Only Remembered Read online

  Michael Morpurgo

  Sketches from War Horse, as drawn by Rae Smith

  DAME EVELYN GLENNIE – Percussionist

  I have read so much about the incessant and monstrous din of warfare that constantly bombarded the soldier’s body with the noise and vibration of bursting shells and caused great pain to their ears. The noise was so enormously resounding that rain and thunder became pleasant and soothing in comparison.

  This set me thinking about whether, in my vast collection of over 1,800 percussion instruments, any might have been used by the actual soldiers during the First World War, and for what purpose? We know that percussion instruments produce high and low sounds, resonant and short sounds, and therefore, what would be the most effective to compete with their already noise-polluted environment?

  We are aware of the use of drums in warfare and how the impact of striking a drum and being moved by rhythm can propel a sense of purpose and teamwork, injecting a sense of fearless determination. However, my eyes wander to my collection of whistles.

  Yes, strange though it is, the whistle is given to the percussion player rather than the wind player, so it has always belonged to the percussion family. The whistle is used worldwide in sport, music, on ships, in hunting, by train guards and much more. However, whistles were also used in various military situations, mainly to initiate a pre-set plan so that all parts would act simultaneously. For example, officers in the First World War would sometimes blow whistles to signal all troops along a broad stretch of trench to attack at the same time.

  The ratchet was another instrument used by soldiers, often to warn of the presence of poison gas or other type of attack.

  The whistle and ratchet are small ‘hand-held’ instruments, crucial for the circumstances of the soldiers, considering they were in such confined spaces, but the sounds they made spliced through their heavily noise-bombarded environment.

  It’s fascinating to see, touch and play the many instruments at our disposal and to think of how they may have been used in the past, saving countless lives in the process.

  SHAMI CHAKRABARTI – Director of Liberty

  I first read this Wilfred Owen poem when a youth of fifteen or sixteen myself. I couldn’t help but be touched by its special blend of beauty, anger and irony. Perhaps Owen was an original ‘emo’, exploring the contrast between the grand ceremony of militarism and religion, and the reality of doomed boys killed ‘as cattle’.

  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 nor bells;

  Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,

  The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

  And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

  What candles may be held to speed them all?

  Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes

  Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

  The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;

  Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

  And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

  Wilfred Owen

  LORD PADDY ASHDOWN – Politician

  Amongst the many unbearable tragedies about the First World War (indeed, any war), one of the most unbearable is the young men who volunteered because they thought that war was a glorious thing. It is, in fact, a muddy, bloody, terrible piece of insanity.

  This poem tells a truth which tears away that ancient deception, so loved by kings and prime ministers and generals far behind the lines. It should be hung in every recruiting office and read out to every new recruit before he (or, nowadays, she too) signs up.

  DULCE ET DECORUM EST

  Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

  Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

  Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

  And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

  Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

  But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

  Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

  Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

  Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,

  Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

  But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,

  And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .

  Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

  As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

  In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

  He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

  If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

  Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

  And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

  His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

  If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

  Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

  Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

  Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –

  My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

  To children ardent for some desperate glory,

  The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

  Pro patria mori.

  Wilfred Owen

  FRANK FIELD – Politician

  Wilfred Owen’s poems, more than the work of any other poet or writer, changed the way we now view the First World War. But that to me is only part of his attraction. From the age of five, Wilfred lived in Birkenhead, a seat I have represented in parliament since 1979. When Wilfred was fourteen, his father, who was stationmaster at Woodside Station, gained a promotion to Shrewsbury. It was there, on Armistice Day in 1918, that a telegraph boy brought his mother a War Office telegram telling her that Wilfred had been killed a week earlier.

  Our vision of what was called the Great War was shaken up, like a kaleidoscope, largely by the war poets. The huge sacrifices – three quarters of a million British dead alone – began to be seen as a huge deceit. Brave British soldiers had been led by donkeys to a mass slaughter. And for what?

  At this point we lost connection with historical reality, and in its place the views of the war poets – of the senseless waste – took control. Owen’s work was fundamental to this change.

  I hope that this poem by a Birkenhead boy brings home the horror of any war, and the sheer bravery of so many of those participating. But we do have to ask why they were participating, and why they participated for so long.

  So please do heed this health warning. The First World War, as the Great War was renamed once a second one was recorded on the pages of history, changed fundamentally the course of the twentieth century, and therefore the world in which we now live. How we weigh the costs against the gains is a task of huge difficulty; any judgement will be finely balanced.

  Be thrilled and shocked by the images Owen gives us of those terrible battles. But in doing so, please look to the gains as well as the losses that the world experienced in a war that I believe was, on balance, important to fight.

  STRANGE MEETING

  It seemed that out of the battle I escaped

  Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

  Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

  Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

  Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

  Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared

  With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

  Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.

  And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,

  By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

  With a thousand pains that vision’s face was grained;

  Yet no blood reached
there from the upper ground,

  And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.

  ‘Strange friend,’ I said, ‘here is no cause to mourn.’

  ‘None,’ said the other, ‘save the undone years,

  The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,

  Was my life also; I went hunting wild

  After the wildest beauty in the world,

  Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,

  But mocks the steady running of the hour,

  And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.

  For by my glee might many men have laughed,

  And of my weeping something had been left,

  Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,

  The pity of war, the pity war distilled.

  Now men will go content with what we spoiled,

  Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.

  They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.

  None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

  Courage was mine, and I had mystery,

  Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:

  To miss the march of this retreating world

  Into vain citadels that are not walled.

  Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,

  I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,

  Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.

  I would have poured my spirit without stint

  But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.

  Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

  I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

  I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned

  Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

  I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

  Let us sleep now . . .

  Wilfred Owen

  MALORIE BLACKMAN – Author and Children’s Laureate 2013–2015

  Walter Tull was born in Kent, the mixed-race son of a Barbadian carpenter and a white English mother. He played professional football for Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton Town before joining the British Army at the outbreak of the First World War.

  The world has changed in many ways since then but, depressingly, much remains the same. The original Sherlock Holmes stories had Dr John Watson returning from a war in Afghanistan. A recent BBC modernization didn’t have to change that detail at all. In 1914 the Balkans were a patchwork of small states with simmering ethnic tensions, and they still are. And when Walter Tull played football for Tottenham Hotspur, he was subjected to appalling racist abuse. Sadly, a century later, that still seems to be with us too.

  But there is progress, and hope! Tull set the trend, not just as a black soldier, but as a black officer – a highly regarded black officer. In 1914, by the strict interpretation of British Military Law, he shouldn’t even have been an officer at all. At the time army regulations stipulated that ‘any negro or person of colour’ was not allowed to become one. Despite this rule, Tull performed so impressively that in 1917 his superiors promoted him to the rank of lieutenant. This made him the first black or mixed-race officer in a British Army combat unit, and the first to lead white men into battle.

  Tull and His Fellow Officers

  Tull first fought in France and then in Italy from 1917–18. After he twice led his men on raids across the River Piave – and each time brought them back safely – Tull was cited for his ‘gallantry and coolness’ by his commanding general. He was, in fact, recommended for the Military Cross for his bravery, but he never received one.

  On 25 March 1918, operating once again in France, Lieutenant Tull was ordered to lead his men in an attack on the German trenches. Soon after entering no man’s land, Tull was hit by a German bullet. He was so popular that his men risked their own lives attempting to bring him back to the British trenches. But the German machine-gun fire was too intense and they failed. Tull’s body was never recovered and he is one of thousands of soldiers from the First World War who have no known grave.

  One death is a tragedy. The sixteen million-plus deaths that occurred as a result of the First World War are not just a statistic, they are a catastrophe. Second Lieutenant Walter Tull fought against narrow-mindedness and bigotry all his life, but he also demonstrated what a brave heart and a fighting spirit can achieve.

  Slowly we edge closer to the day Martin Luther King foresaw in his famous ‘I have a dream . . .’ speech. A day where people ‘will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character’.

  Walter Daniel John Tull 28 April 1888–25 March 1918

  JULIAN BARNES – Writer

  Siegfried Sassoon was an English poet naturally more interested in cricket than in politics, who joined up at the outbreak of war, fought very bravely, and was awarded the Military Cross. Then, appalled by the way the war was being run, and distraught at the death of a close friend, he wrote to his commanding officer refusing to return to the front after leave. His letter was read out in Parliament and caused a famous outcry.

  But Sassoon’s real and lasting protest – not just against the First World War, but against all war – came in the form of poetry. In short, savage, easily understood poems, he described the reality of war, the incompetence of leaders, the hypocrisy of the press, and the nauseating fireside jingoism of those who cheered on the slaughter from a distance. He was what nowadays we would call a whistle-blower – but a whistle-blower in verse.

  This is his poem called ‘The General’:

  THE GENERAL

  ‘Good-morning; good-morning!’ the General said

  When we met him last week on our way to the line.

  Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,

  And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

  ‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack

  As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

  But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

  Siegfried Sassoon

  BEN BARNES – Actor

  When I was seventeen years old, I studied Pat Barker’s Regeneration for my English A level. It resonated with me as an Englishman, but also as the son of a psychiatrist and psychotherapist.

  Some of the scenes from the book came back to me a decade later, when I was rehearsing for the play Birdsong, which was based on another novel about the psychological impact on soldiers fighting in the First World War.

  Barker’s powerful novel focuses on the experiences of soldiers treated for shell shock at a war hospital in Edinburgh in 1917. At its heart is the relationship between two real-life characters: the poet and soldier, Siegfried Sassoon; and a military-hospital neurologist and psychiatrist, Dr William Rivers. Sassoon has not been sent to the hospital as a victim of shell shock, but rather because of his public declaration against the continuation of the war. Pondering this clinical dilemma leads Rivers to become disillusioned; he begins to wonder whether it truly is ‘madness’ for soldiers to break down after facing the horrors of war or whether it is madness that so many blindly follow military orders. He eventually wonders if he himself is the mad one for ‘curing’ patients, only to send them back to the battlefield to be killed.

  Barker herself suggests that the First World War represented ‘a sort of idealism of the young people in August 1914 in Germany and in England. They really felt this was the start of a better world. And the disillusionment, the horror and the pain followed that. I think because of that it’s come to stand for the pain of all wars.’ Indeed, the novel delivers a powerful and eloquent but subliminal message about the folly of all wars, including those we know were to follow the ‘war to end all wars’.

  FROM REGENERATION

  And as soon as you accepted that the man’s breakdown was a consequence of his war experience rather than of his own innate weakness, then inevitably the war became the issue. And the therapy was a test, not only of the genuineness of the individual’s symptoms, but
also of the validity of the demands the war was making on him. Rivers had survived partly by suppressing his awareness of this. But then along came Sassoon and made the justifiability of the war a matter for constant, open debate, and that suppression was no longer possible. At times it seemed to Rivers that all his other patients were the anvil and that Sassoon was the hammer. Inevitably there were times when he resented this. As a civilian, Rivers’s life had consisted of asking questions, and devising methods by which truthful answers could be obtained, but there are limits to how many fundamental questions you want to ask in a working day that starts before eight a.m. and doesn’t end till midnight.

  Pat Barker

  EMMA CHICHESTER CLARK – Illustrator and author

  I first read Birdsong many years ago and remember being fascinated by the tunnelling episodes. I hadn’t realized how much of the First World War had been fought underground, so when Michael asked me to contribute to this collection, I immediately thought of it.

  When I found the book, it fell open on these pages – an incident I’d completely forgotten where a small mishap follows a catastrophe. It’s just a little story within a vast one, but it involves every human feeling and illuminates the paradoxical nature of war.

  FROM BIRDSONG

  Weir was in the trench when the explosion went off, drinking tea with Stephen and explaining his difficulties. He went white as the earth rocked under them. The hot liquid spilled unremarked over his shaking hand.