Chapter 3
Whether I am on the winning or losing side is not the point with me: it is being on the side where my sympathies lie that matters, and I am ready to see it through to the end. Success in life means doing that thing than which nothing else conceivable seems more noble or satisfying or remunerative, and this enviable state I can truly say that I enjoy, for had I the choice I would be nowhere else in the world than where I am.
==
In this letter he says that an article about Rupert Brooke in which his name was mentioned "gave him rather more pain than pleasure, for it rubbed in the matter which most rankled in his heart, that he never could get his book of poems published before the war." However he consoles himself with the reflection that the M.S. is probably as safe at Bruges as anywhere else. "We have finished our eighth month on the firing line," he says, "and rumors are going round of an imminent return to the rear for reorganization."
These rumors proved to be well founded, and on July 17, he wrote on a picture-postcard representing the Lion of Belfort:
==
We have finally come to the rear for a little rest and reorganization, and are cantoned in a valley not far from Belfort, in the extreme east of France, very near the Swiss frontier. Since I wrote you last, all the Americans in the regiment received 48 hours permission in Paris, and it was a great happiness to get back even for so short a while and to see again old scenes and faces after almost a year's absence. We shall be here several weeks perhaps.
==
Three weeks later (August 8) he wrote to his mother:
==
. . . I have always had the passion to play the biggest part within my reach, and it is really in a sense a supreme success to be allowed to play this. If I do not come out, I will share the good fortune of those who disappear at the pinnacle of their careers. Come to love France and understand the almost unexampled nobility of the effort this admirable people is making, for that will be the surest way of your finding comfort for anything that I am ready to suffer in their cause.
==
The spell of rest lasted some two months, and then the Legion returned to the front in time for the battle in Champagne "in which" he writes "we took part from the beginning, the morning of the memorable 25th. September." I cannot resist quoting at some length from the admirably vivid letter in which he gave an account of this experience:
==
The part we played in the battle is briefly as follows. We broke camp about 11 o'clock the night of the 24th, and marched up through ruined Souain to our place in one of the numerous 'boyaux' where the 'troupes d'attaque' were massed. The cannonade was pretty violent all that night, as it had been for several days previous, but toward dawn it reached an intensity unimaginable to anyone who has not seen a modern battle. A little before 9.15 the fire lessened suddenly, and the crackle of the fusillade between the reports of the cannon told us that the first wave of assault had left and the attack begun. At the same time we received the order to advance. The German artillery had now begun to open upon us in earnest. Amid the most infernal roar of every kind of fire-arms, and through an atmosphere heavy with dust and smoke, we marched up through the 'boyaux' to the 'tranchees de depart'. At shallow places and over breaches that shells had made in the bank, we caught momentary glimpses of the blue lines sweeping up the hillside or silhouetted on the crest where they poured into the German trenches. When the last wave of the Colonial brigade had left, we followed. 'Bayonette au canon', in lines of 'tirailleurs', we crossed the open space between the lines, over the barbed wire, where not so many of our men were lying as I had feared, (thanks to the efficacy of the bombardment) and over the German trench, knocked to pieces and filled with their dead. In some places they still resisted in isolated groups. Opposite us, all was over, and the herds of prisoners were being already led down as we went up. We cheered, more in triumph than in hate; but the poor devils, terror-stricken, held up their hands, begged for their lives, cried "Kamerad", "Bon Francais", even "Vive la France". We advanced and lay down in columns by twos behind the second crest. Meanwhile, bridges had been thrown across trenches and 'boyaux', and the artillery, leaving the emplacements where they had been anchored a whole year, came across and took position in the open, a magnificent spectacle. Squadrons of cavalry came up. Suddenly the long, unpicturesque 'guerre de tranchees' was at an end, and the field really presented the aspect of the familiar battle pictures, -- the battalions in manoeuvre, the officers, superbly indifferent to danger, galloping about on their chargers. But now the German guns, moved back, began to get our range, and the shells to burst over and around batteries and troops, many with admirable precision. Here my best comrade was struck down by shrapnel at my side,--painfully but not mortally wounded.
I often envied him after that. For now our advanced troops were in contact with the German second-line defenses, and these proved to be of a character so formidable that all further advance without a preliminary artillery preparation was out of the question. And our role, that of troops in reserve, was to lie passive in an open field under a shell fire that every hour became more terrific, while aeroplanes and captive balloons, to which we were entirely exposed, regulated the fire.
That night we spent in the rain. With portable picks and shovels each man dug himself in as well as possible. The next day our concentrated artillery again began the bombardment, and again the fusillade announced the entrance of the infantry into action. But this time only the wounded appeared coming back, no prisoners. I went out and gave water to one of these, eager to get news. It was a young soldier, wounded in the hand. His face and voice bespoke the emotion of the experience he had been through, in a way that I will never forget. "Ah, les salauds!" he cried, "They let us come right up to the barbed wire without firing. Then a hail of grenades and balls. My comrade fell, shot through the leg, got up, and the next moment had his head taken off by a grenade before my eyes." "And the barbed wire, wasn't it cut down by the bombardment?" "Not at all in front of us." I congratulated him on having a 'blessure heureuse' and being well out of the affair. But he thought only of his comrade and went on down the road toward Souain nursing his mangled hand, with the stream of wounded seeking their 'postes de secours'.
==
He then tells how, in spite of substantial gains, it gradually "became more and more evident that the German second line of defence presented obstacles too serious to attempt overcoming for the moment, and we began going up at night to work at consolidating our advanced trenches and turning them into a new permanent line." To this time, perhaps, belongs the incident related by Rif Baer, an Egyptian, who was his comrade and best friend in the regiment. A piece of difficult trench work was allotted to the men, to be finished in one night. "Each was given the limit, that he was supposed to be able to complete in the time. It happened that Rif Baer was ill, and, after working a while, his strength gave out. Alan completed his own job and R. B.'s also, and although he was quite exhausted by the extra labour, his eyes glowed with happiness, and he said he had never done anything in his life that gave him such entire satisfaction."
Summing up the results of the battle, Alan wrote (still in the same letter, October 25): "It was a satisfaction at least to get out of the trenches, to meet the enemy face to face and to see German arrogance turned into suppliance. We knew many splendid moments, worth having endured many trials for. But in our larger aim, of piercing their line, of breaking the long deadlock, of entering Vouziers in triumph, of course we failed." Then he proceeds:
==
This affair only deepened my admiration for, my loyalty to, the French. If we did not entirely succeed, it was not the fault of the French soldier. He is a better man, man for man, than the German. Anyone who had seen the charge of the Marsouins at Souain would acknowledge it. Never was anything more magnificent. I remember a captain, badly wounded in the leg, as he passed us, borne back on a litter by four German prisoners. He asked us what regiment we were, and when we told him, he cried "Vive la Legion," and kept repeating "Nous les avons en. Nous les avons en." He was suffering, but, oblivious of his wound, was still fired with the enthusiasm of the assault and all radiant with victory. What a contrast with the German wounded on whose faces was nothing but terror and despair. What is the stimulus in their slogans of "Gott mit uns" and "Fuer Koenig und Vaterland" beside that of men really fighting in defense of their country? Whatever be the force in international conflicts of having justice and all the principles of personal morality on one's side, it at least gives the French soldier a strength that's like the strength of ten against an adversary whose weapon is only brute violence. It is inconceivable that a Frenchman, forced to yield, could behave as I saw German prisoners behave, trembling, on their knees, for all the world like criminals at length overpowered and brought to justice. Such men have to be driven to the assault, or intoxicated. But the Frenchman who goes up is possessed with a passion beside which any of the other forms of experience that are reckoned to make life worth while seem pale in comparison.
==
A report appeared in the American newspapers that he had been killed in the battle of Champagne. On learning of it, he wrote to his mother:
==
I am 'navre' to think of your having suffered so. I should have arranged to cable after the attack, had I known that any such absurd rumours had been started. Here one has a wholesome notion of the unimportance of the individual. It needs an effort of imagination to conceive of its making any particular difference to anyone or anything if one goes under. So many better men have gone, and yet the world rolls on just the same.
==
After Champagne, his regiment passed to the rear and did not return to the front until May 1916. On February 1st he writes: "I am in hospital for the first time, not for a wound, unfortunately, but for sickness." Hitherto his health, since he joined the army, had been superb. As a youth he had never been robust; but the soldier's life suited him to perfection, and all remnants of any mischief left behind by the illness of his childhood seemed to have vanished. It was now a sharp attack of bronchitis that sent him to hospital. On his recovery he obtained two months 'conge de convalescence', part of which he spent at Biarritz and part in Paris. About this time, much to his satisfaction, he once more came into the possession of "Juvenilia". On April 13th he wrote to his mother:
==
Did I tell you that the Embassy have managed to get my M.S. for me? It was very interesting to re-read this work, which I had almost forgotten. I found much that was good in it, but much that was juvenile too, and am not so anxious to publish it as it stands. I shall probably make extracts from it and join it with what I have done since. I shall go back to the front on the first of May without regrets. These visits to the rear only confirm me in my conviction that the work up there on the front is so far the most interesting work a man can be doing at this moment, that nothing else counts in comparison.
==
On May 13th he wrote to his "marraine", Mrs. Weeks: "The chateau in the grounds of which we are barracked, has a most beautiful name -- Bellinglise. Isn't it pretty? I shall have to write a sonnet to enclose it, as a ring is made express for a jewel. It is a wonderful old seventeenth-century manor, surrounded by a lordly estate. What is that exquisite stanza in 'Maud' about 'in the evening through the lilacs (or laurels) of the old manorial home'?* Look it up and send it to me." Ten days later he wrote to the same lady:
--
* He was doubtless thinking of this:
Alas for her that met me, That heard me softly call, Came glimmering thro' the laurels In the quiet evenfall, In the garden by the turrets Of the old manorial hall.
--
==
The week in the trenches was a week of the most beautiful weather. . . . These days were saddened by the death of poor Colette in the bombardment, and by the suffering of his brother who has now returned after the burial. They were marked on the other hand by two afternoons of rather memorable emotion. Exasperated by the inactivity of the sector here, and tempted by danger, I stole off twice after guard, and made a patrol all by myself through the wood paths and trails between the lines. In the front of these, at a crossing of paths not far from one of our posts, I found a burnt rocket-stick planted in the ground, and a scrap of paper stuck in the top, placed there by the boches to guide their little mischief-making parties when they come to visit us in the night. The scrap of paper was nothing else than a bit of the 'Berliner Tageblatt'. This seemed so interesting to me that I reported it to the captain, though my going out alone this way is a thing strictly forbidden. He was very decent about it though, and seemed really interested in the information. Yesterday afternoon I repeated this exploit, following another trail, and I went so far that I came clear up to the German barbed wire, where I left a card with my name. It was very thrilling work, "courting destruction with taunts, with invitations" as Whitman would say. I have never been in a sector like this, where patrols could be made in daylight. Here the deep forest permits it. It also greatly facilitates ambushes, for one must keep to the paths, owing to the underbrush. I and a few others are going to try to get permission to go out on 'patrouilles d'embuscade' and bring in some live prisoners. It would be quite an extraordinary feat if we could pull it off. In our present existence it is the only way I can think of to get the Croix de Guerre. And to be worthy of my marraine I think that I ought to have the Croix de Guerre.
==
He had hoped to have been in Paris on Decoration Day, May 30th, to read, before the statue of Lafayette and Washington, the "Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France", which he had written at the request of a Committee of American residents; but his "permission" unfortunately did not arrive in time. Completed in two days, during which he was engaged in the hardest sort of labour in the trenches, this Ode is certainly the crown of the poet's achievement. It is entirely admirable, entirely adequate to the historic occasion. If the war has produced a nobler utterance, it has not come my way. On June 24th, he again wrote, giving an account of a march, which was "without exception the hardest he had ever made" -- "20 kilometers through the blazing sun and in a cloud of dust. Something around 30 kilograms on the back. About 50 per cent dropped by the way. By making a supreme effort, I managed to get in at the finish, with the fifteen men that were all that was left of the section." He now knew that the great offensive was imminent. "The situation," he wrote, "is most interesting and exciting, but I am not at liberty to say anything about it. My greatest preoccupation now is whether this affair is coming off before or after the 4th of July. The indications are that it is going to break very soon. In that case nothing doing in the way of permission. But I still have hopes of getting in."
His hopes of getting to Paris were frustrated, as were all his other hopes save one--the hope of
That rare privilege of dying well.
On July 1st, the great advance began. At six in the evening of July 4th, the Legion was ordered to clear the enemy out of the village of Belloy-en-Santerre. Alan Seeger advanced in the first rush, and his squad was enfiladed by the fire of six German machine guns, concealed in a hollow way. Most of them went down, and Alan among them -- wounded in several places. But the following waves of attack were more fortunate. As his comrades came up to him, Alan cheered them on; and as they left him behind, they heard him singing a marching-song in English: --
Accents of ours were in the fierce melee.
They took the village, they drove the invaders out; but for some reason unknown--perhaps a very good one -- the battlefield was left unvisited that night. Next morning, Alan Seeger lay dead.
There is little to add. He wrote his own best epitaph in the "Ode": --
And on those furthest rims of hallowed ground Where the forlorn, the gallant charge expires, When the slain bugler has long ceased to sound, And on the tangled wires The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops, Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers: -- Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops, Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours.
His death was briefly noticed in one or two French papers. The 'Matin' published a translation of part of the poem, "Champagne, 1914-15", and remarked that "Cyrano de Bergerac would have signed it." But France had no time, even if she had had the knowledge, to realize the greatness of the sacrifice that had been made for her. That will come later. One day France will know that this unassuming soldier of the Legion,
Who, not unmindful of the antique debt, Came back the generous path of Lafayette,
was one whom even she may be proud to have reckoned among her defenders.
The "Last Poems" speak for themselves. They contain lines which he would doubtless have remodelled had he lived to review them in tranquillity -- perhaps one or two pieces, sprung from a momentary mood, which, on reflection he would have rejected.* But they not only show a great advance on his earlier work: they rank high, or I am much mistaken, among the hitherto not very numerous poems in the English language produced, not in mere memory or imagination of war, but in its actual stress and under its haunting menace.
--
* Neither in the "Juvenilia" nor in the "Last Poems" has anything been suppressed that he himself ever thought of publishing. Indeed nothing at all has been omitted, except two early poems on which he had written "These are worthless."
--
Again and again in the "Last Poems"--notably in "Maktoob" with its tribute to
The resignation and the calm And wisdom of the East,
he returns to the note of fatalism. Here he has not only the wisdom of the East but the logic of the West on his side. Necessity is as incontrovertible to thought as it is incredible to feeling. But in the potent illusion of free-will (if illusion it be) rests all morality and all the admiration that we feel for good and evil deeds. Not even at Alan Seeger's bidding can we quite persuade ourselves that, when he took up arms for France, he was exercising no brave, no generous choice, but was the conscript of Destiny.
William Archer.
Poems by Alan Seeger
Juvenilia
1914
An Ode to Natural Beauty
There is a power whose inspiration fills Nature's fair fabric, sun- and star-inwrought, Like airy dew ere any drop distils, Like perfume in the laden flower, like aught Unseen which interfused throughout the whole Becomes its quickening pulse and principle and soul. Now when, the drift of old desire renewing, Warm tides flow northward over valley and field, When half-forgotten sound and scent are wooing From their deep-chambered recesses long sealed Such memories as breathe once more Of childhood and the happy hues it wore, Now, with a fervor that has never been In years gone by, it stirs me to respond, -- Not as a force whose fountains are within The faculties of the percipient mind, Subject with them to darkness and decay, But something absolute, something beyond, Oft met like tender orbs that seem to peer From pale horizons, luminous behind Some fringe of tinted cloud at close of day; And in this flood of the reviving year, When to the loiterer by sylvan streams, Deep in those cares that make Youth loveliest, Nature in every common aspect seems To comment on the burden in his breast -- The joys he covets and the dreams he dreams -- One then with all beneath the radiant skies That laughs with him or sighs, It courses through the lilac-scented air, A blessing on the fields, a wonder everywhere.
Spirit of Beauty, whose sweet impulses, Flung like the rose of dawn across the sea, Alone can flush the exalted consciousness With shafts of sensible divinity -- Light of the World, essential loveliness: Him whom the Muse hath made thy votary Not from her paths and gentle precepture Shall vulgar ends engage, nor break the spell That taught him first to feel thy secret charms And o'er the earth, obedient to their lure, Their sweet surprise and endless miracle, To follow ever with insatiate arms. On summer afternoons, When from the blue horizon to the shore, Casting faint silver pathways like the moon's Across the Ocean's glassy, mottled floor, Far clouds uprear their gleaming battlements Drawn to the crest of some bleak eminence, When autumn twilight fades on the sere hill And autumn winds are still; To watch the East for some emerging sign, Wintry Capella or the Pleiades Or that great huntsman with the golden gear; Ravished in hours like these Before thy universal shrine To feel the invoked presence hovering near, He stands enthusiastic. Star-lit hours Spent on the roads of wandering solitude Have set their sober impress on his brow, And he, with harmonies of wind and wood And torrent and the tread of mountain showers, Has mingled many a dedicative vow That holds him, till thy last delight be known, Bound in thy service and in thine alone.