An Irishman’s Diary about war poet Julian Grenfell

Among the notable birthdays this weekend is that of the English war poet Julian Grenfell, who was born on March 30th, 1888. He’s better known for the circumstances in which died, 27 years later, from a head-wound during the second Battle of Ypres. But he’s most famous of all for two things he wrote in the months before his death – one in poetry, the other prose.

The prose was contained in a letter to his mother in October 1914, when he told her cheerfully: “I adore war. It’s like a big picnic without the objectlessness of a picnic. I have never been so well or so happy. Nobody grumbles at one for being dirty. I have only had my boots off once in the last 10 days, and only washed twice.”

The poem used grander language than that, but its theme was not dissimilar. Into Battle was first published in the Times of London in May 1915, alongside news of Grenfell's death. It begins:

“The naked earth is warm with Spring,/And with green grass and bursting trees/Leans to the sun’s gaze glorying,/And quivers in the sunny breeze;/And life is colour and warmth and light/And a striving for evermore for these;/And he is dead who will not fight;/And who dies fighting has increase.”

Grenfell’s glorification of war sits comfortably alongside certain now-infamous lines of Padraig Pearse, written later that same year in praise of the conflict, and dismissed “as blithering idiocy” by James Connolly.

But that the Times saw fit to print Into Battle alongside the report of Grenfell's death was more that just a tribute to the poem's technical skill. Initial optimism about the war was beginning to wane by then. Even so, the sentiment still fitted with the officially approved idea that the battlefield could be a glorious place.

By 1918, the tone of war poetry had changed dramatically, with the likes of Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth now the defining theme. So when including Into Battle in collections of the period, anthologists have sometimes felt the need to apologise for it, suggesting Grenfell might have changed his mind had he lived longer.

Perhaps he might, although another detail from his non-poetic writings makes you wonder. An Eton- and Oxford-educated son of the aristocracy, he had before the war been fond of shooting game at his family’s estate. He was very good at it too, bagging 105 partridges on one occasion in 1914.

So it was no surprise that, in wartime, he became a sniper. And it’s a notorious fact that he used the same log-book to record his successes with Germans (“Pomeranians” he called them) as he had with wildlife. Under the 105 partridges, the book reads: “November 16th. 1 Pomeranian. November 17th. 2 Pomeranians”.

Mentioning this in his 2010 book Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War, historian John Lewis-Stempel attempted the delicate task of putting it in sympathetic context:

“The entries were less glib than they appear. For Grenfell game-shooting was not a passionless pot at abstract targets, but a means of getting ‘back to real things, bringing the elemental barbaric forces in ourselves into touch with the elemental barbaric forces of nature’. Killing a man on a shoot was an even more fundamentally human, sensual activity. ‘One loves one’s fellow man so much more when one is bent on killing him,’ reflected Grenfell, albeit half-ironically.”

WB Yeats, by the way, was not among those anthologists embarrassed by Grenfell's poem. He included it in his 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, even as he controversially overlooked the other war poets, including Owen, whose work he considered worthlessly maudlin – "all blood, dirt, and sucked sugar-stick".

Of the 1914-18 conflict in general, Yeats thought it “merely the most expensive outbreak of insolence and stupidity the world has ever seen”.

But defending his choices in 1936, he said that “passive suffering is not a theme for poetry” and that “in all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies”.

He and the author of Into Battle seem to have been at one here. Earlier in the war, also in a letter to his mother, Grenfell had written: "Isn't it lucky for me to have been born so as to be just the right age and just in the right place [...] to enjoy this".

Seven months later, he lingered long enough after his fatal wound to write her a last letter in which he admitted that his skull was “a bit cracked”, but said he was otherwise “getting on splendidly”.

@FrankmcnallyIT