Bombed last night and bombed the night before
Going to get bombed tonight if we never get bombed anymore.
When we’re bombed, we’re scared as we can be.
Can’t stop the bombing from old Higher Germany.
They’re warning us, they’re warning us.
One shell hole for just the four of us
Thank your lucky stars there are no more of us.
’Cos one of us can fill it all alone.
Gassed last night and gassed the night before
Going to get gassed tonight if we never get gassed anymore.
When we’re gassed we’re sick as we can be.
For Phosgene and Mustard Gas is much too much for me.
They’re killing us, they’re killing us.
One respirator for the four of us.
Thank your lucky stars there is no more of us.
So one of us can take it all alone.
Anon.
DAVID ALMOND – Author
Oh, What a Lovely War! is a variety show, a series of songs and sketches and jokes. It’s an exuberant and compelling recreation of early-twentieth-century music hall. Rooted in the culture of everyman, it speaks in a common tongue, is a work of art for everyone, and is terrifying and profound. It speaks of the First World War, and is beautifully specific in its references to named generals and rulers, battles and casualty numbers, in its speech patterns and its songs. But it is about all wars.
I saw it first as a movie in 1970, when the Vietnam War was still raging, and when we all lived in dread of a nuclear holocaust. I saw it again in a brilliant new production at the Northern Stage in Newcastle in 2010, when war raged in the Middle East.
Oh, What a Lovely War! honours the decent, ordinary folk who go to war, the medical staff who care for them, but it makes us laugh and quake at easy patriotism, false heroics, the vanity and slippery half-truths of politicians. It invites us to scoff at notions such as ‘God is on our side’, at tabloid ‘gotcha’ mentality, at media sentimentalization of soldiers’ deaths. War is blood and slaughter, tragedy and grief, always has been and always will be. It can grow quickly from a collective stupidity that we must strive to resist.
Strongest memories of this work? The handsome young men turned into shuddering shell-shocked veterans on the stage, the multitude of white crosses stretching towards the horizon at the end of the film, and all those chippy cheerful yearning songs that spring from the core of life but are sung against a background of pain and death.
You’ll see some of the songs from Oh, What a Lovely War! introducing the sections of this book.
LISSA EVANS – Author, producer and director
I once wrote a novel set during the Second World War; it was about the making of a film, and much of it took place in London, during the Blitz. What struck me most, during my research, was how much ordinary things went on mattering, even during extraordinary and terrible times. Being bombed nightly didn’t stop people from wanting something nice for tea or being frustrated if a shoelace broke; it was the ordinary things that kept people anchored to the lives they’d had before, and which they hoped someday to have again.
Stanley Spencer knew this. He was an artist, but during the First World War he worked as a medical orderly, both in England and in northern Greece, where an obscure bit of the war was being fought. He saw many horrible things, brutal death and unspeakable injury; he saw men with shell shock, unable to cope with what they had seen and heard.
After the war, he was commissioned to paint the inside of the newly built Sandham Chapel. It’s an extraordinary place, the walls completely filled with giant canvases that show a different war to the one normally portrayed: a shell-shocked soldier scrubbing a hospital corridor; early morning in a crowded tent, the soldiers shrouded in mosquito nets; a kit inspection; tea urns being filled; a medical orderly opening the gates of a hospital to let in a bus full of the wounded. Small, undramatic moments, but painted with as much intensity and detail as if they were battle scenes.
And in Map Reading, the painting I have chosen for this collection, Stanley Spencer showed something different again: a pause, a moment when the war could almost be forgotten.
The officer is using his horse as a map table. One of the soldiers is feeding the horse from a nosebag. No one else in the painting is doing any work at all – instead, they’re snatching a few minutes in the sunshine. They’re lolling, or sleeping, or picking berries from the mass of bushes at the top of the picture. For a brief moment, they can enjoy being ordinary people doing ordinary things. And in the end, that’s what peace is really about.
Turn to here to see Lissa’s choice.
CLARE MORPURGO –Author and charity campaigner
Stanley Spencer was born in Cookham and lived there most of his life, painting many pictures of his beloved village.
In 1915, when he was twenty-two, Stanley volunteered to train with the Royal Army Medical Corps in Bristol, and in 1916 he served with the 68th Field Ambulance in Macedonia. In 1919 he painted Travoys to commemorate the First World War. He did not want his painting to glorify the horror of war but rather show a moment of redemption and peace.
Turn to here to see Clare’s choice.
As a child I loved this picture long before I understood what it was about. The warm light shining from the stable seemed to be welcoming the travellers on their stretchers, with a promise of warmth and love. To me this could have been a Nativity scene, inspired by the legend that at midnight on Christmas Eve all the animals knelt down in their stables.
IAN BECK – Illustrator
When I first moved to London in the late 1960s I had a part-time job, two days a week at Harrods in Knightsbridge. I usually took the Tube to work but sometimes I would ride on the top deck of a bus. Going round Hyde Park Corner I was struck by the Royal Artillery Memorial. Fresh from art school I was surprised to find something so apparently ‘old fashioned’ and figurative so moving and involving. I was captivated by it and still am nearly fifty years later. I mentioned my interest to a friend who said, ‘I think the same sculptor did the wonderful soldier reading a letter at Paddington station.’
The next time I was at Paddington I made a point of seeking it out. It was obviously by the same hand. Instead of viewing the work from a distance, as in the case of the Artillery Memorial, it was possible to get close. The soldier is in battle dress. He has an army greatcoat draped over his shoulders. He is reading a letter from home. It appears to be winter as he has a home-knitted scarf tight around his neck. Perhaps the letter arrrived with the scarf, which was a Christmas present? His face is passive and his helmet is at a slightly rakish angle. This is a brief repite. A moment out of war. Time to catch up on the news from home. The image resonates as strongly today as it surely did when it was unveiled at 11 o’clock on Armistice Day in 1922.
Jagger himself fought in the trenches and was wounded twice. His soldiers are real and solidly imagined. His is an art born from experience. As Lord Churchill said at the unveiling, ‘I can only hope that when you gaze upon it you may find some solace in the remembrance of those many letters that you wrote to your loved ones at the front, and that you will realise not only what a comfort they were to them, but also how they imbued them with fresh strength and fresh spirit to endure the many horrors and hardships of war.’
The Great Western Railway War Memorial Sculpted by Charles Sargeant Jagger, 1922
EMMA THOMPSON – Actress, screenwriter and author
My father was mildly obsessed with the First World War. He owned a battered, brown-paper-covered facsimile of the Wipers Times, a newspaper written and produced in the trenches for and by the soldiers.
I used to pore over it for hours.
A great deal of it was funny. I particularly loved the cod adverts, Boarding Houses, strangely foretelling the tone of Spike Milligan and Monty Python.
The editors would beg their contributors for humorous pieces. The war made great poets of some, but there were cle
arly hundreds of others who longed to express their agony poetically but hadn’t the gift.
‘No more poetry!’ would be the plaintive edict.
Produced under mind-bogglingly difficult circumstances, occasionally in some ghastly scramble from dugout to dugout, a printing block would go missing.
‘All the “M”s in the issue to be represented by “W”s,’ they’d warn – until some brave soul would risk all manner of hell to go back and find the missing letter.
Everything about this endeavour reveals the peculiarly bloody-minded stoicism of our tribe, determined to wring every morsel of humour out of sustained physical and moral catastrophe.
KLAUS FLUGGE – Publisher
It is perhaps not well known that a lot of German writers, and particularly poets, wrote about the First World War, many of them after the war, if they were lucky enough to survive.
Kurt Tucholsky, a great pacifist writer and journalist born in Berlin in 1880, was lucky, but committed suicide in 1935 in Sweden, having escaped from the Nazis in 1930. The sentiments expressed in this poem were often reflected in the letters my father wrote home from the front. He died at the end of the Second World War.
My own first experience of war took place during the nightly bombing of Hamburg in 1943 and, after my mother escaped from the burning city with her three children, in 1945 in East Germany.
I have always been an ardent pacifist despite brainwashing in school by both the Nazis and the Communists thereafter. The literature of the twenties in Germany produced a lot of great books and poems, anti-war and often pacifist, which had an influence on me for the rest of my life.
PRAYER AFTER THE SLAUGHTER
Heads off for prayer!
Oh God, our dirty and muddied old bones
Have crept forth once more from the trench’s chalky stones.
We appear before you to pray and do not remain silent.
And ask you, Oh God:
Why?
Why have we given our heart’s blood away?
While the Kaiser’s six sons all living do stay.
We once believed . . . Oh how stupid we were . . .!
They made us all drunk . . .
Why?
One man screamed in his hospital bed for six months,
Before dry food and staff doctors finished him off.
Another became blind and took opium secretly.
Three of us between us have only one arm . . .
Why?
Faith, life, war and everything else we have lost
It was they, the powers, who tossed us into it
Like film gladiators.
We had the best audience,
But it didn’t die with us.
Why? Why?
Lord God!
If you really are there as we daily do learn
Descend from starred heaven and show your concern!
Come down to us mortals or send us your son!
Tear the flags down, the orders, the decoration!
Announce to the countries of the earth how we have suffered;
How hunger, lice, shrapnel and lies our bodies have covered!
Chaplains have carried us to our graves in your name.
Declare they have lied! Is it us that you blame?
Chase us back to our graves, but answer us clear!
We kneel before you as best we can – but please lend us your ear!
If our dying has not been completely without point,
Do not anoint us with another year like 1914!
Tell the people and drive them to desert!
A battalion of corpses looks to you for comfort.
All that remains for us is to come before you and pray!
Away!
Kurt Tucholsky
(translated by Peter Appelbaum)
JAMILA GAVIN – Writer
In the First World War 1.27 million Indians volunteered to fight for Britain. That is more than all the Scots, Welsh and Irish combined, and more than the sum total from all the rest of Britain’s colonies and dominions.
A wounded Punjabi soldier dictating a letter at a hospital in Brighton, August 1915
From a letter by a wounded Punjabi Rajput to a relative in India
A wounded Garhwali writes to his elder brother in India:
The twelve kings, among others, were:
Emperor George V of Great Britain and all his colonies
Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany
Kaiser Franz Josef of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
Tsar Nicholas of Russia
King Peter of Serbia
King Ferdinand I of Bulgaria
King Constantine of Greece
King Vittorio Emanuele III of Italy
Prince Wilhelm zu Wied of Albania
King Haakon VII of Norway
King Christian X of Denmark
Sultan Mehmet V of Turkey
The experience of Indians fighting in the First World War was traumatic and revelatory. While their involvement was absolutely necessary to the British, who were otherwise greatly outnumbered by Germany and her allies, it presented Britain with a moral dilemma within the concept of white racial superiority, in which they believed completely: how could brown-skinned Indians be asked to kill the white-skinned enemy?
This nicety was overcome at first by deciding that only soldiers from the princely states should fight – and that the regiments should, by and large, be drawn from the northern states because it was believed that people from the South of India did not have the same fighting capacity and enthusiasm. The British thought this was because, for some Darwinian reason, the inhabitants of the South were racially inferior; probably because they tended to be darker and of shorter stature. Yet other reasons suggest it might be because the South had not experienced the constant invasions into the North going back three or more thousand years – by Greeks, Aryans, Mongols, Bactrians, Afghans, Turks, Scythians, Mughals and the British – which gave them a culture of warfare, as well as the consequent racial mixing. While the predominantly Hindu South had been spared the effect of many of these invasions, they had inherited much of the philosophy of the great Emperor Ashoka (273–232 BC) who, after a bloodthirsty start, embraced Buddhism and spent the rest of his reign promoting the concept of Dharma: respect for all life.
So the regiments which were sent to fight were largely drawn from the North – the Punjabis, Sikhs, Rajputs and Beluchis, the majority from Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan.
Khudadad Khan was the first Indian to receive the Victoria Cross for bravery. He fought with the 129th Duke of Connaught’s Own Baluchis at the first Battle of Ypres, 1914.
They only plead for one reward,
Repaying every loss,
The right to wear like Britain’s sons,
The great Victorian Cross.
Anon.
But even the many Indian regiments weren’t enough for this war, which was devouring lives in their thousands, and there was forcible recruitment of young men from the towns and villages from across northern India – though persuasion was used as well.
This song, recorded for the gramophone by Bhai Chhaila Patialewala, explains the confusing dual existence of a Punjabi British Soldier.
The recruits are at your door step
Here you eat dried roti
There you’ll eat fruit . . .
Here you are in tatters
There you’ll wear a suit . . .
Here you wear worn out shoes
There you’ll wear boot(s) . . .
Bhai Chhaila Patialewala
However, the conditions the soldiers found themselves in, especially those from the Indian regiments, were beyond their comprehension. They suffered dreadfully in uniforms best suited to the heat of India, and the carnage they witnessed could only be understood within their knowledge of the great epic battles of mythology in The Mahabharata; though the Chief Military Censor of letters commented: ‘Not since the days of Hannibal has any of mercenaries suffered so much and complai
ned so little.’ But the letters home were graphic.
A Sikh writing in Gurmukhi from FPO 13, France, to Mahant Partab Das (Patiala State, Punjab) on 18 October 1915
A wounded Garhwali writing from hospital in England, 1917
Don’t go don’t go
Stay back my friend.
Crazy people are packing up,
Flowers are withering and friendships are breaking.
Stay back my friend.
Allah gives bread and work
You wouldn’t find soothing shades anywhere else.
Don’t go my friend, don’t go.
Punjabi folk song of the early 20th century
The First World War was to shake up kingdoms, states, religions, customs and expectations of the whole world, from the great capitals and monarchies of Europe to the smallest of villages of India.
Letter in Urdu from Ressaidar Bishan Singh (JAT 39) to Choudhuri Dobi Dyal (Jullundur District, Punjab)
Having breached one taboo – that of brown-skinned soldiers fighting white-skinned Germans – George V was keen to demonstrate his appreciation of the sacrifice so many Indians had made, and ordered that they should receive the finest nursing care in England. The Royal Pavilion, Brighton, was converted into hospital wards, in the hope that its oriental architecture would make them feel more at home. Of course, in view of the growing movement towards Indian independence now taking hold on the subcontinent, the British were also keen for soldiers returning to India to feel loyal to Britain.
The war at last was over . . .