Every day brings another press extract in The Times’s ‘The First World War’ series, every week another email in their history of the war, and the stream of Tweets from the Imperial War Museum, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, historical institutions, the media, descendants of the fallen, never slackens…
The War grinds on. I try to analyse how my attitude towards it has changed since August 2014. Posting almost daily on George’s experience of the war 1914-15, particularly at Ypres and Gallipoli, was, of course, an exceptional mode of apprehension — eviscerating; exhausting; enervating on the day and hour at Hampstead when we marked his death. As I said at the time, though, such empathy, for want of a better word, or re-living, is the biographer’s job whatever is going on in his/her subject’s life. It was bound to fade away after 4 June 2015. Indeed I believe the biographer always has to come out of that experience again: ‘the limits of empathy are understanding’.
However, I still follow the war quite closely. Possibly I try to look at the cataclysm more historically now. As that superb book The Long Shadow by David Reynolds shows, we are living in a world still shaped by two German world wars. What really was the nature of our commitment to Europe in 1914, and again in 1939? What’s the connexion between those wars and Brexit? What does the past tell us as a nation about our future?
History aside, though, I only have to re-read the 1914-15 chapter of my biography (as I did yesterday to check archive permissions), or stumble on a war poem, and it ‘all’ comes back to me; by which I mean the visceral experience, George’s experience, my grandfather’s experience, Sassoon’s experience, Graves’s experience, Owen’s experience, everyone’s experience. As I have said before, if a German President could state that ‘there can be no moral closure for Germany’, we know from experience that there can be no emotional closure for the rest of us.
This is why the personal effects, the documents and the works of art of World War I affect us so deeply. I read a poem of Rosenberg’s or Trakl’s again, I glance at a souvenir brought back by my grandfather from Ypres, or I chance upon a photocopy of George’s letter to Kittie as he left on the R.M.S. Orsova for Lemnos, and all the emotions are re-ignited.
There is a superb exhibition of Paul Nash’s life’s work at Tate Britain until 5 March. Nash must be one of the very few painters who was a war artist in both world wars (George’s close friend William Rothenstein was one in 1914-18). An unforgettable war painting of Nash’s, which came out of his experience of Ypres 3, is We Are Making a New World, which you can see on the Imperial War Museum website by clicking here. On 13 November 1917 Nash wrote to his wife:
It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from men fighting to those who want the war to last forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.
It is not feeble, of course, and Nash’s anger in this letter is searing. By ‘those who want the war to last forever’ he may have had in mind Lloyd George, who still pursued a ‘knock-out blow’ in the West, or the French with their jusqu’au boutisme, but it equally applied to the Germans, who in their ‘Turnip Winter’ of 1917 launched unrestricted submarine warfare as the way of turning the war. They had forfeited the chance of peace offered them by Woodrow Wilson, by refusing to vacate Belgium. As Norman Stone has written:
Bethmann Hollweg [the German Chancellor] could not say that he would restore Belgium, because he did not intend to do so: Germany was fighting for a German Europe, in effect the ‘Mitteleuropa’ programme partly realized at Brest-Litovsk a year later, and Belgium, with its French establishment and British leanings, did not belong. German industrialists were expecting to take over the considerable coal and iron reserves of Belgium, and the military at the very least wanted to take the fortifications of Liège with a view to any future war.
To some extent, these two quotations epitomise the artist’s and the historian’s different apprehensions of the war.
It is uncanny, I find, how one’s mood follows the war’s emotional trajectory. The shock, the excitement, the moral fervour, the ‘gallantry’, even the fear, are gone: the flower of the nation’s manhood has been blasted, in Kitchener’s words the women are ‘doing nearly everything done by men’, the population are being bombed and starved, it has come down to cold, gritted determination that could fray into mutiny and insanity. If, after thirty months, the commemoration of the war has actually desensitised us, there is something authentic about that: so it had contemporaries, although not brutalised them, I think.
The people I do not envy at this moment are those professionally engaged in the commemoration of the war, day in day out, for another two years. I can close the book of poems, shut my grandfather’s bag of memorabilia, put the photocopied 1915 letter back in its file, and turn away from the war. The professionals of the IWM, the CWGC, historical institutions, the army, the navy, the air force, churches, museums and archives, cannot, and I wonder how on earth they manage to carry on.
Related
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George Calderon c.1901
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Captain of the 11
George Calderon, 1912
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
The War
Every day brings another press extract in The Times’s ‘The First World War’ series, every week another email in their history of the war, and the stream of Tweets from the Imperial War Museum, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, historical institutions, the media, descendants of the fallen, never slackens…
The War grinds on. I try to analyse how my attitude towards it has changed since August 2014. Posting almost daily on George’s experience of the war 1914-15, particularly at Ypres and Gallipoli, was, of course, an exceptional mode of apprehension — eviscerating; exhausting; enervating on the day and hour at Hampstead when we marked his death. As I said at the time, though, such empathy, for want of a better word, or re-living, is the biographer’s job whatever is going on in his/her subject’s life. It was bound to fade away after 4 June 2015. Indeed I believe the biographer always has to come out of that experience again: ‘the limits of empathy are understanding’.
However, I still follow the war quite closely. Possibly I try to look at the cataclysm more historically now. As that superb book The Long Shadow by David Reynolds shows, we are living in a world still shaped by two German world wars. What really was the nature of our commitment to Europe in 1914, and again in 1939? What’s the connexion between those wars and Brexit? What does the past tell us as a nation about our future?
History aside, though, I only have to re-read the 1914-15 chapter of my biography (as I did yesterday to check archive permissions), or stumble on a war poem, and it ‘all’ comes back to me; by which I mean the visceral experience, George’s experience, my grandfather’s experience, Sassoon’s experience, Graves’s experience, Owen’s experience, everyone’s experience. As I have said before, if a German President could state that ‘there can be no moral closure for Germany’, we know from experience that there can be no emotional closure for the rest of us.
This is why the personal effects, the documents and the works of art of World War I affect us so deeply. I read a poem of Rosenberg’s or Trakl’s again, I glance at a souvenir brought back by my grandfather from Ypres, or I chance upon a photocopy of George’s letter to Kittie as he left on the R.M.S. Orsova for Lemnos, and all the emotions are re-ignited.
There is a superb exhibition of Paul Nash’s life’s work at Tate Britain until 5 March. Nash must be one of the very few painters who was a war artist in both world wars (George’s close friend William Rothenstein was one in 1914-18). An unforgettable war painting of Nash’s, which came out of his experience of Ypres 3, is We Are Making a New World, which you can see on the Imperial War Museum website by clicking here. On 13 November 1917 Nash wrote to his wife:
It is not feeble, of course, and Nash’s anger in this letter is searing. By ‘those who want the war to last forever’ he may have had in mind Lloyd George, who still pursued a ‘knock-out blow’ in the West, or the French with their jusqu’au boutisme, but it equally applied to the Germans, who in their ‘Turnip Winter’ of 1917 launched unrestricted submarine warfare as the way of turning the war. They had forfeited the chance of peace offered them by Woodrow Wilson, by refusing to vacate Belgium. As Norman Stone has written:
To some extent, these two quotations epitomise the artist’s and the historian’s different apprehensions of the war.
It is uncanny, I find, how one’s mood follows the war’s emotional trajectory. The shock, the excitement, the moral fervour, the ‘gallantry’, even the fear, are gone: the flower of the nation’s manhood has been blasted, in Kitchener’s words the women are ‘doing nearly everything done by men’, the population are being bombed and starved, it has come down to cold, gritted determination that could fray into mutiny and insanity. If, after thirty months, the commemoration of the war has actually desensitised us, there is something authentic about that: so it had contemporaries, although not brutalised them, I think.
The people I do not envy at this moment are those professionally engaged in the commemoration of the war, day in day out, for another two years. I can close the book of poems, shut my grandfather’s bag of memorabilia, put the photocopied 1915 letter back in its file, and turn away from the war. The professionals of the IWM, the CWGC, historical institutions, the army, the navy, the air force, churches, museums and archives, cannot, and I wonder how on earth they manage to carry on.
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