God Keep My Soldier Boy
May Wedderburn Cannan
The Splendid Days by May Wedderburn Cannan
Imagine it. You are a young woman of some education, some promise. Your family, let us say they are intelligentsia. Professors, poets, that kind of thing. You are spirited, in a way. You believe in action. Action in life, action in love. It is your hope to marry well, of course, to love very deeply, to build a large and contented life. And then, not as a result of your doing, the war arrives, a greater war than has been fought in living memory, a war so immense and so terrible that all of life is swept up in it, made prisoner to it, caught and dragged along as if behind a stampede of horses. And you must go — your moral principles tell you must go — to France to serve as nurse, with the ambulances if necessary — while your betrothed fights in this terrible war, which has long before its conclusion ended the lives of most of the young men you had danced with before its outbreak, in that carefree time.
The world was once, as so many say who in their time were young, a good place. Where there was hope for the future and happiness could be sought, even held. But now promise dims, things go bad, get worse. What is there to do and to say about all of it? What is there to do?
How do you live in reaction to this? Do you defy it — defy your duty, decide that life is not to be lived in this way, at the mercy of events? Do you somehow contrive to have your intended removed from a place of danger to a place of safety? Does war lose its favour with you, just as nursing the results of war might? This is not your reaction. Instead, you begin to think and to write on different lines. Lines almost of tragic honesty, except, of course, you believe in promises that can never be kept, all the siren-songs of the supernatural. You write and publish a little on those dimensions.
And when, as he does, your intended dies — not in the war, per se, not of bomb or bullet, but in the vast influenza of the period — how do you write about that?
May Wedderburn Cannan answers the question in more than one way. In some senses, her work is quite ordinary. It is the story of young love cut off. She looks back, endlessly, obsessively, to the time now ended, spent with her betrothed. The days in Paris, the leaves he got from his soldiering and she from her nursing. I’ve not lost a fiancee but I should imagine the psychology of attempting to relive, to recreate, to resurrect moments of that kind is rather obvious.
Other poems are dramatic monologue types: the idea being that of individual characters, not exactly analogues of the author, discussing things like ideal weddings — promises of future happiness — or unfeeling older women who do not understand. These sorts of things are poetic staples. There’s no surprise that such things might appeal — the creative mind reacts to perturbation with creation, after all.
We imagine scenarios; we think things through; our minds work obsessively; they turn things over, return to lost causes, make new things of old regrets.
And quite a lot of this book seeks solace in the supernatural, and in all those things we cannot know. It contains many notions open, of course, to question.
The idea that those lost in the Great War did not mind early death, that they welcomed it, met it smiling, and so on. All ideas that may give consolation of a kind but that seem unlikely to have been true. So much of the culture around the Great War was like this but by contrast, a deal of what we conjecture about the history of the emotions indicates it is romantic falsehood, spun for people at home, spun to ease their fears for those they loved, to ameliorate suffering known about but not directly experienced.
And then we may get metaphysical: that St Peter might gesture, upon a soldier boy arriving at the gates of Heaven, to the Archangel Michael who would say, he is known to me; he may step forward to join my army of God.
Love enduring forever, and lovers (separated by war, by death) being reunited in a hereafter in all manner of ways and means.
How seriously must we, readers, be forced to take any of this?
Some of the writing here is a cut above the average: wars produce a lot of poetry, a great deal of it aggressively mediocre and flag-waving or sentimental, and this is better than much of it.
So much of the culture of the Great War has disappeared now that those in the second quarter of the twenty-first century might be expected to have a less than fuzzy, less than inept, appreciation of what the war was, what it meant, where it lay in history’s long and evil arc.
Books like this one might teach a little sympathy, a little understanding of those long gone. Of their struggles, their fears, their vain and dashed hopes. Their lives, and the illusions they clung to beyond reason: because the alternative would be simply too horrible, too cruel, to inhuman — as history is — to contemplate.