George Calderon is presumed to have died just after noon at the Third Battle of Krithia on 4 June 1915. Obviously, I refer first-time blog-visitors to my posts for that and subsequent days last year, the actual centenary of the events.
A number of followers have said to me that they cannot believe ‘a year has already passed’. Personally, I wish it hadn’t; as I have repeatedly confessed in this blog, I would have liked to have finished George Calderon: Edwardian Genius six months ago, in which case I might have been able to leave up my usual preamble about Calderonia (i.e. for 1914-15), announce a publication date, stop blogging, and not have to mark this anniversary.
I had always assumed, anyway, that I would not feel so bad about the anniversary as I did this time last year. Wrong: I feel worse. Writing George’s last days and the ghastly aftermath of 4 June was eviscerating (a word I don’t use lightly), but we were building up to the Commemoration of his death, held in bright leafy sunshine outside his last home in Hampstead, which I think we all found solemn, uplifting, perhaps cathartic. What with the ‘wake’ afterwards in Café Rouge, it certainly felt like a form of closure.
But time does not stop and here we are again. Inevitably, I suppose, I have flashbacks to this time last year and the 1915 day itself, as it were, whose heat and wind and dust and smoke and death I felt so overpoweringly. However, the difference is that I now know more facts about the attack at noon by A and B Companies (see my post of 20 July 2015), and they make it seem more terrible than ever. The 1st KOSB’s commanding officer, Major Stoney, quite clearly employed a ruse to delay sending the second wave over the top to their deaths after A and B had been mown down: the telephone line to the brigade was broken and he used this to wait at least twenty minutes longer than his orders before beginning to send C and D forward in ‘platoon rushes’ that were successful. If he could do this, why couldn’t he delay the first wave’s attack, when the ‘feint’ at 11.25 had already shown they would face a wall of lead? The answer is quintessentially Edwardian: his orders were to send A and B over the top at noon and he had to show his ‘stoutness’. One is reminded of Brigadier General Napier, who was leading the main body of the assault troops at Helles on 25 April, being shouted to from the River Clyde ‘You can’t possibly land!’ (in the hail of Turkish bullets), answering ‘I’ll have a damned good try!’, setting off with his staff over the lighters, and falling dead seconds later…
And did George die ‘outright’, as two survivors supposed, or did he lie there an unspecified time, screaming, or groaning, or calling, biting everything back as was his character, before losing consciousness — all as his friend William Rothenstein secretly feared? Frankly, the absurdity and waste of George Calderon’s death fell me more than ever.
However, there is no doubt whatsoever that he believed in what he was doing; and belief/faith of this kind is absurd by nature. In The Cherry Orchard, without knowing it, Pishchik sums up Kierkegaard thus: ‘Some great philosopher, apparently, advises people to leap off roofs… Just leap! he says, and that’s what it’s all about.’ But, of course, we may not share George’s absurd faith. It is very doubtful that his wife did. I have been fond of quoting in this blog Stanley Spencer’s words about his masterpiece The Resurrection of Soldiers: ‘Nothing is lost where a sacrifice has been the result of a perfect understanding.’ What of those who went to the slaughter without that ‘perfect understanding’?
The difference between the centenary and this year’s anniversary is a difference of temporalities or chronotopes. The stressful relationship between the two is our old friend chronotopia. The Commemoration was the completion of a special, one-hundred-year circle (see Clare Hopkins’s Comment to my post of 20 July 2015) . This year we are back to linear reality… Year after year until the last syllable of recorded time.
I shall now be blogging between one and three times a week, but not on set days. In order not to miss posts, therefore, you might like to subscribe at the very top right. ‘Watch this Space’, with its preamble about Calderonia as an experiment in biography, is suspended until I can announce a publication date for my full-length biography of George Calderon. Once this has been done, the ‘Watch this Space’ preamble will be restored and I shall cease blogging until publication. I will always respond to Comments. For an explanation of Calderonia proper, i.e. the blog from 30 July 1914 (2014) to 30 July 1915 (2015), click on ‘About’ in the banner. To access Calderonia proper go to ‘Calderonia: Start Here’ also at top right.
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This post made me feel desperately sad. Sad for George, dying as he did; sad for you, Patrick, mourning him as you are; saddest of all, perhaps, for those whom nobody mourns at all.
In the last few days I happen to have been reading Robert Nichols’ poem ‘The Assault’. These lines are about the Western Front battlefield of Loos in September 1915, but I was powerfully struck by the universality of the junior officer’s experience in every theatre of the First World War:
I hear my whistle shriek
Between teeth set,
I fling an arm up,
Scramble up the grime
Over the parapet!
I’m up. Go on.
Something meets us.
Head down into the storm that greets us.
A wail!
Lights. Blurr.
Gone.
On, on. Lead. Lead. Hail.
Spatter. Whirr. Whirr.
‘Toward that patch of brown,
Direction left.’ Bullets: a stream.
Devouring thought crying in a dream;
Men, crumpled, going down….
Go on. Go.
I would be very interested to know how other Calderonians read ‘Lead. Lead.’ I originally took it as a reference to the hail of bullets, but of course ‘lead’ is also an imperative verb. Is this young poet – against his every natural instinct – urging himself to lead his men to their deaths? Robert was one of Trinity College’s ‘Class of 1913’, of whom more than a quarter fell in WW1. He was terrified by the intense bombardment that preceded Loos; but he was even more terrified at the thought of failing to play the part expected of him as an Edwardian officer.
When I looked at the ‘The Assault’ in Nichols’ first edition, I was taken aback to realise that this word was so important to him that he gave it a diacritic: ˘. But what, then, does it mean? It is a ‘breve’ – so is this therefore the short syllable ‘led’ referring simply to bullets as I had initially assumed? But it is positioned, somewhat oddly, above the letter ‘a’ – so is it thereby extending the diphthong into an even longer, two-syllable word, in order to emphasise the impossible agony of leadership?
We will never know George Calderon’s thoughts as he led the way out of that crumbling trench at Krithia. Following the last days of his life a year ago, I remember thinking that he didn’t seem particularly bothered about the men in his platoon. But I realise I was mistaken in this view. It was very moving to re-read your account of how, just before the attack began, he ‘picked the leaf of a certain shrub, and told the men to do the same and to chew the leaves, as these were said by the Turks to give vigour.’ That was the act of a thoughtful and intuitive individual. It was kind. And somehow, I am glad to know that, somewhere in that awful place, something green was growing.
Calderonian poetry-lovers all, please consider Commenting on Clare’s fascinating piece below about Robert Nichols’s poem ‘The Assault’ — for it’s only by doing that that we can weigh what might be the correct, or best reading of the contentious line! First we had a problem with modern readings of Binyon’s ‘They shall grow not old’, now it’s a question of how to pronounce ‘Lead. Lead.’ in this remarkable, cinematic poem of Nichols’s (many copies available on the Web). I know what I prefer in the year 2016, but I fear that, as with the Binyon, I am historically wrong… Not wishing to spoil anything now, I fully intend to return to the Binyon and other cruxes on Remembrance Sunday.
Meanwhile, Clare, I must thank you again warmly for your genuinely superior understanding of the mood of my post ‘A terrible anniversary’. I was perhaps got down by the ‘eternal recurrence’ of deadly anniversaries; and by some extremely morbid reading I was having to do for an interview with a theologian who has written on eschatology. But the fact is, of course you are right to say I was ‘mourning’ George Calderon. Why can’t men see this sort of thing?! As I have written before, it seems irrational to ‘mourn’ someone you have never known and who died a hundred years ago, but yes, something in the brain does trigger the grieving response, there’s no other word for it. Another follower commented on the ‘millions’ for whom, in your words, ‘nobody mourns at all’, and I agree, but if ever there were a time in which families in Britain, at least, are reconnecting with their fallen, it is now.
Finally, I was delighted by your remark that George’s picking leaves from a certain shrub and telling his men to do the same as it would give them vigour (courage), was ‘the act of a thoughtful and intuitive individual’. George Calderon was a very kind person in private life. One can see that from the facts that he helped care for his dying friend Archie Ripley, sat for hours cheering up the painter Charles Furse when he had a bout of consumption, regularly read to patients in the Ophthalmic Ward at St Thomas’s, and was his infirm mother-in-law’s most popular lifter and jollier-on. Kittie’s word for his charitableness was ‘tender’. She, a lifelong Christian, described George, an agnostic if not a Taoist, as a better Christian than herself. It is a pity that his public persona so often seemed smouldering, irascible and confrontational! But I agree with you about this last glimpse of George’s kindness and empathy. It is also interesting that the clear suggestion is that he chewed these leaves himself. His sang froid may have been described as ‘legendary’, but he was still utterly human: as I see it, to do this he himself must have been afraid.
Yes, mourning. Why can’t/shouldn’t one mourn those one never knew and now long dead? Thank you (and Clare Hopkins) for writing so movingly about George Calderon who was only a name to me.
I want to pick up on Clare’s query about Robert Nichols’s strange usage of ‘Lead’ with a diacritic over the ‘a’ in his poem ‘The Assault’. Earlier in the poem occur the lines “A stream of lead raves / Over us from the left … (we safe under cover!)” in which ‘lead’ is rendered just like that without diacritic and obviously means ‘bullets’. The later lines (with the diacritic twice) read: “On, on. Lead. Lead. Hail. / Spatter. Whirr! Whirr!” Here ‘Lead’ seems to look both ways. Back to “On, on” (with the sense of the officer-speaker urging himself to lead his men), but also forwards to “Hail. / Spatter” etc (ie a hail of bullets and hence ‘lead’ in that sense). I wish I’d discussed this fascinating detail of the poem in my group-biography “Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War” (Pimlico, 2012) in which Nichols appears in several chapters along with his more famous contemporaries. For what it’s worth, I think Clare is right that Nichols put the diacritic there deliberately to elongate the word (as ‘Leeed. Leeed’), emphasising that he means here the officer’s self-injunction to ‘lead’ his men notwithstanding the hail of bullets, and thus distinguishing the word from the other sense. During his brief time at the Front, Nichols never did ‘lead’ his men in this kind of brave crazy attack (“Cool madness” as he calls it in the poem), but at some level he desperately wished he had and imaginatively allowed himself to in the poem, just as he allowed himself more extended service etc in other poems in “Ardours and Endurances”, the sequence in which ‘The Assault’ appears. This imaginative compensation has its own poignancy, I think, and gives a glimpse of one aspect of the extraordinary pressure those who served were under (have you been ‘over the top’, shown your mettle under fire?).
When Nichols read the poem aloud as I imagine he did at war-charity and other readings (though I found no definite record of him delivering this particular poem), the meaning of the word would have been clear. As it stands on the page, however, ‘Lead’ with a diacritic visually remains a pun, suggesting both of its possible senses. Which is perhaps fitting. It is ‘lead’ after all into which the officer is ‘leading’ his men.
Very many thanks Harry for such a comprehensive and helpful answer to my question about Robert Nichols’ line ‘Lead. Lead.’ I really wanted these words to relate to the junior officer leading his men, because this reading seems to make ‘the Assault’ a better – i.e. a deeper and more complex – poem. How sad that Robert ‘desperately wished’ he had taken part in some ‘brave crazy attack’; and how bad that a man who had succumbed to PTSD (as we now call it) should have felt he had failed to meet the expectations of society.
I find myself wondering why Robert Nichols is not better known today. Is it because he did not suffer enough at the front? Or because his poems are too long for the GCSE English Literature syllabus? I also find myself reflecting on Gallipoli and poetry in general. The Dardanelles campaign is very little remembered in the UK, and none of our canon of well-known war poetry relates to it. Is this chicken-and-egg? Discuss.
Another question, for you Patrick: George Calderon seems to have turned his hand to many genres – journalism, satire, drama, comedy, reviews, works on linguistics and anthropology…. Did he never attempt a poem?
Dear Clare and Harry,
I am enjoying your dialogue very much. I hope it continues, and I hope as ever that others contribute! Meanwhile, I can add some crumbs.
A distinguished Professor of Linguistics has come on board and agrees that the breve on the ‘a’ in ‘Lead.’ doesn’t really make sense if it is meant to lengthen the diphthong to ‘Leed’. He writes: ‘I haven’t anything helpful to say about the diacritic. Seems he could see there was potentially a problem, but didn’t give a clear indicator of what was intended. Maybe there’s someone who would know about conventions of the time, who would be confident about what was meant.’
After I speculated about Gallipoli war poetry in my post of 1 May 2015, a follower sent as Comment to that post the text of the Australian Sydney Bolitho’s long poem, and another directed me to A.P. Herbert’s collection Half-hours at Helles (1916), from which I quoted powerful lines about the Third Battle of Krithia in my post of 5 June 2015. But these, I would say, are verse. I’m sure Harry will know of ANZAC poetry written in or about the Gallipoli campaign.
I have never come across a poem written by George, but he was an extremely accomplished writer of verse. I suspect he had a perfect metrical ear. He could certainly call on a vast range of rhymes. The pantomimes Cinderella: An Ibsen Pantomime and The Brave Little Tailor suggest an enviable fluency and quality. This natural talent also enabled him to produce the pastiche Tudor pentameter of Cromwell: Mall o’Monks (1907-9) and the absolutely first-rate translation of the bylina (long narrative poem) Dobrynia published by Henry Newbolt in the Monthly Review of December 1901. In his memoirs, Newbolt said he was as proud of publishing this version of George’s as he was long poems by Binyon and Yeats.
George’s taste in English poetry seems to have been boring and half-hearted. However, the poetry of Tahitian songs wowed him! So, yes, I think he did write poetry when he translated a whole set of these Tahitian songs and utes, which Kittie included when she edited George’s Tahitian travelogue for publication (1921).