Essay: In 2001, Michael Longley accepted the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry at Buckingham Palace, where in 1918 his father had received the Military Cross. On the eve of Remembrance Sunday, the poet remembers his father.
On Remembrance Sunday, I remember my father as accurately as I can. On September 3rd, 1914, at Buckingham Palace Road, he enlisted with the London Scottish Regiment. He was 18, a truant from school. By his early 20s he had won the Military Cross and was a captain in charge of a company of boy-soldiers, most of whom were not yet regular shavers (some weren't shavers at all). They were known as "Longley's Babies". Although, like many survivors, he preferred to keep quiet about the nightmare, he would answer questions from my twin, Peter, and me straightforwardly enough. He showed us the purple shine left on his shin by shrapnel, the smudgy stain burned into his shoulder by mustard gas. We half understood when he told us we were miracle babies: at the Battle of High Wood he'd been wounded in his genitals. Tedium balanced by terror, endless rain, men and horses drowning in mud, trench foot, lice and rats, disgusting rations (he had lost all his teeth by the end of the war): his small sons could scarcely believe what they were hearing.
When I first read the war poets as a young man, I wondered if my father had ever shared a Woodbine with Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. The war poets have become an obsession. I have visited the battlefields and cemeteries of northern France twice in search of them. I shall keep returning there.
Charles Sorley produced a handful of great lines before being killed at the age of 20 ("When you see millions of the mouthless dead/ Across your dreams in pale battalions go . . ."). Why am I compelled to track his name to the Loos Memorial to the Missing, and run my fingertips over the carved letters which are all that is physically left of him? In an extraordinary letter home Sorley wrote: "I think that after the war all brave men will renounce their country and confess that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth . . ."
On the towpath of the Sambre Canal I stand at the spot where the 25-year-old Wilfred Owen was killed on November 4th, 1918. I desperately imagine him crossing the pontoon bridge and making it safely to the other side: just one more week and the war would be over. He is buried with comrades from the Manchester Regiment in a little French village cemetery in Ors. His face as I remember it vanishes into the grass, and I know that I am only feet away from the skull that contained the brain that created the words I have by heart inside my own head. There is nothing else to do but weep: "The eternal reciprocity of tears."
The greatest war poems (among them 'Insensibility' by Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg's 'Dead Man's Dump') ring out like choruses from a Greek tragedy. Sophoclean or Aeschylean in their altitude, they echo far beyond the trenches of Flanders. "None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass/ Or stood aside for the half-used life to pass/ Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth . . ." (Rosenberg). Why are these great lamentations not read out on Remembrance Day? Instead, year in, year out, we are fobbed off with the same quatrain from Laurence Binyon's inadequate 'For the Fallen': "They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old . . ." And the congregation, repeating the last line, solemnly intones: "We shall remember them." This has become narcotic, a form of forgetfulness.
There is nothing in the ceremony to remind us how shrapnel and bullets flay and shatter flesh and bones, how continuous bombardment destroys minds as well as bodies. There is nothing to suggest that anyone might be to blame. Vague expressions of sorrow encourage us to think of the Great War as some kind of natural catastrophe in which millions of young men just happened to die. No one asks us to remember that political decisions pushed millions into the mincing machine, and that cynical calculations prolonged the senseless struggle. No one asks us to remember the bottomless stupidity of the military commanders. In a letter to Henry James, W.B. Yeats dismissed the Great War as "bloody frivolity". A few years ago I might have resented this judgment, but now I think Yeats was right. A generation was lost in vain. Does the hush of Remembrance Day obscure the obscenity? Let us try to recover as many details as we can. Let us really and truly remember.
Remembrance for me begins and ends with my father. In the Public Record Office at Kew I have unearthed his war file. I shake with emotion as I touch his bold handwriting on papers that cover his enlisting, his medical inspection, his taking a commission, his application for a war-wounds pension. Yes, the stories he told Peter and me were true. There's more research to be done. I can't find the citation for his Military Cross, though I have received from the Royal Humane Society a brief account of how he won their bronze medal for his part in rescuing three nurses from drowning at Paris Plage in northern France in June 1917 - a near-death experience just before the muddy abattoir of Passchendaele. I treasure two photographs of him at Buckingham Palace in 1918 receiving his Military Cross from George V.
My father was the main reason I accepted the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2001. During my audience with the Queen I showed her my photographs. She talked movingly about the Great War. When I asked where in the grounds the pictures had been taken, she arranged for her equerry to take me there. I stood where my father had stood. It was his old soldier's style to be low-key and ironical about everything, even his own medals for gallantry. What would he have made of a medal for poetry?
I dreamed I was marching up to the Front to die.
There were thousands of us who were going to die.
From the opposite direction, out of step, breathless,
The dead and wounded came, all younger than my son,
Among them my father who might have been my son.
"What is it like?" I shouted after the family face.
"It's cushy, mate! Cushy!" my father-son replied.