BIOGRAPHY: The Red Sweet Wine of Youth: The Brave and Brief Lives of the War PoetsBy Nicholas Murray Little, Brown, 343pp. £25
‘AT MY INVITATION Rosenberg came to see me. Small in stature, dark, bright-eyed, thoroughly Jewish in type, he seemed a boy with an unusual mixture of self-reliance and modesty. Indeed, no one could have had a more independent nature. Obviously sensitive, he was not touchy or aggressive. Possessed of vivid enthusiasms, he was shy in speech. One found in talk how strangely little of second-hand (in one of his age) there was in his opinions, how fresh a mind he brought to what he saw and read. There was an odd kind of charm in his manner which came from his earnest, transparent sincerity.”
This was Laurence Binyon, poet and curator of prints and drawings at the British Museum, reflecting on his meeting with Isaac Rosenberg, the extraordinarily gifted young poet and painter who, born in Bristol in 1890 of poor Lithuanian Jewish emigrant parents, had settled with his family in the East End of London.
Rosenberg wrote some of the greatest poems that came out of the terrible terror of the first World War. Break of Day in the Trenches, often cited as the greatest of 20th-century war poems, was written in June 1916 and subsequently published in the leading literary journal of the time, Poetry,from Chicago. But Rosenberg was no conventional war hero or patriot, such as the Rt Hon Julian Grenfell, "the aristocratic warrior-hero of the war's first phase", as Nicholas Murray describes him. Rosenberg was if anything an anti-hero in soldier's uniform: "I never joined the army for patriotic reasons. Nothing can justify war. I suppose we must all fight to get the trouble over." Fight and die, that is.
For along with millions of fellow soldiers who, enlisted or conscripted, lost their lives in the industrialised killing fields of Flanders and the Somme, Gallipoli and elsewhere, and put up with appalling conditions of trench life, Rosenberg tried in vain to transfer to the Jewish battalion fighting in Mesopotamia and thereby getting himself at least free of the grudgingly petty and ongoing anti-Semitism of the army. It wasn’t to be. He and his battalion were moved “into the front line near Arras and on the 21st [March 1918] a major spring offensive was launched by the German Army, sending the battalion back to Fampoux close by. On March 31st, 1918, Rosenberg was sent off on a wiring patrol. The next day he failed to return. His remains were later found with 11 other comrades and buried in the cemetery at Fampoux, to be re-interred at Bailleul Road East British Cemetery outside Arras”. To which the author of this compelling study concludes, “Today, a few yards away, in a small wood, are rows and rows of iron crosses of a much larger German war cemetery – together with a small handful of German Jewish graves.”
Rosenberg was 26, and by war’s end, in November 1918, the drastic experience of war, the meaning of victory and the penalties of defeat and widespread loss, was to burrow deep into the European subsoil of the next decade before rekindling in the late 1930s the truly appalling forms of genocide that we know on this side of the globe as the Holocaust.
But what lessons were or are ever truly learned about war and the ambition of leaders and states to plunge their people into carnage for the sake of seemingly invincible self-belief (or self-defence) remains as ever at the centre of the never-lessening fascination with the “Great War”.
In The Red Sweet Wine of YouthNicholas Murray has brought the lives and testimony of a generation of poets into historical focus through their own words: poems, letters, diaries, memoirs. The ludicrous class system of England, the notion of England as a culture of values and virtues distinctive and distinctly worth dying for is relayed through the various lives of the poets who were to become "war poets". For those who did not survive, such as Rupert Brooke, Grenfell, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas, and for those that did survive – Robert Graves, Siegfried "Mad Jack" Sassoon, David Jones – perhaps the fate of Ivor Gurney is most poignant, suffering as he did a breakdown from which he did not recover. In the words of the poet and memoirist Edmund Blunden, whose photograph here shows the face of great decency, "Since 1918, hardly a day or night passed without my losing the present and living in a ghost story." Blunden lived until 1974 in such a partial limbo land.
The only reservation that came to mind reading the concluding chapter, "Other Voices", was why, notwithstanding the book's subtitle, British Poets of the First World War,of Thomas MacGreevy, Francis Ledwidge, Patrick McGill, or any of the other Irish poets who fought, and some of who died in the first World War, not a word. Not one.
And of Rosenberg? In the summer of 1916 he wrote the following, an epitaph in itself: "Simple poetry– that is where an interesting complexity of thought is kept in tone and right value to the dominating idea so that it is understandable and still ungraspable. I know it is beyond my reach just now, except, perhaps, in bits. I am afraid of being empty. When I get more leisure in more settled times I will work on a larger scale and give myself more room, then I may be less frustrated in my efforts to be clear, and satisfy myself too".
Gerald Dawe's Conversations: Poets & Poetrywill be published later this year. His anthology, Earth Voices Whispering: Irish War Poetry 1914-1945, was published in 2008. He teaches at Trinity College Dublin
