As the previous chapter demonstrated, the War Propaganda Bureau had a significant impact on the literature being circulated during the war and the message being delivered. However, theirs was not the only work that endeavoured to rally men to the Front. Civilian and poet-soldiers frequently drew on medieval, romantic images in the depictions of battlefield bravery to inspire the courage needed for enlistment. The rhetoric of chivalry and gallantry was still very operative during the earlier stages of the war, striking a cord with many idealistic individuals. However, as this somewhat naïve and aggrandised treatment of war began to lose favour, poets sought new forms of motivation. This at times manifested through the desire for vengeance, for defence, the compulsion to fill the place a friend or loved one had occupied at the Front, as well as other more realistic and personal reasons. These appealed less to the abstract, romantic ideas of war and more to individual experience and understanding. Just as the nature and comprehension of the war changed within the public mindset, so did responses to it and expressions of the necessity to be involved in it.
‘The Volunteer’ by Herbert Asquith illustrates the potential influence of depictions of combat as portrayed through medieval and medievalist works on one individual’s perception of war.366 The poem features a clerk who views his life as unfulfilled until he is able to gain the battlefield and meet with a heroic death: ‘Thinking that so his days would drift away / With no lance broken in life’s tournament’ (ln. 2-3). Battle is imagined romantically: ‘The gleaming eagles of the legions came, / And horsemen, charging under phantom skies, / Went thundering past beneath the oriflamme,’ rings of medieval poetic illustration (ln. 6-8). The oriflamme, the
366 Herbert Asquith, ‘The Volunteer’, in The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, ed. by George Walter
red banner used to signify a combat à mort and standard of the kings of France, foreshadows the conclusion of the poem inducing an air of fatalism. The use of medieval rhetoric and symbolism acts as a means to engender feelings of nostalgia and cultural pride. Identification with historic events or individuals of brave character would have resonated with the educated and literate audience that many poets, especially those commissioned by Wellington House, strove to attract. But this ‘cult of death’, as Patrick Porter terms it, was not simply the forceful propaganda of the elites nor the imposing rhetoric of state and government agencies.367 Studies of post-war
commemorations, local war memorials, patriotic novels, and poetry of the 1920s demonstrate the endurance of medievalist writing and discourse.
Asquith’s invocation of Agincourt in the poem’s final line contributes to a sense of historicity as well as patriotism, and relies upon the reader’s personal knowledge to translate the reference’s significance.
And now those waiting dreams are satisfied From twilight to the halls of dawn he went; His lance is broken; but he lies content
With that high hour, in which he lived and died. And falling thus, he wants no recompense, Who found his battle in the last resort Nor needs he any hearse to bear him hence, Who goes to join the men of Agincourt. (ln. 9-16)
However, it is death’s unavoidability, or perhaps better phrased, the lack of desire for self- preservation that adds to the poem’s poignancy. According to Leo Braudy, ‘the medieval
language of Christian redemption and warrior honour’ worked to ‘gloss the world of blood, filth and futility.’368 The reader is not permitted to see the clerk’s actions in battle, any of his struggles
or conflicts: rather the audience is immediately at the clerk’s deathbed and shown that this costly
367 Patrick Porter, ‘War and the Religious Will to Sacrifice’, Peace Review, 17.1 (2005), 17-24, at p. 17. 368 Braudy quoted by Porter, ‘Will to Sacrifice’, p. 18.
sacrifice is not simply the only acceptable outcome for entering battle, but the only desired one. Life becomes complete in death. In order to fulfill the role of knight he must perish in battle, dying honourably in the service of some worthy cause without any ulterior desire. The poem leaves no opportunity for the warrior to live on but rather glamourises his death, portraying it as the actualisation of masculinity.
The reception of Arthur Machen’s short story ‘The Bowmen’ demonstrates the effect of such famous historical events.369 Intended as a work of fiction, Machen’s tale of the bowmen of Agincourt coming to the aid of British soldiers after the retreat at the Battle of Mons was so enormously popular that individuals interpreted it as truth with any questions of its authenticity ultimately becoming treasonous.370 Its narrative style convinced many of its authenticity and many “real-life” accounts by soldiers, officers and nurses alike began to be circulated.371 As Andrew Maunder points out, Machen capitalised on the controversy and popularity of the story that it was issued in a book selling ‘3,000 copies in the first day, 50,000 in three months, and 100,000 in a year and was translated into six languages’.372 This aggrandisement of sacrifice and its links to medieval notions of bravery take on even deeper significances when soldiers are draped in the mantle of sacrifice and refigured as Jesus Christ willingly going to the cross, a topic that will be addressed later in this chapter.
Yet not all references to the chivalrically informed ideals of sacrifice were positively viewed or remembered. Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Disabled’ about a boy who becomes an amputee as a result of the war is certainly not in support of the conflict, but does offer a bitter glimpse of
369 Arthur Machen, The Angel of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (London: Simpkin, Marshall,
Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1951).
370 Fussell, Modern Memory, p. 116; Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: British, American and Canadian
Propaganda and Fiction, 1914-1933 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014), p. 103.
371 Andrew Maunder, The Facts on File Companion to the British Short Story (New York, NY: Facts on File, 2007),
pp. 44-45.