The Soldier

[jsburbidge]

"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.  There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven."

I have in my possession a copy of Brooke's 1914 and other Poems, printed in November 1915 (the tenth impression) with the following two inscriptions on the flyleaf:

In the centre of the page: "Sgt. E.G. Evans/NoT Canadian General Hospital/April 1917. France".

At the top left corner of the page, in a different hand: "From dear old Sgt. McGregor, who died in Not. C.G. H. Dec 19th 1917".

For all of his eclipse these days by Owen, Sassoon, et al., Brooke was wildly popular, and not only on the home front. On this 100th anniversary of the armistice, it might be worthwhile to remember the ideals for which "those who died as cattle" did die: naive as they may have been, they thought they were fighting to secure a better world.

Have we come anywhere near to realizing that aspiration?

Comments

[graydon]

In terms of things which would have occurred to them, perhaps things are better than they were. (Did anywhere in the world allow women the vote in 1918?)

In terms of things which wouldn't have occurred to them, things are much worse; the involuntary human extinction project is doing well.

Major wars in the industrial age kill a disproportionate number of idealists, one way or another; if the folks who had signed up early to end slavery had survived the American Civil War, you get a different political outcome. It's kinda that way with the Great War; not only was there no political legitimacy left, there was a real shortage of persons with a positive social vision afterwards and no shortage of panic among the advantaged classes. It lead to a poor political outcome.

I am weirdly reminded of something attributed to Jan Smuts, the Griqua Prayer, that "the Lord should come Himself and not send His Son, as this is not a time for children." I don't think there's a spirit of quantitative analysis, but we could use one.

[stoutfellow]

Did anywhere in the world allow women the vote in 1918?

Yes; a number of the United States, mostly in the West, did so. One of the "No" votes on entering WWI was Jeannette Rankin, a Republican congresswoman from Montana. (She was also the only "No" vote on entering WWII.)

[graydon]

Thank you! I did not know that.

[stoutfellow]

Wyoming was the first state to allow women to vote; I'm told it was because, without counting women, they didn't have enough voters to justify being admitted as a state.

[graydon]

That would do it!

I am fond of the post-Great War women's suffrage narrative where the combination of collapsed legitimacy and the creeping awareness in the male voter that neither they nor anyone they actually knew was up to handling bulk picric acid sufficed to remove sufficient objection, but should make an effort to remember that it was a long process with a bunch of threads to it.

[jsburbidge]

Iceland had granted partial women's suffrage in 1915, as well.