, they’d persevered. They’d done their bit. And auntie Marie-Claire would smile wryly while the claque of her needles, regular as the passing of time, never stopped, as they might have been the ticking of a sun dial.

Mémé and maman flitted always to and fro, bringing refreshments.

“Encore des histoires de dormir debout!” Mémé’d say and wink at me.

My mother’s laughter filled the air. I drank it all in. My little brothers, who could never be still, played soldier-boys, whacking each other with sticks for swords, in and out between the shrubs, thrashing and parrying until grenadine, red as blood, was poured into tall glasses and they would gulp it down, their mouths sticky with red. Then papa would stride home from field or vineyard, carrying some seasonal fare: a brace of rabbits or clutch of wood pigeons, salmon or trout, cherries or cob nuts, or in August, dripping from a large wash bowl, a wedge of honeycomb, big as the doorstep, warm and golden, still studded with bees.

Soon a neighbour would arrive, or two, or three, or the postman on his bicycle, or an old friend of grandpa’s who happened to be passing this way just on time for the casse-croûte and he could perhaps be persuaded to un petit verre. All were welcomed. All were fed. It was like that in our family – no friend or stranger ever turned away.

And it was like that until the day I left; left to join the resistance, eager to do my bit. I imagined nothing had changed and that nothing ever would change in that peaceful place so full of love. When I was captured, it was this that kept me going, that gave me the courage to fight on until the last. I would die rather than betray its memory.

I suppose, from their point of view, I never came back. But the truth for me, is that I never left this paradise I was fighting to protect. And I am here still, a shadow among shadows in this corner of my past. The warmth of terracotta gives back memories of my life.

 ©2018 Oonah V Joslin. Previously published in Writing in a Woman's Voice

November 2020 -- A whole Heap of Other Stuff -- No1 -- All Saints to Armistice

Today is All Saint's Day and the perfect antidote to 31 days of Horror is this story that was published in The Shine Journal. 

Just Another Step

Sofia could see no one above her; no one beneath her. There was just the stair spiralling on and on, upwards and downwards, thicker in the far reaches below, ever narrowing towards the top and with one, slim, central support.

Here the stair comprised crystal wedges, difficult to make out as steps and more than a little disconcerting. She could see through them to the vertiginous depths. Exhausted from climbing, overwhelmed in scale and dizzied, like in an Escher painting, she felt at any moment she might faint and fall -- fall to doom.

‘If only I could step off. Take a moment’s rest.’

As if in answer to her thought, beside the step on which she stood, a wide, grey expanse opened up all around, extending as far as the eye could see like a great lounge in some endless hotel. She stepped off and stood ankle deep, in a carpet of thick cloud, furnished with soft hummocks, whiter or darker, that formed chaises-longues all draped with rainbow quilts. There were deep armchairs piled with pillows, and fluffy footstools. Not far off, under a silver canopy, a waterfall flowed into a drinking basin of ethereal blue. Sofia drank and splashed her face and arms. Never had she known anything so refreshing.

“Sit, Sofia!” It was barked out like an order rather than an invitation and a great white dog bounded across and shook itself so she was drenched in silvery raindrops.

“Toby? Toby is that really you?”

“Sorry, couldn’t resist,” it laughed. “You were always telling me to sit so I thought...”

“Toby!” Sofia put her arms about his neck and buried her head in his thick coat and remembered that wet, doggy smell she’d complained about so many times. Now she welcomed it. He jumped up beside her and his tail thrashed happily against her leg. Dear Toby! She had a million questions but she was so tired now that she just lay back on the pillows, feeling safe as she always had with Toby by her side.

When she woke Toby had gone. ‘Strange dream,’ thought Sofia. Then she realised she was indeed lying on cloud and through its middle a little way off, she saw the glimmering stair. “It was no dream,” she said aloud.

“No. It isn’t a dream.” The speaker was a child.

“Should I know you?”

“I never lived but you carried me once.” The child sat beside her.

“Where did Toby go?”

“I expect he’s in a field somewhere chasing sheep. You’ll see him again.”

“Is this Heaven?”

“No that’s far above.”

“It’s such a climb! I thought they just – took you there, you know?”

“Do you remember the first steps?”

Sofia nodded; those first steps had been hard. They were of black, volcanic glass, wide and slippery, and full of dark memories. At least she’d left all that behind. Higher up they’d turned to granite then narrowed to silvered glass and now the purest crystal.

“You are doing well,” assured the child.

“Why did I not see this platform before?”

“Because you didn’t need it before. You became discouraged and fearful and it is here. What more can you ask?”

“But what if I’d fallen?” Sofia shivered to think of the untold depths.

“You weren’t allowed to fall,” said the child. “Higher up, when the steps become invisible, you must remember that.”

“Invisible?” an alarming thought. “Then how will I know where to put my feet?”

“Eventually you will learn to climb without steps, without feet, even. Rest now, Sofia.”

“Please, how long may I stay here?”

“Until you are ready to leave.”

Time was without measure here and Sofia lacked nothing, but eventually she felt she could climb again and approached the spiral stair to begin. Ahead she perceived only three crystal steps, barely visible, and she remembered what the child had said. There was no telling how far she had still to climb. Perhaps there would be other resting places, other friends to be met and this was just another step, but every step demanded new courage. As soon as she took it, the stairway dissolved beneath and above, and she found herself drawn upwards on glowing wings; climbing without feet. Perhaps one day she would fly without wings too, ‘towards the light,’ she thought. ‘Always towards the light.’