First World War: Commemorations

Lord Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 26th November 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Jones (Lab)]

My Lords, I most sincerely thank the noble Lord, Lord Black, for obtaining this debate and for his insightful and meaningful remarks.

I liked the reference to John Singer Sargent’s “Gassed”. It is a frightening, huge canvas, with much detail. I suggest that the noble Lord also considers the pendant to that painting, equally large, which is titled, “General Officers of World War I”. If one looks first at “Gassed” and the terrifying impact on the poor, bloody infantry, and then sees the immaculate, shining detail of “General Officers of World War I”, it provides a very helpful contrast.

I commend to the Minister one poet who was born on the Welsh border in Oswestry—Wilfred Owen. He was the poet of the trenches. This is his poem, “The Sentry”:

“We’d found an old Boche dug out, and he knew,

And gave us hell; for shell on frantic shell

Lit full on top, but never quite burst through.

Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime,

Kept slush waist-high and rising hour by hour,

And choked the steps too thick with clay to climb.

What murk of air remained stank old, and sour

With fumes from whizbangs, and the smell of men

Who’d lived there years, and left their curse in the den,

If not their corpses… There we herded from the blast

Of whizbangs; but one found our door at last,

Buffeting eyes and breath, snuffing the candles,

And thud! flump! thud! down the steep steps thumping

And sploshing in the flood, deluging muck,

The sentry’s body; then his rifle, handles

Of old Boche bombs, and mud in ruck on ruck.

We dredged it up, for dead, until he whined

‘O sir - my eyes, - I’m blind, - I’m blind, I'm blind’.

Coaxing, I held a flame against his lids

And said if he could see the least blurred light

He was not blind; in time they’d get all right.

‘I can’t,’ he sobbed. Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids

Watch my dreams still, - yet I forgot him there

In posting Next for duty, and sending a scout

To beg a stretcher somewhere, and floundring about

To other posts under the shrieking air.

Those other wretches, how they bled and spewed,

And one who would have drowned himself for good,

I try not to remember these things now.

Let Dread hark back for one word only: how,

Half-listening to that sentry’s moans and jumps,

And the wild chattering of his shivered teeth,

Renewed most horribly whenever crumps

Pummelled the roof and slogged the air beneath,

Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout

‘I see your lights!’ But ours had long gone out”.

The noble Lord also referred to artists. I think it is CWR Nevinson’s “The 1st Kensingtons” which shows a dead beat, exhausted platoon; they are armed; they are burdened; they have balaclavas; it is freezing; some are lying, some are sitting and some are standing. It is a study in exhaustion and the grind and terror of the trenches. Another picture by Nevinson is “The Machine Gun”, which depicts the machine gun as its central character. That was, of course, the one destructive invention that ensured hundreds and thousands of deaths and countless maimings. I will mention one other artist before I sit down. Mark Gertler’s painting “Merry-Go-Round”, which is in Tate Britain, is technicoloured and shows a fair on Hampstead Heath. On the whirling horses are soldiers, buttoned up and erect. Every mouth is open; it could be entitled “The Scream”. It is a brilliant depiction of what happens to the soldier. Mark Gertler was a depressive and, ultimately, a suicide. Time presses and I must conclude.