As the Great War approached, there was, in some quarters, much enthusiasm for it, especially among young men who saw it as their chance to experience a transcendental glamour.
Hamo was not exceptional; when the war was declared on Aug. 4, 1914, he didn't hesitate to abandon his nascent career as a civil engineer building bridges and breakfronts along the Rio de la Plata in Argentina. He returned home to England and received his commission as a second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers. In October 1915, he arrived on the peninsula of Gallipoli in the Ottoman Empire as part of a campaign the British optimistically believed could quickly capture Constantinople, neutralize Turkish forces and connect them with Russian allies fighting on the Eastern Front.
Hamo was sent out on Oct. 28 to string barbed wire in the no-man's land beyond the British trenches. It was a routine mission for him, who, as one of his brothers later recalled, "did the most daring things in a cool, quiet and unassuming way." But this mission was not like the others; on this mission a Turkish sniper shot Hamo in the leg.
Because he did not want to expose other members of his unit to sniper fire, Hamo did not call out, but instead crawled silently back to the trench and tumbled over the parapet. He impressed both the medics who initially dressed his wounds and the doctors who saw him at the casualty clearing station with his cheerful stoicism even after they informed him that his leg, which he had further damaged by dragging it through the mud, would have to be amputated. For Hamo, the war was over.
But then the wound turned septic, and a feverish Hamo was transferred to a hospital ship. He died Nov. 1, 1915, and was buried at sea.
Sometimes boundaries are well marked: One moment Hamo was alive. Then he was dead.
But sometimes these boundaries only seem well marked. World War I ended 100 years ago today. The Allies and Germany agreed to put down their guns at the precise moment the clock registered the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918. And not a second before.
Ten minutes before the fighting stopped, a French soldier was killed as he spread the news that hot soup would be served immediately after the cease-fire went into effect. Two minutes before the fighting stopped, a Canadian soldier was killed by a sniper.
At 10:30 a.m. Nov. 11, a U.S. rifle company at Ville-devant-Chaumont, north of Verdun, learned of the imminent end of the war. But they were instructed to keep pushing until the last second, to root out German positions and place the Allies in the most favorable position in case the cease-fire failed to hold. At 10:59 a.m., they were pinned down by an enemy machine gun nest. And an American soldier of German descent named Henry Gunther fixed his bayonet, ignored the orders of his sergeant, and charged.
The Germans, aware of the absurdity of Gunther's action, shouted and tried to wave him off, but after he fired at them they cut him down with a short burst. He was the last of 2,738 soldiers killed on the war's final morning.
Or perhaps he wasn't -- there is an anecdote about a German officer who approached American troops after 11 a.m., to let them know that they could billet in a house he and his men had been occupying as they were retreating. But the Americans hadn't yet learned of the Armistice and shot the officer dead.
Fighting continued between the Bolsheviks and counter-revolutionary forces in Russia for another four years, with a multinational expeditionary force consisting of British, American, Canadian, French, Italian and Japanese troops fighting against the Red Army in Asia and northern Russia. Violent civil strife continued in Germany well into 1919; the newly created nation of Poland would fight five wars with its neighbors over the next three years.
There are always arbitrary lines separating then from now, past from present. We say World War I ended 100 years today, but it wasn't officially over until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919. Perhaps it will prove more useful to future historians to view the years 1914-45 as a 30-year war, because Germany was never vanquished, only punished and maybe driven mad.
The past will not be settled until there is no one left to remember.
. . .
In some ways it is convenient for us to think of the Great War -- fought "to end all wars" -- as a nullification of various old-world assumptions and the violent birth of the Modern.
Modernism -- the cultural and literary movement that self-consciously attempted to find new ways of describing identity and depicting the human condition -- is intricately and deeply bound in the experience of those who fought in, witnessed and survived the shock and devastation of the Great War. After the war, shattered artists struggled to find meaningful new forms of expression.
In the smoky aftermath, soldiers came home different, having experienced a different kind of war, the first mechanized bath of steel where luck seemed more important than personal courage or resourcefulness, where bombs were dispatched by an invisible enemy miles away.
And it wasn't only the technology that dehumanized the enemy. It was the first war where "atrocity propaganda," designed to mobilize hatred against a sub-human enemy, was widely employed. Every side in the war stereotyped opposing nations, hardening nationalist feelings and providing easy targets for scapegoating. (James M. Cain, then a reporter for the Baltimore Sun and later an author of hard-boiled fiction, reported that final war casualty Gunther may have acted in part because "he thought himself suspected of being a German sympathizer ... from the start he displayed the most unusual willingness to expose himself to all sorts of risks.")
But there was revolution afoot in Europe before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Well before the war, painters such as Kandinsky, Matisse and Picasso had pushed beyond the great French impressionists of the late 19th century into purer abstraction. Although he rejected the term "impressionist," it's not difficult to see parallels between the impressionists' use of dots and gestural strokes and the symphonic sketches of Claude Debussy, whose work expanded the traditional tonal system and inspired Igor Stravinsky, whose Le Sacre du Printemps evoked a near-riot when it opened at the Theatre de Champs-Elysees on May 12, 1913.
James Joyce had begun writing Ulysses in 1914 while living in Italy, teaching at the Berlitz School in Trieste, before the war broke out. Portions of it were published as early as 1918 in The Little Review, a magazine of the international avant-garde based in Greenwich Village.
The Great War was midwife, not mother, to Modernism.
Modernism prioritized the interior life of the individual, abandoning the strictly representational forms for something more fluid and intuitive.
. . .
Hamo was like a lot of men of his lost generation; his life was first interrupted and then truncated by a force so large as to seem invisible to its combatants. He was crushed by an inevitable wave of history. "The flower of youth and the best manhood of the peoples have been mowed down," read The Spartacist Manifesto, a document signed by, among others, the recently executed communists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and published in The Nation two weeks after the armistice.
Were it not for his relatives, Hamo would be forgotten -- just another 27-year-old engineer with an odd name on some marble monument. But he was from a prominent family, the nephew of sculptor Hamo Thornycroft, one of the leading lights of England's New Sculpture movement which, despite the name, was as much a reaction to the Modernist experiments of the likes of Auguste Rodin as it was an attempt to escape the conventions of neo-classicism.
Hamo was married to a beauty named Agatha, who came from a family of agnostics and was reputed to have been the model for the heroine of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Ubervilles.
It is odd to think of Hardy in the context of World War I; he was born in 1840 and his novels have a decidedly 19th-century flavor to them. But he lived until 1928, long enough to have read and wondered about Ulysses, which was finally published in 1922. (I don't know if Hardy in fact read Joyce; but Joyce's biographer, Richard Ellman wrote that, after reading Tess and Jude the Obscure, Joyce "was bored by Hardy.") Hardy also -- as Paul Fussell pointed out in his landmark 1975 work of literary criticism The Great War and Modern Memory -- wrote "Men Who March Away," a patriotic poem encouraging British youths to enlist after the war broke out:
In our heart of hearts
believing
Victory crowns the just,
And that braggarts must
Surely bite the dust,
Press we to the field
ungrieving,
In our heart of hearts
believing
Victory crowns the just.
Hamo's aunt Helen was also a prominent sculptor with a naturalistic, detailed style. Hamo's mother, also a sculptor, was better known for her precise pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood-inspired paintings like The Parable of the Great Supper which echoed those of her mentor Ford Madox Brown.
Finally, those familiar with the life of Rupert Brooke -- whose most famous poem "The Soldier" begins: If I should die, think only this of me:/That there's some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England, parallels his story and Hamo's -- also died of sepsis while en route to Gallipoli in April 1915. Unlike Hamo, Brooke never experienced combat; it was an infected mosquito bite that killed him.
Some sources have Hamo acquainted with Brooke, but while that would make a good story it's difficult to verify. What we do know is that on July 9, 1914, an aspiring poet named Siegfried Sassoon, through the intercessions of a mutual friend, had breakfast with Brooke, then a rising star of British poetry.
Sassoon was Hamo's brother; he was 17 months older and on his way to fight in Belgium.
. . .
If you know anything about Siegfried Sassoon you probably know him as the bitterest and most biting of English poets to emerge during World War I. While Brooke could, in his 1915 poem "Peace," thank God for the war because it provided a chance for young men to turn as swimmers into cleanness leaping,/Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary, Sassoon, in 1917's "Blighters," imagined tanks crushing British fatuous audiences laughing at military-theme entertainments:
And there'd be no more
jokes in Music-halls
To mock the riddled
corpses round Bapaume.
In "Fight to the Finish" Sassoon fantasized about a post-war victory parade where a crowd gathered "to cheer the soldiers who'd refrained from dying," and is surprised when the boys fix bayonets and charge them as the poet commands his bombers to attack Parliament.
Yet it is simplistic to view Brooke and Sassoon as representing, respectively, naive and cynical views of war. Sassoon admired and took Brooke for a model -- a draft of a poem he wrote in (probably) 1914, tentatively titled "Before We Are Going," echoes the callow enthusiasm for war that marks Brooke's work:
Hear our last word. In Hell
we seek for Heaven;
The agony of wounds shall
make us clean.
But this was before Sassoon was sent to the Western Front with the Royal Welch Fusiliers, where he met Robert Graves and won the Military Cross and earned the nickname "Mad Jack" for his reckless (and in retrospect, possibly suicidal) exploits like single-handedly invading an enemy trench armed with grenades and scattering 60 German soldiers. This was before his comrade and close friend David Cuthbert Thomas was shot in the throat and died. Had Brooke lived long enough to see things like this, his attitude about war would likely have evolved as Sassoon's did.
Aside from the war itself, Sassoon's biggest influence may have been Hardy, who while best known as a novelist was a more accomplished poet than the title of his best work, 1914's Satires of Circumstance, might lead us to believe. Hardy regretted that the title emphasized his lighter verse; the book contains an 18-poem meditation on the death of the poet's wife and many examples of fine philosophical poems.
The war transformed Sassoon -- and Wilfred Owen and Ivor Gurney -- from polite "Georgian poets" into men determined to express what Owen, in "Anthem for Doomed Youth," called the "monstrous anger of the guns."
The pacifist E.E. Cummings, whose World War I experience deserves more space than we can give here, came home from the war determined to demolish illusions and live as freely as possibly.
"I don't think we enjoyed courting disaster," Cummings said in the 1950s. "I do feel we liked being born."
War changes what it does not destroy. After Verdun, Victorian hypocrisy and Georgian gentility were obsolete.
Look at the difference between T.S. Eliot's "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock," published in 1915, and "The Wasteland" published in 1922. The very title of the latter work is a reference to the devastated continent, the poem itself an extended meditation on a ruined world.
And while Joyce's Ulysses was begun before the war (the novel follows the progress of Leopold Bloom through Dublin on June 16, 1904), its interiority and audaciousness were unprecedented in English literature. While other novels had taken place in a single day, it took Joyce to imagine the circadian cycle as worthy of an epic. Like "The Wasteland," Ulysses is a work glued together from the shattered pieces of a blown-apart world.
Which is the world we have today, a world of semaphore and signal and inchoate thoughts that add up differently every time we try to total them. We no longer expect wars to make sense, for good to triumph over evil, for a painting to look like anything more than the artist's struggle for expression. Poems only sometimes rhyme. Irony abounds.
So maybe it's fitting that the ultimate imperative of the artist was framed by E.M. Forster, a contemporary of Modernists who resisted (and "hated") the movement (and it was an organized movement, with writers like Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence and others keenly self-aware of the icons they were sacking), in these lines from Howards End, published in 1910:
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
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Style on 11/11/2018