Jessie Pope: 'War Girls'

'I suppose that of all the victims of the War', writes George Simmers, 'the one we should be sorriest for is Jessie Pope.' As a marker of A level exam scripts, George is well placed to report on the opprobrium directed at that most convenient of scapegoats. Never mind that Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est' makes no mention of Jessie Pope. The best-known fact about the poem is that its earliest draft was ironically dedicated to her. Why this piece of apparently arcane information should be so widely emphasised is a question which ought to give us pause. Not wanting to be implicated by Owen's indictment, we hastily reinstate the dedication so that we can safely remain as disapproving judge and jury. If Owen is accusing Jessie Pope, he can't be accusing us.

Pope was no poet, but she wrote fairly accomplished verse. 'War Girls' shows her at her best:

War Girls

There's the girl who clips your ticket for the train,
  And the girl who speeds the lift from floor to floor,
There's the girl who does a milk-round in the rain,
  And the girl who calls for orders at your door.
      Strong, sensible, and fit,
      They're out to show their grit,
    And tackle jobs with energy and knack.
      No longer caged and penned up,
      They're going to keep their end up
    Till the khaki soldier boys come marching back.

There's the motor girl who drives a heavy van,
  There's the butcher girl who brings your joint of meat,
There's the girl who cries 'All fares, please!' like a man,
  And the girl who whistles taxis up the street.
      Beneath each uniform
      Beats a heart that's soft and warm,
    Though of canny mother-wit they show no lack;
      But a solemn statement this is,
      They've no time for love and kisses
    Till the khaki soldier-boys come marching back.

There is no point in breaking butterflies upon wheels. Yet 'War Girls' does merit attention on sociological grounds, for the skilled way in which it responds to contemporary anxieties. Ought women to tackle male roles? Can they do them well? Will they lose their femininity and become 'like a man'? The poem makes a virtue of necessity, celebrating the war girls' 'energy and knack' and reassuring readers that 'Beneath each uniform / Beats a heart that's soft and warm'. These girls are, of course, the sexual reward for returning soldiers (see the contemporary music-hall songs below), so Pope also stresses that 'They've no time for love and kisses / Till the khaki soldier-boys come marching back.'

But what happens when the men do come back? Love and kisses are all very well, but who takes the job on civvy street? 'War Girls' had already made clear, in a piece of social criticism unusual for Pope's poetry, that gender politics prior to the War had oppressed women: they had been 'caged and penned up'. Never again can that situation be permitted. For all its attempts to allay fears, 'War Girls' exposes a conflict between the rights of women and the rights of soldiers to return to their pre-War jobs. 'Where are they now?', Ivor Gurney would come to ask of his comrades in a poem of 1922, before bleakly answering his own question: 'on state-doles'.

War Poetry during Remembrancetide 2010

Please click on the links below. The BBC links will only work for a few more days, and may not be accessible outside the UK. If I missed anything worthwhile, do add it to the comments, and I will update the post.

Wilfred Owen: A Remembrance Tale (BBC)

Battlefield Poet: Keith Douglas (BBC)

Oh What a Lively War: Guillaume Apollinaire (BBC Radio 4 at 4.30pm today, and on iPlayer thereafter)

'The Bugle' --- a newly published poem by Ivor Gurney (Guardian)

John McCrae: 'In Flanders Fields'

No better time to discuss John McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields' than Remembrance Week, when the poem, or at least a generous excerpt, will be quoted at countless public events across the English-speaking world.

Rarely has the question been asked: how appropriate is the poem to an occasion of remembrance? Or to put it another way, what else might we be submitting to when we submit to this poem? Lest this seem like a finicky concern in the context of overwhelming grief, one fact must be spelt out: in political terms, McCrae could not be more distanced from Owen and Sassoon, whose work 'In Flanders Fields' is often read alongside. And in McCrae's case, the politics shape the poetry; without the politics, there is no poetry. We may not feel obliged to take sides, but an appreciation of these poems must acknowledge that sides have been taken.

In Flanders Fields

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.

'In Flanders Fields' is often read without its final stanza in an attempt to shear away the awkward surprise: that this is a recruitment poem. The best parallel may be with the reception of Psalm 137, 'By the waters of Babylon', in which every effort is made to forget that it ends with an infanticidal revenge fantasy: 'Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.'

Sassoon believed, and persuaded Owen, that the War had been prolonged well past its natural course, and had become a war of punishment and conquest. McCrae's poem calls for the War to be prolonged: the dead would not be able to rest if the cause for which they died were betrayed by peace terms. McCrae and Sassoon represented two extremes of a spectrum of opinion among the fighting men: that Germany and her allies should be crushed; and that peace should be negotiated at the earliest opportunity.

My own difficulty with McCrae's poem is caused not by his politics but by the way that that he pressgangs the dead to make his case. 'We are the Dead', his second stanza begins, and the poem puts into their mouths McCrae's own views on the War. The dead are obliged to speak with a unified voice (which is, of course, more than they managed while alive), through which they insist that the living should go on sacrificing themselves in order to keep faith. This is brilliant propaganda: no one would dare argue with those who have made the ultimate sacrifice. 'In Flanders Fields' attempts an outrageous act of appropriation, which insults the very men whom the poem is meant to honour.

Update: Thanks to Ed Leimbacher, who directs me to this site. It publishes more of McCrae's poems, including 'The Anxious Dead', which seeks to allay the fears expressed by 'In Flanders Fields'. The guns will tell the dead that the living have heard their call and 'will not turn aside... till we win or fall'.

Who Chooses the War Poets?

is the title of Adrian Barlow's public lecture at the Morison Room of Cambridge University Library on Tuesday 9 November at 5.30pm. Details here.

Next day, Wednesday 10 November at 5.30pm in the Mountbatten Room, Royal Overseas League in London, Richard Duncan will be speaking on 'Kipling in Vernet les Bains, France'.

And on Remembrance Sunday, 14 November, at 4.30pm, Radio 4, Martin Sorrell will be presenting 'Oh What a Lively War' (scroll two-thirds of the way down the link), a programme dedicated to French First World War poet Guillaume Apollinaire. I will be holding forth, alongside Susan Harrow and Brian Turner. Paul McGann will be reading Apollinaire's poetry in translation.

War Poetry Review

The new issue of War Poetry Review, the journal of the War Poets Association, is now published. Essays include Jean Liddiard on Rosenberg, Derek Shiel on David Jones, and Stuart Lee and Kate Lindsay on the First World War Poetry Digital Archive. You can view the full list of contents here.

Update: In other news, a conference on 'Tales of War' has been announced to take place in Bucharest next July. I admit that I can't make head nor tail of the Call for Papers: 'As a phenomenological issue, as the privileged subject matter of cultural debates, historiography, theology, philosophy, interpretation strategies and anthropological research the problematic of war appears to illustrate and confirm, beyond Eliade's "terror of history" or Ricoeur's "hermeneutics of suspicion", the correlatives of subjectivity, as well as a richly connotative "existential heritage" of the "fallable man".' Etc.