In that great London depository of mankind's madness and sadness, the Imperial War Museum - fittingly housed in the remains of the 19th-century lunatic asylum, Bedlam - there is a special exhibition commemorating 12 soldier poets of the first World War, writes Wesley Boyd.
Among those whose lives and work are featured is Francis Ledwidge, born in Slane, Co Meath in August 1887 and blown to pieces by a stray German shell near Ypres in July 1917. Ironically, Ledwidge, who had worked as a navvy on the roads of Meath, was a member of a detail repairing a road near the front line on a wet and cold afternoon. Drenched to the skin, they had stopped to brew up a pot of tea.
Of the 12 poets only Ledwidge and Isaac Rosenberg could be described as working class. Ledwidge had to leave school at 12 to support his widowed mother and Rosenberg, the son of Russian immigrants in the East End of London, at 14. The others, by and large, came from the cossetted comfort of upper-class homes and had known the spires of Oxford and Cambridge.
Did not survive
Rosenberg, like Ledwidge did not survive the war; neither did Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell, Charles Sorley, Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas. One of the survivors, David Jones, was to write: "The many men so beautiful/ And they all dead did lie/ And a thousand thousand slimy things/ Lived on; and so did I." In the current exhibition they are commemorated by great and little things:
The pocket watch of Edward Thomas, which stopped at the moment when he was killed by a shell blast at the Battle of Arras on Easter Monday 1917; he was a family man who, as it happens, had been born in Lambeth close by the museum (then the lunatic asylum) in 1878.
An olive branch from the grave of Rupert Brooke who died from blood poisoning on a troopship bound for Gallipoli and was buried on a Greek island ("some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England").
The Military Cross awarded to Wilfred Owen for bravery in France a month before he was mowed down by machine-gun fire on November 4th, 1918; the Armistice bells were ringing in Shrewsbury seven days later when the War Office telegram arrived at his parents' door. (The exhibition is named after one of his best-known poems, Anthem for Doomed Youth).
A pistol carried by another poet of protest, Siegfried Sassoon, when he won the Military Cross at the Battle of the Somme in July, 1916 and survived to describe, in later years, the Menin Gate Memorial as "this sepulchre of crime".
Hand-written manuscript
Perhaps the most moving of the Ledwidge memorabilia on display is the hand-written manuscript of his elegy for Thomas MacDonagh, one of the three soldier poets of the Easter Rising executed in 1916. It was a searing moment for Ledwidge, who was back from the Dardanelles and the Balkans on sick leave in a Manchester hospital. He regarded himself as an Irish nationalist and it was agonising for him to admit that he wore the same uniform as the men who shot MacDonagh and his comrades.
Ledwidge had enlisted in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in October 1914. It was not an easy decision. "I joined the British Army," he explained to a friend, "because she stood between Ireland and a an enemy common to our civilisation and I would not have her say that she defended us while we did nothing at home but pass resolutions."
Like Rupert Brooke before him he sailed off to Gallipoli in July 1915. A couple of weeks later the Inniskillings landed at Suvla Bay to join the multitudes of Irish, English, Scottish, Australian and New Zealand troops. They were ripped to pieces by the Turkish guns on the heights above the beaches. Only 76 of the 250 men in Ledwidge's company reached their target point on the dunes; in all, more than 115,000 men were slaughtered. After the heat of the Dardanelles the Inniskillings were sent to the frozen wastes of the Serbian front. While there he was warmed by the news that his first book of poems, Songs of the Field, had been published. Retreating once again, he collapsed with total exhaustion and was taken to hospital in Saloniki and eventually to Manchester.
Easter Week executions
After hospital he was granted home leave and hurried back to Slane. His distress at the executions of Easter Week heightened and he overstayed his leave. On his return to the regiment he was court-martialled for his tardiness and for making offensive remarks to his officers; he lost his lance-corporal's stripe.
The following year the Inniskillings were in action again, this time on the Western Front. In a letter to his publisher, Edward Marsh, he described the many colours of the German rockets at night: white, green, blue, purple. "It is like the end of a beautiful world," he wrote. A couple of months later he was dead. Identified only by his name disc, he was buried where he fell.
The manuscript of Seamus Heaney's lament for Ledwidge is in the exhibition. "I think of you in your Tommy's uniform/ A haunted Catholic face, pallid and brave/ Ghosting the trenches like a bloom of hawthorn. . ."
The exhibition Anthem for Doomed Youth continues at the Imperial War Museum in London until April 27th.