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    The War Poets and the Diary of an Ordinary Tommy: Convergence, Class and Transmission
    The War Poets and the Diary of an Ordinary Tommy: Convergence, Class and Transmission
    The War Poets and the Diary of an Ordinary Tommy: Convergence, Class and Transmission
    Ebook143 pages1 hour

    The War Poets and the Diary of an Ordinary Tommy: Convergence, Class and Transmission

    By Margaret Parry

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    About this ebook

    The book is a highly original and personal response to the diary of an RAMC soldier recording his experiences at the Somme and Arras. Written by his granddaughter, who never knew him, she has followed in his footsteps during the engagements of 1916 and 1917, from the front lines to rest places and transit camps. She draws on her encounters with local people, whose memories are still alive, to write a compelling narrative which combines history and poetry to convey ‘the truth about war’. Not the least surprising element in the narrative is the link she draws between her own literary vocation and the first stirrings of poetry, a hundred years ago, in a working-class soldier whose experiences, through a new cultural awakening, transcended the horrors of war.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAustin Macauley
    Release dateJan 5, 2018
    ISBN9781370201075
    The War Poets and the Diary of an Ordinary Tommy: Convergence, Class and Transmission
    Author

    Margaret Parry

    The author’s career has been devoted to the service of literature and cross-cultural understanding, both as a university teacher and as a writer. She is bilingual and publishes in both English and French. She has published widely in the field of her doctoral research on Mauriac and Bergson, on inter-cultural communication, and on a range of contemporary European novelists. She has been a founder member of various associations and journals in which she has played leadership and editorial roles, most notably, the Association Européenne François Mauriac which has been a focus of her activity during the last 30 years. It has members in 18 countries and its annual conferences focus on the modern European literary scene. (association europeennefrancoismauriact.blogspot.com/) Her current writing is veering more towards fiction, poetry and memoir, religion and literary aesthetics. She is a great lover of French rural life.

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      Book preview

      The War Poets and the Diary of an Ordinary Tommy - Margaret Parry

      About the Author

      Margaret Parry’s career has been devoted to the service of literature and cross-cultural understanding, both as a university teacher and as a writer. She is bilingual and publishes in both English and French. She has published widely in the field of her doctoral research on Mauriac and Bergson, on inter-cultural communication, and on a range of contemporary European novelists. She has been a founder member of various associations and journals in which she has played leadership and editorial roles, most notably, the Association Européenne François Mauriac which has been a focus of her activity during the last thirty years. It has members in eighteen countries, and its annual conferences focus on the modern European literary scene.1 She initiated more recently in this context ‘Les Rencontres de la Cerisaie’ devoted to contemporary Russian writing. Her current writing is veering more towards religion and literary aesthetics. She is a great lover of French rural life.

      Footnotes of this topic

      1See:associationeuropeennefrancoismauriac.blogspot.com/

      ***

      Dedication

      For my mother

      ***

      THE WAR POETS AND THE DIARY OF AN ORDINARY TOMMY: CONVERGENCE, CLASS AND TRANSMISSION

      Published by Austin Macauley at Smashwords

      Copyright 2018 Margaret Parry

      The right of Margaret parry to be identified as author of this work has been asserted byher in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the

      Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with the written permission of the publisher, or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      A CIP catalogue record for this title is

      available from the British Library.

      www.austinmacauley.com

      THE WAR POETS AND THE DIARY OF AN ORDINARY TOMMY: CONVERGENCE, CLASS AND TRANSMISSION

      ISBN 978-1-78629-263-6 (Paperback)

      ISBN 978-1-78629-264-3 (E-Book)

      Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.

      CGC-33-01, 25 Canada Square

      Canary Wharf, London E14 5LQ

      ***

      Acknowledgments

      My warmest thanks to those who, knowingly or not, have played a part in the emergence of this book:

      Jeanne Bernard, Richard Cooper, Véronique de Coppet, Kath Goodman, Keith Hanson, Angela Keeble, Ghislain Lobel, Wendy Mann, Jean Ponthieu, Andrew Spooner, Avril Williams, John Wriggles+.

      With thanks too to members of the Austin Macauley editorial and production teams for their friendly help and guidance at each stage of the editing process.

      Last and not least, I thank my late mother, Mary Hanson, for ensuring that the little black moleskin notebook one day came into my hands. And above all, I thank my grandfather, Harry Atkinson, for having been the man he was.

      Siegfried Sassoon poems courtesy of Barbara Levy Literary Agency.

      ***

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      Contents

      Frontispiece

      Foreword by Canon Richard Cooper

      1 The Way of the Poets

      2 From the Somme to Arras: The Testimony of a Participant Observer

      3 France 1916: The War Diary of Harry Atkinson (1880-1938)

      4 Echoes and Interweavings: The War Poets and a Voice in their Midst

      5 1916 – 2016: Itineraries – Images Past and Present; Recollections

      6 The Somme Revisited, Dialogue with the Living: Poems by Margaret Parry

      Epilogue: Convergence

      ‘Miners’ by Wilfred Owen

      Sources & Select Bibliography

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      Frontispiece

      Harry Atkinson (1880-1938)

      ***

      Les morts veulent vivre ; ils veulent vivre en vous ; ils veulent que votre vie développe richement ce qu’ils ont voulu. Ainsi les tombeaux nous renvoient à la vie.

      (Alain, ‘Le culte des morts’, in Propos sur le bonheur)

      The dead want to live; they want to live in you; they want your life to develop to the utmost everything they wished for. Thus tombstones restore us to life.

      (Alain, ‘The cult of the dead’, in Thoughts on

      Happiness)

      We met in the night at half-past one, between the lines. Liedholz shot at me and I at him, and in the ensuing tumult he surrendered to me. Before we reached our wire he told me he had a wife and three children. In the dug-out we gave him a whisky. Going to the Brigade with my prisoner at dawn, the early sun made the land delightful and larks rose singing from the plain.

      In broken French we discussed Beethoven,

      Nietzsche and the International.

      (Extract from Herbert Read, Liedholz, displayed at Green Howards Museum exhibition on the Somme, 2016)

      ***

      Foreword

      Over recent years a number of war-time diaries, from the First World War, have been handed in to the Regimental Museum of the Green Howards. They are often brought in by the grandchildren of the authors who rightly think that such documents should be preserved. Most have only a few entries and usually these are concerned with the monotony of long marches, poor billets and even worse food. Some speak of terrible conditions in the front line and occasionally, if a Pal’s Battalion, of friends or neighbours they have met.

      ‘The Diary of Harry Atkinson, France 1916’ – is of a very different character. He was not a Green Howard but served in the RAMC attached to another Yorkshire Regiment – The King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.

      So what makes this diary so different?

      It is the diary of a mature man. Harry was thirty-four years old when he enlisted. Most of the officers would be at least ten years his junior and no doubt needed to rely upon class consciousness to give them the authority they desired. But that too would change as, in the face of so much terror, they realised that they had more in common with each other than with that which separated them.

      Harry’s maturity shows itself in so many ways, in the detailed observations which he makes and the wide-ranging interest he shows in what is going on away from the front line. For instance, he is fascinated that the French are still using flails for threshing and that beans are a major crop. His character is clearly formed by his Chapel-going Christian Faith as he can write:

      ‘I was very much struck here by the French people, more like ourselves, very strict at church services each morning at 7.00am. and they paid great attention to the Sabbath Day.’

      Remarkably, unlike so many others, his own Faith was not destroyed by his experiences. Perhaps, as he was in the RAMC, he dealt with the consequences of man’s inhumanity rather than with inflicting it directly himself. He also did not seek to lose himself in the oblivion of alcohol or the cheap perfume and arms of the local ‘Madames’.

      His diary was his escape, allowing him to shape the chaos around him into a context where ‘normal’ life continued, where not all buildings and beauty were destroyed and where people continued to fish and plant and live.

      ‘We visited Beauval. I had a look at the Church. It was a credit to the architects and builders for the

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