Britten, the pacifist

I wonder how many people, like me, bored with the cookery programmes, worthy dramas and so-called "reality TV", especially during lockdown, have found themselves reduced to scrolling down the alphabetical list of elderly BBC documentaries on iPlayer? One such search yielded a 2013 programme about the composer Benjamin Britten.

     I didn't even know about the informal performances given by Britten and his partner Peter Pears on the BBC in the 1960s, short interludes with Britten at the piano and Pears in a cardigan. Thus, although I remember the Dudley Moore (himself a highly talented musician) parody of these performances, I had no idea at the time what he was parodying. Apparently Pears - the chief victim of the parody - took it in good spirit, but Britten was very hurt. He had not been singled out by Moore, who also parodied Brecht and Weill and several other better-known classical composers, yet clearly he took his work seriously and did not respond well to being held up to ridicule.

    Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, were lifelong pacifists, both of whom applied for recognition as conscientious objectors during the Second World War. (Britten was not born until 1913, and claimed that his pacifism was an indirect result of the harsh regime he experienced at boarding school.)  Like Sassoon, he became a member of the inter-war Peace Pledge Union, on whose behalf he wrote a piece of music called Pacifist March. As a composer, he was still in the process of building his reputation, and the march was not a big hit in the run-up to the war. In the same year, 1937, there were two major events in his life: his mother died, and he met Peter Pears.

    Their pacifism was one of the reasons for Britten and Pears leaving the UK for Canada and later the United States, where they were less exposed to the hostility of what Sassoon called "jingo".  They returned to the UK before the end of the war and Britten agreed to work for the Ministry of Information.

    Yet in 2013, while preparing a film about Britten for the centenary of his birth, director Tony Palmer claimed that the Ministry of Defence had refused him permission to use a piece of training film when they found out he was working on material about Britten, on the grounds that the MOD could not be seen to deal with "cowards" and "deserters". The MOD denied any such motive, but it may be that Palmer had happened to come into contact with individuals who held such views, of which many can be found on your nearest high street.   

    Britten's music can be something of an acquired taste, but that he was a remarkable talent is hardly open to debate. His setting of Wilfred Owen's "At a Calvary near the Ancre" was included in the concert, "Songs of War", organised by the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship in partnership with other war poets' societies at St James's Church, Piccadilly, in 2009. Really, though, this song is part of the War Requiem that Britten wrote in 1962 for the consecration of Coventry Cathedral, a modern replacement constructed right next to the ancient building destroyed by German bombing in 1941. Many of us can clearly remember watching the opening on black-and-white television, though of course its significance was lost on a six-year-old child, as I then was.

    The War Requiem, generally regarded as Britten's masterpiece, included a substantial chunk of Wilfred Owen's poetry (including "Anthem for Doomed Youth", the poem Sassoon helped him write), and no doubt introduced Owen's work to a much wider audience. These texts are interspersed with the traditional sequences of the Latin requiem - "Kyrie Eleison", "Dies irae", "Libera me", etc. One great admirer of the work was the late Dom Sebastian Moore, who described to me in our 2007 interview how it had moved him.

    Britten's love of poetry was not limited to Owen and the war poets. He was a great admirer of the work of Thomas Hardy and William Blake, and was a close personal friend of W H Auden. Around 150 poets in total were given the Britten treatment, a staggering figure, but I can't find Sassoon among them; nor have I as yet found any clues as to Sassoon's opinions on Britten's music. Siegfried was very musical and would certainly have had a view. The two men were far apart in age, but not enough to have precluded them becoming friends, and they moved in the same circles and shared many ideas. It's impossible that they did not meet on occasions, and yet I can't find a direct link between them. Just another of the many remaining gaps in my knowledge of Siegfried Sassoon.

Book review: The Battle of Tsushima 1904

Phil Carradice describes himself as a "storyteller" rather than a historian. This may ring alarm bells with some who do not like his drama-documentary style of writing. However, to the best of my knowledge, there are no events in this book that did not happen. To quote one of the UK's greatest contemporary historians, Michael Wood, writing just this month in the BBC History magazine, "Stories are what history is about."

    Personally, I don't mind a little imagination being added to the descriptions, as happens almost on the first page of this book when Carradice describes the feelings of the future Czar Nicholas II on being confronted by a would-be assassin during what should have been a leisure trip to Japan. This incident, thirteen years before the battle took place, is considered key to Nicholas's subsequent attitude to Japan, and certainly much of the blame for the disastrous (for the Russians) battle which is the subject of this book rests at the czar's door. 

    In the first decade of the twentieth century, Russia was a massive empire largely governed by high-born incompetents and heading for trouble, whilst Japan was a small, mysterious nation emerging from centuries of isolation and not taken seriously by the western world. The czar's word was law, and Nicholas was no military tactician. After a series of defeats for his Pacific fleet, he insisted on a large force of unsuitable ships being sent out from the Baltic to Vladivostok to replace them, firmly believing that quantity was a substitute for quality.

    Throughout the narrative, we are treated to intriguing stories - stories about the admiral of the Russian fleet, Zinovy Petrovich "Mad Dog" Rozhestvensky, a man who did his best with the sub-standard raw materials allotted to him, threw his binoculars overboard whenever thwarted, and frequently retreated to his cabin to wallow in deep depression. It seems miraculous that he and his ships ever arrived in the Tsushima Strait, let alone put up any kind of fight against the better-equipped Japanese fleet, with its more highly-skilled and better-trained crews, and led by the enigmatic Admiral Togo. No wonder the battle ended with around 5000 Russian lives lost, compared with less than 200 Japanese.

    As one might expect in a book of this kind, there are many names - of ships, people and places - that are unfamiliar to an English-speaking reader and difficult to memorize. It is thus a major frustration that there is no index. As far as I can make out, most of Pen & Sword's excellent non-fiction works have one, and I can only assume that this is an oversight by the editors (who, sadly, don't seem to have expended much effort on proof-reading either).

    The major service this book does (and the reason I'm reviewing it here) is that it puts the Battle of Tsushima in its historical context. Phil Carradice ably shows how preceding events led up to it, and also how it led indirectly to Russia's involvement in the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and Japan's subsequent rise to a position of world power that was not easy to control. Russia's opinion of herself, and Japan's growing confidence, were affected for many decades to come. Thus a battle that may, taken in isolation, seem unconnected with the world conflicts of the twentieth century, is shown to be very relevant and well worth writing and reading about.

Phil Carradice, The Battle of Tsushima. Pen & Sword, 2020. ISBN 978-1526743343

 

War and taxes

It was Benjamin Franklin who said that only two things in life are certain: death and taxes. He might have said "war and taxes", which is almost equally true. Moreover, history has demonstrated that war is often inextricably linked with taxes, either as a cause or a result of them.

Five years ago, in the monograph on Henry Vaughan that I wrote for Cecil Woolf's War Poets series, I drew attention to the many parallels between the seventeenth-century poet whom Siegfried Sassoon admired and Sassoon himself. One of my aims was to show that, although warfare may become more mechanised, in essence it does not become more sophisticated, and the wartime experiences of those who participated in the English Civil War were not so different from those of twentieth-century soldiers. I am reminded of this time and time again when reading about Britain's history of warfare. Some of the episodes I am about to mention may seem startlingly familiar.

Most recently, I have been researching the series of events known, somewhat inaccurately, as The Hundred Years War, a long-running conflict between England and France. When I say "England", I do mean England. Scotland was a separate kingdom, which had its own troubles. Wales had been annexed by England in 1284, and for more than two hundred years after that, the Welsh were effectively second-class citizens in the merged kingdom. (This situation stemmed from the fact that neither the Saxons nor the Danes had ever controlled Wales or Scotland and the resulting ethnic divisions would not be healed until 1603, when James VI of Scotland inherited the throne of Queen Elizabeth I. Long before that, however, the French were seen by their close relations, the Anglo-Norman nobility, as the real enemy.)

I note that 21st July will be the anniversary of the Battle of Shrewsbury, which fell right in the middle of the Hundred Years War, but had nothing much to do with it.  The main antagonists, on that occasion, were Harry Percy, son of the Duke of Northumberland - known as "Hotspur" because of his impetuous nature (who does this remind you of?) - and King Henry IV, to whom Percy had previously given his allegiance. In this case, there were Welshmen on both sides, since the rebellious Percy and his father had made an alliance with Owain Glyndwr, a Welsh nobleman who had taken up the sword after being unfairly treated in a dispute with his English neighbour. At the same time, the king had long-standing associations with Wales, where he was a leading landowner, and was able to call hundreds of Welshmen to his side.

Someone asked me recently why Richard II of England was such an unpopular king. The answer, I fear, may lie less in Richard's mercurial personality than in the fact that he brought a temporary end to the Hundred Years War.  One only has to look back to the Falklands conflict of 1982 to see how a national leader can trade on a foreign invasion to gain lasting popularity, although in the case of the Hundred Years War, England may be regarded as the aggressor. Richard II had been born at Bordeaux, in the English Crown's French territories, and his father (the "Black Prince") had worn himself out fighting multiple large-scale battles in order to maintain English power on the Continent. Richard was a very different man from his father, and had no wish to spend his life campaigning overseas. Eventually he was forced to take steps to defend the realm against possible invasion, and this meant raising taxes. However, Richard refused to take the financial hit himself, declining to reduce his household bills. Having married the French king's daughter and made a peace treaty, he was surrounded by frustrated noblemen, branded a tyrant, and deposed.

The Welsh rebellion broke out almost immediately, and Richard's cousin Henry IV found that it was not as easy to keep the whole country happy as he had anticipated. Twenty years after his son, the Prince of Wales, was seriously wounded at Shrewsbury (almost certainly resulting in a permanently disfiguring scar), the prince came to the throne as the glorious King Henry V, who is remembered as a saviour of the nation in the war against France that resumed in 1415. Many Britons are under the false impression that the Battle of Agincourt was decisive. Miraculous as it was, it did not significantly assist the English in their goal of taking the French throne. It would be another five bloody years before Henry was recognised as the heir of King Charles VI of France, and his death at the age of 35 led on to further bloodshed in the form of a renewal of war with France, followed at close quarters by the Wars of the Roses.

The men who participated in these wars often lived to regret their experiences. Sir John Cornwall, a veteran of Agincourt, later served Henry in a second French campaign, in the course of which he witnessed his 17-year-old only son having his head blown off by a cannonball. Sir John vowed never again to fight a war of conquest. Reading this, I could not help thinking of the death of David Thomas, and the words of Sassoon's 1917 declaration: "I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest." It simply was not worth the human suffering.  

VE Day at Heytesbury

On 8th May 1945, as the rest of the nation celebrated victory in Europe with noisy parties and military parades, Siegfried Sassoon wrote that he felt a sense of "mental flatness". He had done his best to avoid anything to do with the Second World War. (As usual with Sassoon, his actions were contradictory; he had written for the papers to back up the war effort, though it can be safely assumed that his heart was not in it.) He must have felt that he and his generation had failed. After the Great War, they had initially believed that there would never be another one like it. Sassoon, with his Jewish blood, must quickly have come to realise that it was inevitable, despite the pacifism he had embraced in the 1930s. Even his own published work had been banned in Germany.
When the time came and the Observer, a paper that had once been owned by his own family, asked him for a celebratory poem, he produced something much less congratulatory in tone. His peace at Heytesbury House had been seriously disturbed by the war, with evacuees needing to be accommodated, and he had retreated to his study to work on his memoirs, leaving the additional work to his young wife Hester, who already had her hands full with their son George, still a toddler in 1939.

Many of Sassoon's friends enlisted, but he was not tempted to apply to join the Home Guard. He told one of his friends that he felt like "a semi-submerged barge on a derelict canal". He started to despise Hester for taking an interest in the progress of the war. Nevertheless, he conceived a great dislike for Hitler and began to see this conflict as the final struggle between good and evil. This was in contrast with the feelings of some of his friends, such as Edmund Blunden and J C Dunn, who were both unhappy with Britain's conduct.

By the end of the war, the first two volumes of memoirs had sold well and received praise from reviewers, one notable exception being Malcolm Muggeridge, who had referred to The Old Century as "an anaemic fairy story". However, even combined with the successes of D-Day and the prospect of an end to the war at last, it was not enough to make 1945 a happy year for Sassoon. During the war, his former lover, Stephen Tennant, had crawled out of the woodwork, making unexpected visits to Heytesbury. He was the last person Siegfried wanted to see. Someone he cared about far more, Glen Byam Shaw, had been badly wounded while serving in the far east. Another friend, Rex Whistler, was killed in 1944. In the meantime, Siegfried's relationship with Hester had gradually deteriorated and was at breaking point.

His friend Blunden had already divorced two wives, and Sassoon began to think that this was the only way out of his problems with Hester. He had sent her to stay with her mother, but she refused to stay away, continuing to phone and visit frequently. Rather than celebrate VE Day together, he insisted that Hester return to her mother's, and himself ignored what was going on outside the haven of Heytesbury. His poem had appeared in the Observer two days earlier.

"To Some Who Say Production Won The War" was a sad and bitter poem. It began with a dig at the profiteers, who had come through the war at the expense of others who had given their lives: "Defenders of the soul of man assailed/By foul aggression and its creed of crime."

By the time the Japanese had been defeated in August 1945, Sassoon declared he was past caring. "I have no literary ambition at all now," he wrote, adding that his life from now on would be centred on his son George. He had failed to recognise the inevitability of losing his son to adulthood. For the moment, he tried to settle back into the comfortable rural existence he had previously enjoyed.

Alone

"Alone" was the poem that first brought John Stuart Roberts, Siegfried Sassoon's first biographer, to his appreciation of the poet. Sassoon himself said that "it was the first of my post-war poems in which I discovered my mature mode of utterance". He was, at the time, feeling isolated, despite sharing a house in London with his friends, Walter and Delphine Turner. He had gradually developed a dislike of Walter Turner, brought on partly by Turner's mistreatment of his wife, Delphine, for whom Sassoon felt great sympathy. Sassoon lived on the top floor and had little interest in associating with his downstairs neighbour. He was desperate to leave.

The poem was actually written after a visit from Glen Byam Shaw, the young actor who would remain one of Sassoon's greatest friends throughout his life. Glen had brightened up his evening, as well as helping him to find alternative accommodation in a house at Campden Hill Square, which nowadays boasts a blue plaque recording Sassoon's residence there. The words of the poem suggest that the poet was feeling his age and possibly even believing that it was affecting his state of mind.

In the middle of the crisis that is currently affecting most of society, I wonder how many people have begun to feel that they are "getting strange", as Sassoon's poem puts it. He did not mind being alone - he loved books, and liked to have his own space in which to ponder and write his poetry. Nevertheless, he was fond of company. In his youth, he had enjoyed playing team games as well as solitary excursions on his horse and long cycle rides. During the war years, he had mixed well with his comrades, even those who were not on the same intellectual level (the incident when Robert Graves identified him as a kindred spirit by what he was reading speaks volumes).

On the other hand, it was Sassoon's preference for his own company and need for peace and quiet that would prove to be one of the deciding factors in the break-up of his marriage. He had expected Hester to be there when he wanted her, and to stay out of his way when he didn't. When he wrote: "I thought how strange we grow when we're alone/And how unlike the selves that meet and talk," he was already recognising his own shortcomings in this respect, but that recognition failed to bring him happiness in the long term. He was truly set in his ways.
Perhaps some of us, feeling a little depressed by this enforced isolation, have been told by friends or family to "snap out of it" or reminded how lucky we are not to be living in a tenth floor flat or working in the NHS without the necessary PPE. Does it make us feel any better? I doubt it.
Chris Packham, the TV naturalist, has been open about his own struggles with depression and commented recently that isolation was easy for him because he spends a lot of his working life alone, exploring the countryside with only nature for company. However, he also stated that he would find it impossible to be confined to the house and unable to go out for walks, and that he feels this is essential for his mental health.

Siegfried, I think, was such a person. He was perfectly willing to isolate himself on the top floor of the house in Tufton Street with his books, while the Turners carried on their separate lives downstairs. He would probably have managed more than adequately in the present situation, provided there was someone to bring him his meals. What he could not stand was being stuck indoors, and in an environment such as central London, country walks were not possible even if he did go out. Campden Hill Square was at least in a greener, leafier part of the capital. However, it's not surprising that as soon as he could afford it (courtesy of the legacy from Auntie Rachel) he moved to a rural area in the west of England where he had a private estate at his disposal.

Boredom 2020-style

One of the biggest worries for people in the UK and other developed countries in the current situation is boredom. We have so many types of entertainment at our disposal, and yet the one thing everyone wants to do at the moment is to go outside. Forget the convenience of online ordering; we want to go to the shops. We can make a cup of coffee at home but it's much more appealing to go out to a coffee shop with friends and spend an hour chatting. We can easily phone our relatives, but we would rather see them face to face. This gives me some optimism for the future of the human race. Perhaps, in the future, we will come to appreciate the natural world and the joys of physical contact more than we ever did.

Siegfried Sassoon talks about boredom sometimes in his memoirs. Very much an outdoor man in his youth, he realised on arriving at the Western Front what other soldiers also mentioned - the boredom of being in the trenches, alternating as it did with short periods of extreme danger and horror. Officers were obliged to invent monotonous tasks to keep their men occupied - filling sandbags, cleaning out the latrines, etc. It was critical to keep up their morale. I like this quote from the letters of Max Staniforth (1893-1985), who wrote:

The only way to be here is to be philosophical. We have evolved a philosophy accordingly. What do you think of it?
If you are a soldier, you are either:
(1) at home or (2) at the Front.
If (1), you needn’t worry.
If (2), you are either (1) out of the danger zone or (2) in it.
If (1), you needn’t worry.
If (2), you are either (1) not hit, or (2) hit.
If (1), you needn’t worry.
If (2) you are either (1) trivial or (2) dangerous.
If (1), you needn’t worry.
If (2), you either (1) live or (2) die.
If you live, you needn’t worry: and – If you die, YOU CAN’T WORRY!!
So why worry?

When we think about how much worse off we could be, we inevitably feel guilty about complaining of boredom, but I feel sure it won't take long for us to forget. In years to come, we'll be telling our children about the time we had to stay indoors for a few weeks and how hard it was. And they won't understand...

The First World War at the Movies

Have you seen it yet? Of course, I'm talking about 1917, the film that was widely tipped to win Best Picture at the 2020 Oscars, but didn't. I've read that there are over a hundred films about the First World War - well, pardon me, but it feels like a lot more than that, and it seems to me that there has been a spate of films on the subject in the aftermath of the centenary commemorations, which is odd. Admittedly, it does take a long time to come up with the idea of a film, get the finance and then do the work. Perhaps some producers and writers only thought of it in 2014 and ran out of time before their projects came to fruition.

Despite the plethora of films about the Great War that have been made since 1914, there are many that we never get the opportunity to see. Silent films, for a start, never appear on television and it would be nice to get the chance to find out whether any of them were any good. For example, Wikipedia tells me that British film star Madeleine Carroll (best known for her later role in The 39 Steps opposite Robert Donat) made her first screen appearance in 1928's The Guns of Loos, the plot of which involves a blind veteran who "returns home to run his family's industrial empire".

Believe it or not, music hall star Vesta Tilley, already in her fifties, appeared in a 1916 film called The Girl Who Loves a Soldier, as a nurse who disguises herself as a man in order to carry out a dangerous mission on behalf of her beloved. In the same year, an Australian film, The Joan of Arc of Loos, offered an alternative angle on the events of the previous year, focusing on a French girl who is inspired to wade into battle against the aggressors, eventually being awarded a medal for her heroism. The strangest thing about the film is that it is based on a real-life incident.

The most interesting prospect, for us, is the new film, currently or about to be "in the making", called Benediction, which features Siegfried Sassoon as its central character. It's not due to hit our screens until 2021, so I can't tell you much about it. I've seen it described as a "biopic", but my impression is that it's mainly about Sassoon's wartime activities and specifically about his protest of 1917. Jack Lowden, who plays Sassoon, is Scottish and ginger-haired, but after all he's an actor so one assumes he can effectively convey an impression of a real person who looked nothing like him. I gather that another Scottish actor, Peter Capaldi, has been selected to play the older Sassoon, which will be equally interesting. Let's face it, it can't be any further from the truth than the bearded version played by John Hurt on TV in 2016.

Sassoon has of course been depicted on screen previously, notably by James Wilby in Gillies MacKinnon's Regeneration. Although Whitby was blond, a fact that the film's makers made no attempt to disguise, he certainly had an air of Sassoon about him, and of course one must bear in mind that the film was adapted from Pat Barker's novel, which had its own interpretation of the man and his personality. The relatively unknown actors Stevan Rimkus (The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles) and Morgan Watkins (The Pity of War) are among those who have played the young Sassoon on television, plus of course Michael Jayston in the 1970 TV play Mad Jack, about which I posted last September.

Noting that the new James Bond film's release date has just been postponed because of the coronavirus outbreak, it's possible that the filming of Benediction will also be delayed, especially if there is difficulty raising the necessary funds. (I have no inside knowledge on this, but we do hope to be able to fill you in on further details as time goes on.) How will Sassoon be portrayed in this latest screen version of his life, and, more importantly, will the significance of his life be recognised as it deserves? Time alone will tell.