Some Desperate Glory, Max Egremont, Picador, 2014, 336pp, £20 (hardback)

Horses Between Our Legs, Patricia McCarthy, Agenda Editions, 2014, 55pp, £10 (paperback)

War Poet, Jon Stallworthy, Carcanet, 2014, £9.95 (paperback)

There has been quite a revisionist vogue during this last year of the Centenary of the First World War, that lays at the door of poetry some blame for defining too narrowly how we think of that war, how we judge the rights and wrongs of it, how we see it in our mind’s eye. The story of the war, we are told, is far better served by historians, whose well informed knowledge and clear-sighted objectivity are needed to understand better the whys and wherefores of how the war happened, of how battles were won or lost, and how it was for those who fought, and for those on the home front too.

It is most certainly true that generations, like mine, growing up as we did during the twentieth-century were profoundly affected by the poetry of the First World War. And it is true that it was certainly the poetry of Brooke, Owen, Sassoon and McCrae, and others, that first introduced many of us to that war. But poetry wasn’t alone in this. We could read Erich Maria Remarque’s novel of All Quiet on the Western Front, go to the theatre to see R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End or Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War. At the cinema there was Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, and Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, and in the concert hall Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. We could picture it too from the photographs of the Western Front, and saw it also through the eyes of Paul Nash and Christopher Nevinson and Stanley Spencer. So it was largely through the poets and novelists, dramatists, film makers and artists, that we could begin to imagine and understand something of what it was they had to live through.

But yes, it was for me and for so many, essentially the poets who opened our eyes to this war. From them we first learnt of the courage, the camaraderie, the patriotism, the killing and the dying, the suffering, the horror, the grieving, but above all, the pity of it, whether on the Somme, at Verdun, at Gallipoli.

But how to think of it now a hundred years on, after so many more wars, how to comprehend the narrative that led Europe into such a cataclysmic conflict of self-destruction? For that we do need to know the history, understand something of the power politics of the European Powers, to understand the context of those times. So in truth, we need both the history and the poetry and indeed the history of the poets themselves.

For any historian a prime source of evidence must be the writings of those who were there, saw it with their own eyes, lived it, died in it even. From home and from the Front, we have their diaries and letters, we have memoirs and autobiographies. And we have their poems too. Millions on all sides wrote poetry, because it was for so many the best way of expressing the intensity of their feelings, their fears and hopes, their excitement and exhilaration, their pain and loss. Poetry is part of the history of the First World War, not separate from it, and should be understood and valued as such. It forms part of the evidence, broadens our understanding.

In Max Egremont’s Some Desperate Glory, history and poetry come together as never before in one volume. He tells us the poets’ stories, sets them in their time and place, in their homes and families and schools, interweaves their friendships and meetings, or near meetings, their feelings for each other and for one another’s poetry. He gives life to them in a way that enables us all the better to understand why they wrote as they did, what motivated them to go to war, how they endured or enjoyed it, and all too often how they died in it. Best of all, we have their poetry too, pages of it (and not just quotes, thank goodness), poems chronologically selected from 1914 to 1918, lines familiar and less familiar, of extraordinary intensity in amongst the mundane, the domestic, the tedium and the fear.

In doing this he shines new light on them and on their times, and reminds me of the first encounters I had with the poets and their poetry, with the paths they walked, where I too have walked. With one them our paths actually did cross, a long time ago, at a cricket match. He was a great poet, though I didn’t know who he was at the time. It had to be pointed out to me afterwards. Edmund Blunden, aged but still bright-eyed, a small kindly man, patted me on the shoulder as I passed him on my way back to the pavilion after my innings. He told me I had done well. But that’s another story.

I had not realised until I read Some Desperate Glory just how young Blunden had been when he went off to the war, how he had gone there straight from Christ’s Hospital School in Sussex, his only experience of soldiering in the cadet force, then just two weeks training before he could be an officer and command men, and fight. Already he was writing his poetry. He took with him in his head the vision of the countryside where he had grown up, as so many did. Indeed it seems clear from Egremont’s most excellent book that this vision of England is so much of what they were fighting for. The peace and tranquillity of the countryside permeates so many of the poems. There is a lot less about King and Country, though it is there.

Most strikingly of all, we find this in Edward Thomas. I have walked the hangers at Steep, near Petersfield in Hampshire, where he lived and often walked, where in the depths of his despair he had thought to kill himself. I had not realised though that an overweening father and a failure to get a First at Oxford had overshadowed the life of this relatively successful writer, (though he never thought so). But he was never writing what he wanted. He could have gone to America with his friend Robert Frost, his great admirer, and lived out his life on a farm, but instead he went off to the war, and wrote some of the finest poetry of that war and of the English countryside, the two of them so powerfully entwined, as in ‘A Private’ and ‘This is no Petty Case of Right or Wrong’ and ‘As the team’s head brass ….’ And never came home. What poetry we might have had from him, had he survived.

Much has been made of the backgrounds of many of our great war poets, and it is true that many were officers, and many had been to public schools. Sorley and Sassoon to the same one, at Marlborough, Grenfell to Eton and Balliol. But many, such as Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney and Wilfred Owen came from poorer families, though he was an officer of course. And rereading them, we discover it is myth to suppose that class alone predisposed attitudes to the war. Julian Grenfell wrote: ‘I adore war. It is like a big picnic.’ He was killed in 1915. Sassoon, who survived, wrote of the Menin Gate in Ypres when it unveiled in 1927 that it was a ‘sepulchre of crime.’

This was the first war, as becomes abundantly clear in Egremont’s book, when genuinely everyone was in it together. It was an army of the people, as were the armies all over Europe. There were ‘millions of the mouthless dead’ as Charles Sorley put it. He does warn us not to say ‘soft things’ about it. Wilfred Owen certainly did not. He wrote that the poetry is in the pity. As the war dragged interminably on Sassoon wrote his ‘Soldier’s Declaration’, his courageous appeal for sanity and peace. The two men met famously at Craiglockhart, in hospital, a meeting at the heart of Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration, fiction maybe, but like Some Desperate Glory, a book that also illuminates for us the minds of great poets.

Two books of much more recent poetry have, like Pat Barker, the perspective of history at their disposal, a distance. Each of these poets chooses to echo the past it would seem, very differently. Yet they both have the history of that war, sometimes the horses, sometimes the poets, for inspiration. There are those who may hold the view that those of us who come after can have little useful to say about that war of so long ago, because we were not there. But Pat Barker and Sebastian Faulks, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy, amongst others, have forged a link to that past, the past that made us what we are today, and in doing so have given us new perspectives, new ways of understanding.

Patricia McCarthy does this too. In her Horses Between our Legs, she gives us a book of touching, telling poetry, of great insight and sensitivity. But, to dwell too long on the title and the cover might be rather misleading in the first instance, even a little off-putting. Surely we have heard enough of War Horses by now, some might say. But this slim volume is as much about women in those times. ‘A Mental Case’ tells of Emily Davison, the suffragette, who threw herself under a horse at Tattenham Corner in 1913. Of ‘The FANY Ladies’ of the First World War, she writes – ‘brave founding women of an army, whose gender filled an urgent space’. In ‘Helen Thomas visits Ivor Gurney in the City of London Mental Asylum 1932’ we come face to face with consequences of war on the human mind. In ‘Eleanor Farjeon’s Death, 1965’ – she was Edward Thomas’s dear friend, to whom he wrote his last letter before he was killed – we hear Helen Thomas’s imagined plea for understanding.

Like losing a daughter: the day you died.

‘Sailor Boy: Battle of Jutland 1916’ and ‘Wounded Indians, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, 1914-1916’ go nowhere near trenches, but speak to us disturbingly through the smokescreen of images and legends. But yet this book is also about the horses. In ‘Another War Horse’ we are witnesses to a long farewell to dear friend, a beloved horse about to go off to war. Franz Marc’s paintings of horses loom large for her in two fine poems. In ‘Horse Worshipper’,

The language of a snort, whinny,
ears forward, back…..

Here is a writer who knows her horses, can paint them in words, can ride them with rhythm and rhyme, wonderfully well. Memorably.

At the heart of Jon Stallworthy’s masterful War Poet is an epic poem about the horse in the English landscape, the tale told of the White Horse of Uffington from its early beginnings in 1000 BC through the centuries to the present day, almost; how our history has been played out on it and around it, how it looked down on King Ethelred’s army:

“Shall the heather stand between this white horse and his ancient sire?” The army’s answer, hurled around the hills, reached the Danes as thunder.

And then in 1940, the Home Guard buries the white horse under the turf,

Lest the Luftwaffe set a course
For Birmingham by the lie of our horse.

And after the bombing of Dresden, when they have buried a downed German airman,

I’ve given his grave a flower or two,
Hoping some German might not neglect
An English airman known unto God.

Here too there are echoes of those First World War Poets whose lives and deaths live on, who made poetry that no one can forget: ‘Edward Thomas’s ‘Fob Watch’, and his powerful ‘Goodbye to Wilfred Owen’, killed while helping his men bring up duckboards on the bank of the Sambre Canal. Stallworthy’s poems are searing in their intensity, rooted in history and in the lives of the poets of the First World War that he knows so well. They are best I feel, spoken out loud, as indeed are Wilfred Owen’s, where words can sing on long after the poem is done.

Jon Stallworthy grew up during the war that followed ‘the war to end all wars’, grew up with his mother’s memories of a brother and friends killed in the First World War. He has passed on his memories, told the tale as Max Egremont has, as Patricia McCarthy has, each as it has not been told before. Reading them is to keep hope alive, knowing all, despite all.

Say what you will, our God sees how they run.
These disillusions are His curious proving
That He loves humanity and will go on loving;
Over there are faith, life, virtue in the sun.
(Edmund Blunden)

Grey Gowrie writes: Jon Stallworthy who died in November 2014 was a poet and publisher and professor at Oxford. He wrote the biographies of Wilfred Owen and Louis MacNeice and his Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems were published by Carcanet (1998). He was a good friend of The London Magazine and we mourn him.