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Two Fusiliers and Two Poets

9/22/2021

Robert Graves was born in Wimbledon in 1895, the third child of ten. His father was an Irish poet and his mother was the great-niece of a famous German historian. Graves learned to box because his half-German ancestry made him the target of bullies.

Graves published his first poems in 1911, when he was a student at The Charterhouse School. One of the young masters there was George Mallory, who introduced Graves to the works of George Bernard Shaw, Rupert Brooke, and John Edward Masefield, and took him climbing. Mallory was later to die on the 1924 Everest expedition.

In 1914, Graves was supposed to go to St John’s College, Oxford. Instead, he enlisted in the army joining the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He was posted to France in May 1915, and fought in the Battle of Loos in September that year. Two months later, he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow-officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. “Two Fusiliers”, is a celebration of that friendship.

In July of 1916, Graves was wounded by a shell at High Wood, in the Somme. His colonel believed that Graves' injuries would result in his death, and wrote a condolence letter to Graves’s parents. The Times reported that Graves had died of his wounds in their August 4, 1916 edition. This “death” and “rebirth”, which occurred close to his 21st birthday, had a profound effect on Graves’s life and writing.

Graves' bestselling war memoir, Good-bye to All That, was published in 1929 and caused a rift between him and Sassoon and ultimately between himself and his country. He moved to Deià in Majorca, where he lived until his death in 1985 with the exception of two periods, during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, when he was evacuated.

Graves is not only known as a poet and mythologist, but as a novelist. His I, Claudius books were turned into a miniseries for PBS.

Two Fusiliers
BY ROBERT GRAVES

And have we done with War at last?
Well, we've been lucky devils both,
And there's no need of pledge or oath
To bind our lovely friendship fast,
By firmer stuff
Close bound enough.

By wire and wood and stake we're bound,
By Fricourt and by Festubert,
By whipping rain, by the sun's glare,
By all the misery and loud sound,
By a Spring day,
By Picard clay.

Show me the two so closely bound
As we, by the wet bond of blood,
By friendship blossoming from mud,
By Death: we faced him, and we found
Beauty in Death,
In dead men, breath.

Jennifer Bohnhoff's World War I historical novel A Blaze of Poppies will be published in October 2021 and is available for preorder on Amazon.

Funny Fragments from the Front

9/19/2021

Bairnsfather in 1918

Most Americans are familiar with the art of Bill Mauldin, the cartoonist who captured the spirit of American GIs during the Second World War.

The British, First World War equivalent was a brilliant cartoonist named Charles Bruce Bairnsfather.

Bairnsfather's cartoons were featured in a weekly "Fragments from France," serial published in The Bystander magazine.

His best-known character, Old Bill, became the face of the British soldier stuck in the trenches.

Bairnsfather was born July 9, 1887 at Muree, in a part of British India that is now in Pakistan. His father was a Major in the Indian Staff Corps, and both his parents were great-grandchildren of a Baronet. He was brought to England when he was 8 years old so that he could be educated. His plans for a career in the military were thwarted when he failed his entrance exams to Sandhurt and Woolwich Military Academies. After a brief stint in the Cheshire Regiment, he resigned to become an artist.

When war broke out in 1914, Bairnsfather joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as a second lieutenant. He served in a machine gun unit in France until 1915, when he was hospitalized with shellshock and hearing damage sustained during the Second Battle of Ypres.

He was then posted to the 34th Division headquarters on Salisbury Plan, in southern England. Here, he he developed his humorous series for the Bystander about life in the trenches.

Bairnsfather's most famous character was "Old Bill", an older, experienced soldier with an enormous moustache.

The best remembered of his cartoons shows Bill with another trooper in a muddy shell hole with shells whizzing all around. The other trooper is grumbling and Bill says, "Well, If you knows of a better 'ole, go to it." This cartoon is included in the collection Fragments From France, published in 1914.

Bairnsfather's cartoon were immensely popular with the troops and created massive sales increases for the Bystander. However, the general public , initially objected to the cartoons as "vulgar caricatures". As the war progressed and romantic notions of war faded, he became more popular. The cartoons did so much to raise morale that Bairnsfather got a promotion and an appointment to the War Office to draw similar cartoons for other Allies forces.

When the Second World War broke out, Bairnsfather became the official cartoonist to the American forces in Europe. He worked from England, contributing cartoons for Stars and Stripes and Yank. He even drew some nose art for aircraft on American bases in England.

When Bairnsfather died of bladder cancer on September 29, 1959, his obituary in the Times noted that he was "fortunate in possessing a talent … which suited almost to the point of genius one particular moment and one particular set of circumstances; and he was unfortunate in that he was never able to adapt, at all happily, his talent to new times and new circumstances." He may never have been able to extend his talent beyond the Great War, but he gave voice and a face to those who fought in the trenches.

Jennifer Bohnhoff's World War I novel A Blaze of Poppies will be published on October 22, 2021 and is now available for preorder on Amazon. Every Friday from here through Veteran's Day she will be featuring a page from a copy of Fragments from France that she owns on her Facebook page. and will be giving the copy away to someone on her email list of friends, fans and family during the month-long celebration.

A Rendevous with Death

9/16/2021

Alan Seeger was born in New York City, the son of a businessman with connections to Mexico's sugar refining industry. He and his two siblings grew up in a wealthy and cultured home in Staten Island. He attended the Staten Island Academy and then the Horace Mann School in Manhattan until the family moved to Mexico city when he was 12. Alan returned to New York in 1902 so that he could attend the Hackley School, in Tarrytown. He then went on to Harvard University, where he came under the influence of the Romantic poets.

After graduating in 1910., Seeger moved to New York City's Greenwich Village, where he attempted to live a bohemian life, writing poetry and sleeping on the couch of his classmate, the revolutionary, John Reed. After two years, Seeger moved to Paris, France. When World War I began in 1914, Seeger enlisted in the French Foreign Legion.

Seeger's war-time letters talk of crowded quarters, filth, cold and misery. None of this made its way into his poetry, which demonstrates a romantic and fatalistic streak.

Alan Seeger died of a shot to the stomach during the attack on Belloy-en-Santerreon on July 4th, 1916. The French military awarded him the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille militaire posthumously. He was buried in a mass grave.

Seeger’s collected Poems were published in 1917 to mixed reviews. Critics often criticize his verses as impersonal, conventional, and idealized, but, like his English contemporary Rubert Brooke, Seeger hadn't matured as an artist. James Hart in the Dictionary of Literary Biography explained, “He needed more time to move from a stock and outmoded romanticism to a more distinctive and original style, from a style full of abstractions to one more concrete and personal.” Given more time, he might have become an American version of Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon.

I Have a Rendevous with Death

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air--
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath--
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear ...
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a former history teacher who now writes full time. Her next novel, A Blaze of Poppies: A Novel About New Mexico and World War I, is due out on October 22, 2021.

September is Apple Time

9/12/2021

Few people would recognize the name John Chapman. Most people would recognize him by his nickname: Johnny Appleseed.

Chapman was born sometime around 1774 in Leominster, Massachusetts. As a young man, he moved west, to Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, where he bought a small farm and planted an orchard. A devout Swedenborgian Christian, Chapman provided free food and lodging for the pioneers who passed his farm on the was west to the Ohio Valley wilderness. As a parting gift, he pressed a small pouch into their hands before they resumed their journey.

The pouch contained apple seeds. Chapman collected the residue from local cider presses, then laboriously picked the seeds out of the sticky mash, dried them, and placed them in little deerskin bags that he had sewn. He felt that the pioneers in the wilderness needed orchards just as much as he did.

After many years, Johnny began to worry about the orchards in the wilderness. He gave his farm to a widow with a large, needy family, bought two canoes from the Natives and lashed them together, loaded them with apple seeds, then floated down the Ohio River. He traveled all over Ohio, planting new orchards and tending those that were planted before his arrival. He lived by trading seeds for food and for used clothing, and was known for wearing his one cooking pot as a hat as he walked from settlement to settlement. Native Americans regarded him as touched by the Great Spirit. Even hostile tribes left him alone. Myths began to rise up around him. One story is that, after noticing that mosquitoes flew into his fire, he doused it and said “God forbid that I should build a fire for my comfort, that should be the means of destroying any of His creatures." Another says he had a pet wolf that had started following him after he healed its injured leg. He reportedly could play with bear cubs while their mother looked on.

As settlers continued west, so did Chapman. In the 1830s he left Ohio and began planting trees in Indiana. He moved on to Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa and Illinois. He died in 1845, his body found lying in an orchard near Fort Wayne, Indiana. In his lifetime, the botanist/herb doctor/missionary had planted thousands of trees. endeared himself to pioneer families, and become an American legend.

These cookies are crisp on the outside and tender on the inside, just like the apples that inspired them. Before I made these, I visited my mother, picked apples from her tree, and made up several quarts of applesauce. You can use bottled sauce from the store if you're not as lucky - or industrious - as I am.

Applesauce Cookies

1 cup sugar
½ cup shortening
1 ¼ cup unsweetened applesauce
1 egg
2 ½ cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp cloves
¼ tsp salt
1 cup raisins
½ cup chopped nuts

Heat oven to 375°. Spray cookie sheets with oil.
Beat sugar and shortening until light and fluffy. Add applesauce and egg and blend well. Stir in flour, baking soda. Cinnamon, cloves and salt and mix well. Sir in raisins and nuts. Drop by rounded tablespoonfuls 2 inches apart on greased cookie sheets. Bake at 375° for 15 minutes or until light golden. Immediately move from sheet to cooling rack.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a retired middle school language arts and history teacher. She now writes historical and contemporary fiction from her home in the mountains of central New Mexico. You can read more about her and her books on her website.

On Somme by Ivor Gurney

9/9/2021

Suddenly into the still air burst thudding
And thudding and cold fear possessed me all,
On the gray slopes there, where Winter in sullen brooding
Hung between height and depth of the ugly fall
Of Heaven to earth; and the thudding was illness own.
But still a hope I kept that were we there going over
I; in the line, I should not fail, but take recover
From others courage, and not as coward be known.
No flame we saw, the noise and the dread alone
Was battle to us; men were enduring there such
And such things, in wire tangled, to shatters blown.
Courage kept, but ready to vanish at first touch.
Fear, but just held. Poets were luckier once
In the hot fray swallowed and some magnificence

Ivor Gurney was born in Gloucester, England in 1890. He began composing music when he was 14 years old and attended the Royal College of Music on a scholarship. He wrote hundreds of poems and more than 300 songs.

Gurney was rejected by the army for poor eyesight, but managed to convince the 2nd/5th Gloucesters to take him in 1917 despite the fact that he had already suffered a nervous breakdown and was probably already suffering from manic-depression. He served in France, where he was wounded twice, the second time by gas.

After the war, Gurney returned to the Royal College of Music to study with Ralph Vaughn Williams, but his increasingly erratic behavior forced him to leave school. By 1922, his mental state had deteriorated to the point where he had to be institutionalized. He spent the rest of his life in institutions. In 1937, he died of tuberculosis in the City of London Mental Hospital.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a novelist who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. A Blaze of Poppies, her novel set in New Mexico and France during the 1910s, is available for preorder on Amazon.

The Americans who Lie in Flanders Field

9/5/2021

Flanders Field American Cemetery and Memorial is the only World War I American cemetery on Belgian soil. It is located on the southeast edge of the town of Waregem and honors 411 American servicemen, some of whose bodies are unidentified and others whose bodies are unrecovered.

The memorial was designed by architect Paul Cret, who ennobled the site with art deco and lots of quiet, garden-like areas that make it a deeply moving place.

Lieutenant Kenneth MaCleish

One of the men interred in this cemetery is Kenneth MaCleish, the brother of American poet Archibald MaCleish, who lived into the 1980s and produced a massive and impressive body of work. Here is one of his poems to think on:

Liberty
When liberty is headlong girl
And runs her roads and wends her ways
Liberty will shriek and whirl
Her showery torch to see it blaze.

When liberty is wedded wife
And keeps the barn and counts the byre
Liberty amends her life.
She drowns her torch for fear of fire.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a former educator who writes historical fiction. Her World War I novel, A Blaze of Poppies, will be released in October 2021.

a Medic and a Poet

9/1/2021

During his fifty-year career, Robert Laurence Binyon authored many poetry collections, plays, historical biographies, and art history books. During World War I he served as an orderly in the Red Cross, working in a military hospital in France in 1915 and 1916. This experiences influenced his poetry. While this is not his most famous poem, this invokes a somber picture of what medics had to go through to retrieve the wounded. It is eerie and haunting.

Fetching the Wounded

by Robert Laurence Binyon

At the road's end glimmer the station lights;
How small beneath the immense hollow of Night's
Lonely and living silence! Air that raced
And tingled on the eyelids as we faced
The long road stretched between the poplars flying
To the dark behind us, shuddering and sighing
With phantom foliage, lapses into hush.
Magical supersession! The loud rush
Swims into quiet: midnight reassumes
Its solitude; there's nothing but great glooms,
Blurred stars; whispering gusts; the hum of wires.
And swerving leftwards upon noiseless tires
We glide over the grass that smells of dew.
A wave of wonder bathes my body through!
For there in the headlamps' gloom--surrounded beam
Tall flowers spring before us, like a dream,
Each luminous little green leaf intimate
And motionless, distinct and delicate
With powdery white bloom fresh upon the stem,
As if that clear beam had created them
Out of the darkness. Never so intense
I felt the pang of beauty's innocence,
Earthly and yet unearthly. A sudden call!
We leap to ground, and I forget it all.
Each hurries on his errand; lanterns swing;
Dark shapes cross and re--cross the rails; we bring
Stretchers, and pile and number them; and heap
The blankets ready. Then we wait and keep
A listening ear. Nothing comes yet; all's still.
Only soft gusts upon the wires blow shrill
Fitfully, with a gentle spot of rain.
Then, ere one knows it, the long gradual train
Creeps quietly in and slowly stops. No sound
But a few voices' interchange. Around
Is the immense night--stillness, the expanse
Of faint stars over all the wounds of France.

Now stale odour of blood mingles with keen
Pure smell of grass and dew. Now lantern--sheen
Falls on brown faces opening patient eyes
And lips of gentle answers, where each lies
Supine upon his stretcher, black of beard
Or with young cheeks; on caps and tunics smeared
And stained, white bandages round foot or head
Or arm, discoloured here and there with red.
Sons of all corners of wide France; from Lille,
Douay, the land beneath the invader's heel,
Champagne, Touraine, the fisher--villages
Of Brittany, the valleyed Pyrenees,
Blue coasts of the South, old Paris streets. Argonne
Of ever smouldering battle, that anon
Leaps furious, brothered them in arms. They fell
In the trenched forest scarred with reeking shell.
Now strange the sound comes round them in the night
Of English voices. By the wavering light
Quickly we have borne them, one by one, to the air,
And sweating in the dark lift up with care,
Tense--sinewed, each to his place. The cars at last
Complete their burden: slowly, and then fast
We glide away. And the dim round of sky,
Infinite and silent, broods unseeingly
Over the shadowy uplands rolling black
Into far woods, and the long road we track
Bordered with apparitions, as we pass,
Of trembling poplars and lamp--whitened grass,
A brief procession flitting like a thought
Through a brain drowsing into slumber; nought
But we awake in the solitude immense!
But hurting the vague dumbness of my sense
Are fancies wandering the night: there steals
Into my heart, like something that one feels
In darkness, the still presence of far homes
Lost in deep country, and in little rooms
The vacant bed. I touch the world of pain
That is so silent. Then I see again
Only those infinitely patient faces
In the lantern beam, beneath the night's vast spaces,
Amid the shadows and the scented dew;
And those illumined flowers, springing anew
In freshness like a smile of secrecy
From the gloom--buried earth, return to me.
The village sleeps; blank walls, and windows barred.
But lights are moving in the hushed courtyard
As we glide up to the open door. The Chief
Gives every man his order, prompt and brief.
We carry up our wounded, one by one.
The first cock crows: the morrow is begun.

Jennifer Bohnhoff lives in the mountains of central New Mexico, where she writes historical fiction. Her next novel, A Blaze of Poppies, tells the story of two New Mexicans serving in World War I.

Horses from History: Man o' War

8/29/2021

Even though he never ran the Kentucky Derby, Man o' War is perhaps the most famous thoroughbred race horse of all time.

Man o' War was born in March of 1917. He was named for his owner, August Belmont, Jr., who joined the United States Army soon after the colt's birth. Belmont was 65, but World War I had inspired him to serve overseas, in France, despite his age.

Man o' War, who was also called Big Red, won an amazing 20 of his 21 races. His only loss was, ironically, against a horse named Upset, and came after a bad start, where he was reportedly facing the wrong way when the starter raised the tape.
The talented horse never ran the Kentucky Derby because his owner, Samuel Riddle, thought that the spring weather in Kentucky was too unpredictable. Considering that it has snowed on Derby day more than once, he may have had a point. In 1989, the race time temperature in Louisville was 43 degrees, a little cool for a horse to run 1 ¼ miles without straining his muscles.
After his racing career, Man o’ War was put out to stud. He sired many famous racehorses, including the 1929 Kentucky Derby Winner Clyde Van Dusen and War Admiral, who won the Triple Crown in 1937. Another of his progeny, Hard Tack, became the father of Seabiscuit, the small horse that came to symbolize hope during the Great Depression.

Man o’ War died in November of 1947 at the age of 30, which is advanced for a horse. His body was embalmed, then placed in a giant, custom-made casket. It took 13 men to carry the 1,200 pound horse to his grave. His death was reported in The New York Times with the kind of pomp that was usually reserved for celebrities and politicians.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a former educator who is now devoting her time to writing historical fiction. Her next book, A Blaze of Poppies, will be published in October 2021 and tells the story of a female rancher from New Mexico and her experiences as a nurse during World War I.

For the Fallen

8/26/2021

Laurence Binyon was in his 40s when World War I broke out. He'd never seen battle, and like many naïve and romantic people, he didn't understand the devastation that was to come. Binyon wrote this poem just a month into the war, while sitting on a cliff overlooking the sea in Cornwall. Later he would sign up to be an orderly with the Red Cross. His brief stint in a hospital in France changed him, and his poetry, significantly.

In early September I will feature another Binyon poem. I think it would be interesting for readers to compare them.

For the Fallen
By Laurence Binyon

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

A Blaze of Poppies, Jennifer Bohnhoff's novel about New Mexicans involved in World War I, will be published in October and is now available for presale on Amazon.

Break of day in the trenches

8/25/2021

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old Druid Time as ever.
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems, odd thing, you grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping,
But mine in my ear is safe –
Just a little white with the dust.

Isaac Rosenberg
1890-1918

Image © The Imperial War Museum & The Isaac Rosenberg literary estate