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Neurology, Poetry and the First World War of 1914–1918

Christopher Gardner-Thorpe*,{,1 *

The Coach House, Exeter, UK Society of Apothecaries, London, UK 1 Corresponding author: Tel.:þ44-1392-433-941, Fax.: þ44-872-115-3847, e-mail address: [email protected] {

Abstract The First World War of 1914–1918 produced a wealth of disability and death and much has been written of this catastrophe for mankind. Prose is prolific and much poetry has been written too, some of it discussed here; it consists of works by healthcare workers and also about the effects of the war upon those who fought and those who were left behind. Some of the work is by neurologists and some deals with the neurological disorders of those who fought.

Keywords neurology, First World War, poetry, Henry Head, Craiglockhart Hospital, shell shock, visual loss, sensorimotor disorders

After the catastrophe that was named the First World War started, Britain’s Cabinet led by the Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith (1852–1928), declared war after Germany invaded Belgium on 28 July 1914. It was triggered by the shooting on 28 June 1914 in his car of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863–1914) of Austria in Sarajevo by the Serbian student Gavrilo Princip (1894–1918). In 1916 one million casualties were recorded in 10 months; in 1917 the United States joined the war to assist the Allies. The war finished, to all intents and purposes, at 11 am on 11 November 1918 and the Armistice was signed. The war had lasted 4 years, 3 months and 14 days. The Cenotaph in London and many memorials elsewhere remind us of this era of our history. Such monuments can hardly be said to commemorate the war and we must not forget. The literature of war is of interest to neurologists and some was written by neurologists. The disorders of those who fought include various neurological conditions, blindness, sensorimotor symptoms and shell shock. Various advances in neurology Progress in Brain Research, Volume 205, ISSN 0079-6123, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-63273-9.00013-7 © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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followed the war including much of the work on the cerebral localization of vision derived from terrible gunshot and shrapnel wounds. Gordon Morgan Holmes (1876–1965) published the results of studies of brain-injured soldiers, forming the basis of much of the understanding of cerebral localization in relation to its connections. So much has been written about this war and some of it in poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) wrote ‘Prose – words in their best order: poetry – the best words in the best order’ (Coleridge, 1821–1834). Much of the writing has a neurological bent. Field Marshall Earl Wavell (1883–1950), who gave distinguished service in India and elsewhere, produced an extraordinary compilation, apparently from memory (Wavell, 1960). Fictional poets include Cecil Teucver Valance who wrote poetry from the trenches (Hollinghurst, 2011). Doctors and other healthcare workers’ poetry and prose concern the medicine and psychological effects of damage from war wounds. Patients in rehabilitation hospitals also wrote poetry, for example those in the converted Durston psychiatric hospital in Northamptonshire, UK. Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy comprises Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993) and The Ghost Road (1995), the latter winning the Man Booker Prize in 1995; in 1993 she won the Guardian First Book Award. Her work is based on the neurological rehabilitation of the war-wounded carried out at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh and, in particular, that of the poets Wilfred Edward Salter Owen (1893–1918) and Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967). Craiglockhart Hydropathic Institute, built in Edinburgh in 1877, was taken over for the rehabilitation of shell-shocked soldiers between 1916 and 1919. Barkers’ film, based on the books, brought home to a cinema-going public in dramatic manner the combination of classical medical and psychological trauma affecting those who fought in war and the extreme forms of treatment; William Halse Rivers (1864–1922), who was prominent in areas of medicine and psychology, was the most celebrated member of the staff at Craiglockhart Hospital. While in Craiglockhart, Wilfred Owen wrote in the metaphorical sense of the effects of brain damage in Exposure: Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us . . . Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent . . .

Owen addressed his Dulce et Decorum Est, written while in hospital, to Jessie Pope (1868–1941), another writer who wrote of the physical disability resulting from war: Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, . . .

Many writers, perhaps less known, included Sir Owen Seaman (1861–1936) who was Professor of Literature at Newcastle in 1890 and Editor of Punch 1906–1932. Alan Seeger (1888–1916) hastened to join the French Foreign Legion and was killed at Belloy-en-Santerre on the fourth day of the Battle of the Somme. Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895–1915) wrote poetry that impressed Robert Graves (1895–1985); a lover of Germany, Sorley was killed on 13 October 1915 at the Battle of Loos. Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) described the poetry of Muriel Stuart (1885–1967) as superlatively good.

1 The First War Poet to Volunteer for Service

Edward Thomas (1878–1917) was killed in France on 9 April 1917; he was a friend of Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) and of Eleanor Farfjeon (1881–1965), better known as an author of children’s stories. Katharine Tynan (1861–1931) was a friend of the poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939). Arthur Graeme West (1891–1917) was educated at Blundell’s School in Tiverton, Devon; he hated war and was killed at Bapaume by a sniper’s bullet. Gilbert Frankau (1884–1952) fought at Loos, Ypres and on the Somme but in February 1918 he was invalided with shell shock though later he served as a Squadron Leader in the Second World War. Julian Henry Francis Grenfell (1888–1915) joined the Army in 1910 and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) in 1914; he sent his poem Into Battle to The Times in 1915 and within a few days he died of his wounds. John Oxenham (1852–1941) supported the war in view of his Christian idealism; his Hymn For the Men at the Front sold more than eight million copies and he was a very popular poet.

1 THE FIRST WAR POET TO VOLUNTEER FOR SERVICE Siegfried Lorraine Sassoon (1886–1967) was the first British war poet, on 3 August 1914, to volunteer to fight but he became politically active through disillusionment with the war. He is probably also the best known and his work was admired and quoted by Winston Churchill (1874–1965) who met him on several occasions. A friend of Robert Graves, Sassoon protested in the summer of 1917 about the war and was sent to Craiglockhart. He returned to war but suffered a graze to the head from an accidental shot from one of his own men that put him out of action in July 1918. He was awarded the Military Cross (MC). His poem, The Death-Bed, tells us of the effects of injury and pain: He stirred, shifting his body; then the pain Leapt like a prowling beast, and gripped and tore His groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs. But someone was beside him; soon he lay Shuddering because that evil thing had passed. And death, who’d stepped toward him, paused and stared. ... But death replied: ‘I choose him.’ So he went, And there was silence in the summer night; Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep. Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.

And what is the effect of all of this? we may ask, as Sassoon did in Does it Matter? Does it matter? - losing your legs?. For people will always be kind, And you need not show that you mind When the others come in after hunting To gobble their muffins and eggs.

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Does it matter? - losing your sight? . . . . There’s such splendid work for the blind And people will always be kind, As you sit on the terrace remembering And turning your face to the light. Do they matter? - those dreams from the pit? . . . You can drink and forget and be glad, And people won’t say that you are mad; For they’ll know you’ve fought for your country And no one will worry a bit.

Well, yes it does all matter and others have mused on the effects of warfare upon individuals and societies. A Canadian doctor, a Major who fought in the Artillery on the Western Front and who died of pneumonia on 28 January 1918, was John McCrae (1872–1918) who wrote eloquently of what mattered to him. He started to draft his poignant poem In Flanders Fields on the evening after he had conducted the burial service, since the chaplain was away elsewhere on duty, for his friend Lieutenant Alexis Nannum Helmer (1892–1915) who was killed on 2 May during the Second Battle of Ypres: In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.

2 A FRUSTRATED NEUROLOGIST WRITES POETRY Henry Head (1861–1940) was a pioneer in the description of speech and its disorders although his poetry is not well known (Head, 1926). Head’s six poems were written at the time of his anguish in not being able to go to war himself since he stayed in London to fulfill his obligations as physician at The London Hospital. Head does not appear in anthologies but in 1919 his war poems (Gardner-Thorpe, 2004;

2 A Frustrated Neurologist Writes Poetry

Reich, 1988) were combined with four previously unpublished poems, dedicated to his wife Ruth by the inscription ‘To Her without whose touch the string would have been mute’, in his Destroyers and Other Verses; 500 copies were published. The section ‘1914–1918’ contains 10 poems including Paris, 1816; Epiphany; Elan Vital; and Pegasus. Head sent his first poem to the neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing (1869–1939) who published it in the Yale Review in 1916. Head was still several years away from the Parkinsonism that was to limit his consulting work a decade later. The poem I Cannot Stand and Wait describes Head’s frustration at not taking part in active service: How can I serve who am too old to fight? I cannot stand and wait With folded hands, and lay me down at night In restless expectation that the day Will bring some stroke of Fate I cannot help to stay. Once, like the spider in his patterned web, Based on immutable law, Boldly I spun the strands of arduous thought, Now seeming naught, Rent in the sudden hurricane of war. Within my corner I will take my place, And grant me grace Some delicate thing to perfect and complete With passionate contentment, as of old Before my heart grew cold. This in the Temple I will dedicate, A widow’s mite, Among more precious gifts, obscured from sight By the majestic panoply of state. But when triumphal candles have burned low And valorous trophies crumbled into dust, Perchance my gift may glow, Still radiating sacrificial joy Amid the ravages of moth and dust.

Head’s poem Homing Wings speaks of the English landscape, the idyllic land, and of the destruction that was feared but fortunately not realized during the First World War, a far cry from the damage that was to follow during the Second World War of 1939–1945. The Royal Flying Corps, the air arm of the British Army, and the Royal Naval Air Service were to play their part in the war before amalgamation into the Royal Air Force on 1 April 1918. However, Homing Wings speaks of natural wings, those of birds, and not of the noisy mechanical versions:

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Poised like the black-winged swallow born to roam And find a living in the ambient air, We sacrificed our home For unpolluted realms of natural law. Must we despair Because the neutral tissue of our dreams Dissolves like ravelled mist before the heat, And at our feet The radiant prospect of this ancient land, Grey hamlets, happy fields, sequestered streams, Unconquerable stand? E’en the world-wandering bird suspends her nest Beneath the overhanging cottage eaves In fecund rest; And breezes ocean-born In brooding oaks scarce stir the crumpled leaves, Where poppies flame among the ripening corn. So we return to worship homely things, That filled our baby hands, ancestral springs Resurgent and intense Stirring the reverent heart Of childhood’s innocence.

All of this enacted a price for Britain and its people, encapsulated in Head’s poem The Price: Night hovers blue above the sombre square, The solitary amber lanterns throw A soft penumbra on the path below, And through the plumed pavilion of the trees A solemn breeze Bears faintly from the river midnight bells; While at this peaceful hour my spirit tells Its tale of arduous joys, Pain conquered, Fear resolved, or Hope regained, Swift recognition of some law divine, Shy gratitude that could not be restrained, All these were mine, And so, supremely blest, I sink to rest. Through labyrinthine sleep I grope my way, Feeble of purpose, sick at heart, and sure Some unknown ill will lead my steps astray, Till, cold and gray,

2 A Frustrated Neurologist Writes Poetry

The dawn rays through my shuttered windows steal And with closed eyes I thank my God for light, For the fierce purpose of another day, When work and thought forbid the heart to feel.

Head wrote too of the contribution of the sea-based fighting forces in his Destroyers. He sets the scene in a peaceful seascape, soon to be churned up with destroyers of two types, human and mechanical, each depicted in a stanza: On this primeval strip of western land, With purple bays and tongues of shining sand, Time, like an echoing tide, Moves drowsily in idle ebb and flow; The sunshine slumbers in the tangled grass And homely folk with simple greeting pass, As to their worship or their work they go. Man, earth, and sea Seem linked in elemental harmony, And my insurgent sorrow finds release In dreams of peace. But silent, gray, Out of the curtained haze, Across the bay Two fierce destroyers glide with bows a-foam And predatory gaze, Like cormorants that seek a submerged prey. An angel of destruction guards the door And keeps the peace of our ancestral home; Freedom to dream, to work, and to adore, These vagrant days, nights of untroubled breath, Are bought with death.

So many died after wounding in the war and many poets wrote of the damage to limb, torso, brain and mind, and of death which came to some in merciful relief. Head wrote of this too in Died of His Wounds: Death set his mark and left a mangled thing, With palsied limbs no science could restore, To weary out the weeks or months or years, Amidst the tumult of a mother’s tears Behind the sick-room door, Where tender skill and subtle knowledge bring Brief respite only from the ultimate Decree of fate.

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Then, like the flowers we planted in his room, Bud after bud we watched his soul unfold; Each delicate bloom Of alabaster, violet, and gold Struggled to light, Drawing its vital breath Within the pallid atmosphere of death. That valiant spirit has not passed away, But lives and grows Within us, as a penetrating ray Of sunshine on a crystal surface glows With many-hued refraction. He has fled Into the unknown silence of the night, But cannot die till human hearts are dead.

And both during and after all of this, war and damage, courage helped to preserve a way of life and Head mused on this in To Courage Seated: We wandered through the chill autumnal Park, And spoke of courage and the youthful dead, And how the boldest spirit may be cowed By indiscriminate terror. Overhead, The moon rode high on her predestined arc, Steadfast through tidal waves of sombre cloud. Like vast antennae, search-lights swept the sky, When, suddenly, as if in swift reply, Out of the south, with jets of luminous smoke, And coughing clatter, hidden guns awoke. And we fell silent at the thought of death. We were too old to leap with panting breath Into the turmoil of the bloody strife, And dance upon the razor-edge of life To fame or to oblivion. We must wait Like senators of old, with folded hands, In silence, seated, for the stroke of Fate. One boon alone an ardent soul demands, To die before its passion waxes cold, Enthusiasm fails, or Love grows old.

3 HENRY HEAD’S FRIENDSHIP WITH THOMAS HARDY Head was very friendly with another war poet, Thomas Hardy, the author from Dorset whose prose works are acclaimed; these include Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, A Pair of Blue Eyes and many other stories. Hardy supported

3 Henry Head’s Friendship with Thomas Hardy

the war as a member of The Fight for Right Movement that promoted the need to continue the fight to secure a satisfactory conclusion insofar as Britain was concerned and also of the Secret Bureau for Propaganda that was supported by many writers including Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) who wrote To Arms!, a recruiting pamphlet, in 1914; his son, Arthur Alleyne Kingsley Conan Doyle (1892–1918) was wounded on the Somme and died of pneumonia on 28 October 1918—an example of the later effects of wounding. Others include Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), John Masefield (1878–1967), Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939), William Archer (1856–1924), Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936), John Galsworthy (1867– 1933), Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), Sir Henry Newbolt (1862–1924) who wrote the official British Naval History of the War, Gilbert Parker (1862–1932), George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876–1962) and Herbert George Wells (1866–1946). Hardy wrote of the sounds and of the fears induced by the great guns that could be heard across the English Channel, La Manche, in his Channel Firing, written in April 1914 about the futility of war: That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgement-day. And sat upright. While drearisome Arose the howl of wakened hounds. The mouse let fall the altar-crumb, The worms drew back into the mounds, ... So down we lay again. ‘I wonder, Will the world ever saner be,’ Said one, ‘than when He sent us under In our indifferent century!’ And many a skeleton shook his head. ‘Instead of preaching forty year.’ My neighbour Parson Thirdly said, ‘I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.’ Again the guns disturbed the hour, Roaring their readiness to avenge, As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

Hardy commented on the psychological effects of the war in Mental Cases: Who are thee? Why sit they here in twilight? Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows, Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish, Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ tongues wicked?

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Hardy evoked memories of the feelings of those who lost their sight in The Sentry: We dredged him up, for killed, until he whined ‘O sir, my eyes – I’m blind – I’m blind, I’m blind’ Coaxing, I held a flame against his lids And said if he could see the least blurred light He was not blind; in time he’d get all right. ‘I can’t,’ he sobbed. Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids Watch my dreams still; but I forgot him there In posting next for duty, and sending a scout To beg a stretcher somewhere, and floundering about To other posts under the shrieking air.

The terrible conditions and effects of the war, blindness again, were set to verse once more in A Terre (being the philosophy of many soldiers): Sit on the bed. I’m blind, and three parts shell. Be careful; can’t shake hands now; never shall. Both arms have mutinied against me, - brutes. My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.

Hardy commented on the effects on the body of the bitter conditions in Exposure: Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us . . . Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent . . . Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient . . . Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous, But nothing happens.

And then of the effect on the soldier who was frustrated and Disabled: He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark, And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey, Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn, Voices of play and pleasure after day, Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him. ... One time he liked a bloodsmear down his leg, After matches, carried shoulder-high. It was after football, when he’d drunk a peg, He thought he’d better join. - He wonders why. Someone had said he’d look like a god in kilts, That’s why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg, Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts He asked to join. He didn’t have to beg; Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years. ...

3 Henry Head’s Friendship with Thomas Hardy

Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal. Only a solemn man who brought him fruits Thanked him; and then inquired about his soul. Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes, And do what things the rules consider wise, And take whatever pity they may dole. Tonight he noticed how the women’s eyes Passed from him to the strong men that were whole. How cold and late it is! Why don’t they come And put him into bed? Why don’t they come?

Those who did not agree to fight were styled Conscientious Objectors (COs) and Edna St Vincent Millay (1892–1950) summed up their entirely understandable approach in Conscientious Objector: I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.

From across the world Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833–1870) wrote Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes, to be seen on the war monument in Melbourne: Life is mostly froth and bubble, Two things stand like stone: Kindness in another’s trouble, Courage in your own.

An atheist and socialist, Rupert Chawner Brooke (1887–1915) suffered a nervous breakdown. He enlisted in the Royal Navy and died, of septicemia following a mosquito bite, on ship on the way to Gallipoli. He is buried on Skyros. His poem 1914 V: The Soldier sets out the thoughts of a soldier: If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

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Brooke is one who also wrote of the goings-on in the English Channel in A Channel Passage: The damned ship lurched and slithered. Quiet and quick My cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew I must think hard of something, or be sick; And could think hard of only one thing – YOU! You, you alone could hold my fancy ever! And with you memories come, sharp pain, and dole. Now there’s a choice – heartache or tortured liver! A sea-sick body, or a you-sick soul! Do I forget you? Retchings twist and tie me, Old meat, good meals, brown gobbets, up I throw. Do I remember? Acrid return and slimy, The sobs and slobber of a last years woe. And still the sick ship rolls. ’Tis hard, I tell ye, To choose ’twixt love and nausea, heart and belly.

And of the waiting game that was a hallmark of this war in particular in Dawn: Opposite me two Germans snore and sweat. Through sullen swirling gloom we jolt and roar. We have been here for ever: even yet A dim watch tells two hours, two aeons, more. The windows are tight-shut and slimy-wet With a night’s foetor. There are two hours more; Two hours to dawn and Milan; two hours yet. Opposite me two Germans sweat and snore. . . . One of them wakes, and spits, and sleeps again. The darkness shivers. A wan light through the rain Strikes on our faces, drawn and white. Somewhere A new day sprawls; and, inside, the foul air Is chill, and damp, and fouler than before. . . . Opposite me two Germans sweat and snore.

Robert von Ranke Graves, whose mother was German, became a friend of Sassoon, Nichols, and Owen. He saw service on the Somme and was invalided with major injuries and shell shock in July 1916 when shrapnel pierced his lungs. In 1929 he wrote his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, a personal account of the war. He became Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1961 to 1966 and wrote two well-known historical novels that were televised, I Claudius and Claudius the God. He lived in Majorca. Graves wrote Recalling War: Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean, The track aches only when the rain reminds. The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood,

4 Poets in Important Occupations Related to Medicine

The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm. The blinded man sees with his ears and hands As much or more than once with both his eyes.

Robert Nichols, a friend of Brooke and Sassoon served in the trenches for a few weeks but then suffered shell shock and syphilis in 1915 and was invalided.

4 POETS IN IMPORTANT OCCUPATIONS RELATED TO MEDICINE Many writers were employed in occupations related to medicine during the First World War. Ambulance drivers served their country in a remarkable way. Many became well-known novelists and poets including Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), John Dos Passos (1896–1970) who wrote One Man’s Initiation, and Edward Estlin Cummings (1894–1962); Robert William Service (1874–1958) who wrote The Shooting of Dan McGrew, Charles Bernard Nordhoff (1887–1947) who wrote Mutiny on the Bounty, John Masefield (1878–1967) who wrote much poetry including The Old Front Line and The Battle of the Somme. William Somerset Maugham (1874– 1965) who studied medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital in London wrote many novels including Liza of Lambeth, perhaps his best known, about his experiences at medical school; he did not qualify as a doctor but did work in the Red Cross Ambulance Unit attached to the French Army. Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) was a stretcher bearer. Isaac Rosenberg, artist and engraver trained at The Slade School of Fine Art in London, was killed on 1 April 1918. Sassoon praised his poetry. His language in particular evokes images of the dead, perhaps no better than in Dead Man’s Dump which would ring bells with the stretcher bearers and ambulance drivers: A man’s brains splattered on A stretcher-bearer’s face;

and in The Tower of Skulls: These layers of piled-up skulls, These layers of gleaming horror- stark horror!

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) visited hospitals and drove for the American Fund for French Wounded she wrote The Autobiography of Alice B Toklias. Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890–1998) worked at the American Red Cross headquarters in Paris and not because she was in love with an ambulance driver. Edward Morgan Forster (1879–1970), novelist and writer, interviewed some of the wounded in hospitals in Egypt. Dorothea Canfield Fisher (1879–1958) made home in France for her husband while he was ambulance driver. Archibald Joseph Cronin (1896–1991), a Scottish doctor, wrote of his early medical experiences in The Citadel in 1937. Anne Green and May Wedderburn Cannan (1893–1973) were nurses.

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Others of note include: Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989), Sidney Howard (1891– 1939), Robert Service (1874–1958), Louis Bromfield (1896–1956), Harry Crosby (1898–1929), Julian Green (1900–1998), Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), William Seabrook (1884–1945), Robert Hillyer (1895–1961), John Howard Lawson (1894– 1977), William Slater Brown (1896–1997), Sir Hugh Walpole (1884–1941), Desmond MacCarthy (1877–1952), Russell Davenport (1899–1954), Edward Weeks, Cyrus Leroy Baldridge (1899–1977) and Samuel Chamberlain (1895–1975).

5 LAMENT FOR LOST RELATIVES Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay and taken aged five to Southsea where he was educated in a family and then he went to the United Services College at Westward Ho! He is well known for his children’s stories and in 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1898 Kipling published The Destroyers and it is possible this gave Henry Head the idea for the content and title of his Destroyers. Kipling’s poem, the earlier of the two, in part reads The strength of twice three thousand horse That seeks the single goal; ... Adown the stricken capes no flare No mark on spit or bar, Girdled and desperate, we dare The blindfold game of war. ... Hit, and hard hit! The blow went home, The muffled, knocking stroke – The steam that overruns the foam – The foam that thins to smoke – The smoke that clokes the deep aboil – The deep that chokes her throes Till, streaked with ash and sleeked with oil, The lukewarm whirlpools close! ... Oh, strike your camp an’ go, the bugle’s callin’, The Rains are fallin’ The dead are bushed an’ stoned to keep ’em safe below. The Chaplain’s gone and prayed to Gawd to ’ear us To ’ear us O Lord, for it’s a -killin’ of us so!

Kiplings’ only son John (1897–1915), known as Jack, was killed on 27 September in World War I. Jack was aged 18 and a Lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards. He went missing during the Battle of Loos, known as ‘The Big Push’, in France on 25 September to 18 October 1915. Kipling wrote of his son as if he had been lost during the Battle of Jutland, in the North Sea off the coast of Denmark in 1916, with

5 Lament for Lost Relatives

particular poignancy since he had campaigned that despite his poor eyesight Jack should be allowed to join the armed forces. Jack’s grave is at St Mary’s ADS Cemetery at Haisnes Pas-de-Calais (Fig. 1). Kipling wrote A Son and An Only Son: Have you news of my boy Jack?’ Not this tide. ‘When d’you think that he’ll come back?’ Not with this wind blowing, and this tide. ‘Has any one else had word of him?’ Not this tide. For what is sunk will hardly swim, Not with this wind blowing, and this tide. ‘Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?’ None this tide, Nor any tide, Except he did not shame his kind Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide. Then hold your head up all the more, This tide, And every tide; Because he was the son you bore, And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

FIGURE 1 First World War Graves in St Mary’s ADS Cemetery, Haisnes Pas-de-Calais, Northern France in 2011. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haisnes_-_St._Mary’s_ADS_Cembetery_4.jpg (accessed 27 August 2013).

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6 POETS LOOKED TO THE FUTURE Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968) was awarded the Military Cross (MC) and the DSO and was knighted in 1953. He wrote A Short Poem for Armistice Day: One eye one leg one arm one lung A syncopated sick heart-beat The record is not nearly worn That weaves a background to our work.

Vera Brittain (1893–1970), mother of the politician Shirley Williams (1930–), nursed as a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse in Buxton in Derbyshire, then in Camberwell and later at Millbank in London. Brittain looked forward with hope in her poem Perhaps: Perhaps some day the sun will shine again, And I shall see that still the skies are blue, And feel once more I do not live in vain, Although bereft of You. Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet Will make the sunny hours of spring seem gay, And I shall find the white May-blossoms sweet, Though You have passed away. Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright, And crimson roses once again be fair, And autumn harvest fields a rich delight, Although You are not there. Perhaps some day I shall not shrink in pain To see the passing of the dying year, And listen to Christmas songs again, Although You cannot hear.’ But though kind Time may many joys renew, There is one greatest joy I shall not know Again, because my heart for loss of You Was broken, long ago.

In The Lament of the Demobilised Brittain wrote of the outcome of war, hinting at the futility of the whole episode: ‘Four years,’ some say consolingly. ‘Oh well, What’s that ? You’re young. And then it must have been A very fine experience for you !’ And they forget How others stayed behind and just got on Got on the better since we were away.

References

And we came home and found They had achieved, and men revered their names, But never mentioned ours; And no-one talked heroics now, and we Must just go back and start again once more. ‘You threw four years into the melting-pot Did you indeed !’ these others cry. ‘Oh well, The more fool you!’ And we’re beginning to agree with them.

7 THE POETS ARE COMMEMORATED The poets of the Great War are commemorated in many ways. Two, Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, are buried in Westminster Abbey. Sixteen others (listed here in order of date of death) are commemorated in Poets’ Corner: Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell (1898–1915), Charles Sorley, Edward Thomas (1878–1917), Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918). Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) was gassed and wounded and in 1922 paranoid schizophrenia was diagnosed; he died of TB; his work has been set to music. Laurence Binyon (1869–1943), Robert Nichols (1893–1944), and Richard Aldington (1892–1962). Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878–1962) is related to this author. Siegfried Sassoon, Herbert Read (1893–1968), David Jones (1895– 1974), Edward Blunden (1898–1974) and Robert Graves. Laurence Binyon wrote the words For the Fallen that can be heard at the Cenotaph in London at the Armistice Ceremony each 11 November: They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.

References Coleridge, S.T., 1821–1834. Table Talk. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. Gardner-Thorpe, C., 2004. The poetry of Henry Head. In: Rose, F.C. (Ed.), Neurology of the Arts, Painting, Music, Literature. Imperial College Press, London, UK, pp. 401–420. Hollinghurst, A., 2011. The Stranger’s Child. Picador, London, p. 291. Head, H., 1926. Aphasia and Kindred Disorders of Speech. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Reich, S.G., 1988. History of neurology. Archives of Neurology 45, 1257–1260. Wavell, A.P., 1960. Other Men’s Flowers. The Penguin Poets. Penguin Books, Middlesex.

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Neurology, poetry and the first world war of 1914-1918.

The First World War of 1914-1918 produced a wealth of disability and death and much has been written of this catastrophe for mankind. Prose is prolifi...
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