Robert Service: 'Only a Boche'

The portrayal in verse of the enemy soldier has been one of this blog's recurring subjects. Rarely glimpsed during the First World War, Fritz is most likely to be encountered as a corpse, 'Dribbling black blood from nose and beard', or lying inert while a 'happy warrior' stabs him again and again.

The best time for conversation and reconciliation between warring soldiers is after death. The dead German in 'Strange Meeting' recognises the poem's speaker, 'For so you frowned / Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed'. Similarly, Ivor Gurney imagines in 'The Target' that, if he is killed, he will seek out the man he shot, 'And ask his pardon, if I durst.' After all, as Thomas Hardy had pointed out several years previously, killing someone in war is nothing personal.

Even when Fritz is alive, poets find it hard to muster any animosity towards him. Gurney's own attitudes are complex and shifting, but as I argue in this essay, he reserves his outbursts of rage for letters rather than poetry, and for Germany as a nation rather than for individual soldiers. David Jones goes so far as to dedicate In Parenthesis partly to 'the enemy front-fighters who shared our pains against whom we found ourselves by misadventure'. Resisting all this fellow feeling for the brotherly enemy, the most contemptuous account of Fritz that I have read is given by John Allan Wyeth, whose sonnet, 'Souilly: Hospital', describes how the 'rancid bodies' of POWs inspire his 'dull and cruel laughter'. The greatness of the poem stems from Wyeth's deliberate refusal to offer the sentimental response expected by his readers.

Soldiers sometimes fantasise about killing Germans. Robert Service, like Sassoon, can write poems imagining the joy of bayoneting them --- 'I'm 'untin' for someone to christen me bay'nit', as the charmless speaker of 'My Bay'nit' puts it. However, bloodthirsty rhetoric gives way to compassion when an injured German soldier needs assistance. The title of Service's 'Only a Boche' seems increasingly ironic, as the Boche is discovered to be a mirror-image, a married man and a family man with cherubic daughters whose curse it will be to experience their father's death 'again and again'.

For Service's place among Canadian war poets, see here; and here is an assessment of another poem from Rhymes of a Red Cross Man.

Canadian Poetry from World War I

I missed the publication this summer of a new anthology: Canadian Poetry from World War I, edited by Joel Baetz. By chance I stumbled across it recently, when I was carrying out some amateur research into Robert Service's war poetry.

The recurring theme of Baetz's introduction is that 'Canadians were by and large fervent supporters of the war effort, from its very beginning until its final moments'. A soldier's memoir after the War might talk of a 'nightmare' period of history, but typically his devotion remains intact, and he concludes that the War remains 'the greatest adventure of [his] life among the most glorious men that the world has ever produced.' The poems collected by Baetz seem to support this argument: if there is a Canadian Sassoon or Owen, his work is not represented here. And, sadly, that is a value judgement as well as a political one. Baetz admits that when he is asked, 'But is it good poetry?', his answer is: 'It's always interesting'. The poems are interesting, but I would hesitate to call them good.

The exception is Robert Service. Baetz selects six poems from Rhymes of a Red-Cross Man. They are the best in the book, and they convey the spectrum of Service's responses. One moment he is dutifully celebrating 'the soldier's proudest part': 'He died with the glory of faith in his eyes / And the glory of love in his heart.' The next moment he is writing a traumatised dramatic monologue of a soldier caught on the wire: 'Of the thousands that wheeze and hum / Heedlessly over my head, / Why can't a bullet come, / Pierce to my brain instead...' Pierce to is especially brutal, acknowledging what needs to be pierced even before the bullet reaches the brain to deliver merciful oblivion.

However, the greatest revelation in the anthology is Service's prose, a selection of which Baetz includes in an appendix. An editorial footnote reports that 'Service's Records of a Red Cross Man was a series of weekly correspondent pieces beginning on 11 December 1915 and running until 29 January 1916. Rhymes of a Red-Cross Man was published later that year. The pieces read as documents of Service's experiences as a stretcher-bearer and ambulance driver...'

Service's accounts are, by turns, wry, terrified, courageous and fascinated. An explosion forty yards away leaves the poet staring mesmerised at its 'black snake-head of smoke': 'Then turning round I find I am alone. Like magic every one has vanished.' So Service crawls under his ambulance, and hopes that the man he is waiting to collect --- who is said to be 'dying' --- will hurry up and die so that he can go. It is honest heroism, apparent again later when Service must transport a badly-burned soldier:

The skin of his breast is a blueish color and cracked open in ridges. I am sorry I saw him. After this, when they put the things that once were men into my car I will turn away my head.

The editor of the Toronto Star declined to print the passage. The Ottawa Journal printed it in its entirety, and incurred the wrath of the Chief Censor for doing so.

It may seem to be damning with faint praise to recommend a poetry anthology for its prose, but Baetz's introduction and Service's first-hand accounts make Canadian Poetry from World War I an important book.

Robert Service: 'Tri-colour'

Robert Service, the 'Bard of the Yukon', is claimed by three countries: born in Preston, England, he grew up in Scotland, and moved to Canada aged 21. He was the laureate of the Klondike gold rush (although he first visited the area a decade later), making his name with poems like 'The Shooting of Dan McGrew' and 'The Cremation of Sam McGee'.

Less well-known are Service's war poems. During the First World War, he worked for the Canadian Red Cross, and his experiences were recorded in The Rhymes of a Red-Cross Man (1916). The book deserves much more attention: it belongs with the best of Canadian war poetry.

'Tri-colour' (click on this link) is probably voiced for a British or French soldier, as signalled by the red, white and blue of the flowers. (The United States did not join the war until 1917.) It was written in the same year as Canadian John McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields'. Both works are dramatic monologues, but whereas McCrae claims to give voice to the dead, Service speaks powerfully for the mad. The Christian consolation at the end is tantalisingly ambiguous. Does the dying soldier hallucinate the vision, or is mercy finally granted?