An optimistic view of War

This poem is by Julian Grenfell, who was killed in the Great War in 1915, shortly after writing it.

Into Battle


The naked earth is warm with Spring
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the Sun’s gaze glorying
And quivers in the sunny breeze;

And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light,
And striving evermore for these;
And he is dead who will not fight;
And who dies fighting has increase.

The fighting man shall from the sun
Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth
Speed with the lightfoot winds to run,
And with the trees to newer birth;
And find when fighting shall be done,
Great rest, and fulness after dearth

All the bright company of Heaven
Hold him in their high comradeship,
The Dog Star and the Sisters Seven,
Orion's Belt and sworded hip.

The woodland trees that stand together,
They stand to him each one a friend;
They gently speak in the windy weather;
They guide to valley and ridges' end.

The kestrel hovering by day,
And the little owls that call by night,
Bid him be swift and keen as they,
As keen of ear, as swift as sight.

The blackbird sings to him:
'Brother, brother, If this be the last song you shall sing,
Sing well, for you may not sing another;
Brother, sing!'

In dreary, doubtful, waiting hours
Before the brazen frenzy starts,
The horses show him nobler powers;
O patient eyes, courageous hearts!

And when the burning moment breaks,
And all things else are out of mind,
And only Joy of Battle takes
Him by the throat and makes him blind,

Through joy and blindness he shall know,
Not caring much to know, that still
Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so
That it be not the Destined Will.

The thundering line of battle stands,
And in the air Death moans and sings;
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
And Night shall fold him in soft wings.

Winter in Surrey

This picture, entitled 'A Winter's Afternoon', a scene near Wotton in Surrey by the artist Waite, shows beautifully the transquillity and the cold and the light of the county of my birth. I feel homesick looking at it.

68 years ago today

This is the German battleship Bismarck, which was sunk by the Royal Navy on 27 May 1941. The ship had a brief career - sent out on a sortie to attack Allied shipping in the Atlantic, it almost immediately sank the battlecruiser HMS Hood in the Battle of Denmark Strait - in this picture Bismarck is seen firing just afterwards, at Hood's companion ship HMS Prince of Wales.

Bismarck was then hunted down by many Royal Navy ships, and after its steering was crippled by an air strike, was sunk on 27 May in an action lasting three hours, with the loss of most of its crew of over 2,000 men. This photo shows it under fire in its last moments before sinking.


The commander of the Royal Navy fleet, Admiral Sir John Tovey, said 'The Bismarck had put up a most gallant fight against impossible odds worthy of the old days of the Imperial German Navy, and she went down with her colours flying'

Romantic Ruins

This painting is Monastery Graveyard in Snow, by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. His subjects were often like this - images of abbeys, forests and so on against a romanticised landscape. In this picture, monks process through a graveyard to enter the ruins of their abbey. It is an apparently bleak vision but ultimately an uplifting one of faith and hope.

The painting was destroyed in the allied bombing of Berlin in 1945.

The end............

This is a NASA artist's impression of a red dwarf star. Our Sun's fate is to turn from a main sequence yellow star into a red dwarf, having first swollen considerably and destroying all life on Earth. When that happens, unless we have managed to quit this place for elsewhere, the words of a past prime Minister of Great Britain, Arthur Balfour, will come to pass:

Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets. Of the combination of causes which first converted a dead organic compound to the living progenitors of humanity, science, indeed, as yet knows nothing. It is enough that from such beginnings famine, disease, and mutual slaughter, fit nurses of the future lords of creation, have gradually evolved, after infinite travail, a race with conscience enough to feel that it is vile, and intelligence enough to know that it is insignificant. We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. 'Imperishable monuments' and 'immortal deeds', death itself, and love stronger than death will be as though they had never been. Nor will anything that is be better or worse for all that the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless generations to effect.

From Chapter I of The Foundations of Belief by Arthur Balfour

Ruralists

This painting is by Annie Ovenden and is entitled Storm Gathering Over St German's. Ms Ovenden and her husband were members of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, a distinctly English group of painters who depicted nature in a very special way - not naturalistic but with a very keen eye for the feel of a place. Although no longer in formal existence, the group still has a website here. There is also a good book about their work, which is listed on Amazon here.

Gentlemen at leisure

This painting by Emerson shows the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) reclining with friends outside the Northumberland house of Cragside, in 1884. This house was the first in the world to be lit using hydroelectricity.

Tribute to Oscar Wilde

Depending on which account you read, the relationship between the Anglo-Irish playwright Oscar Wilde and his friend Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas (above) seems either quite unpleasant or a thing of poetic beauty. It put Wilde into prison in 1895, where he wrote a long letter of recrimination ('De Profundis'). Their contact afterwards was sporadic, although Douglas was chief mourner at Wilde's funeral in Paris. After Wilde's death Douglas put a lot of effort into rewriting the relationship. But whatever his subsequent denials, the poem he wrote shortly after Wilde's death is a moving and beautiful tribute to Wilde's immense talent:

The Dead Poet

I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face
All radiant and unshadowed of distress,
And as of old, in music measureless,
I heard his golden voice and marked him trace
Under the common thing the hidden grace,
And conjure wonder out of emptiness,
Till mean things put on beauty like a dress
And all the world was an enchanted place.

And then methought outside a fast locked gate
I mourned the loss of unrecorded words,
Forgotten tales and mysteries half said,
Wonders that might have been articulate,
And voiceless thoughts like murdered singing birds.
And so I woke and knew that he was dead.

The thrill of a uniform

This picture taken in the 1930s shows two of the famous (or notorious, depending on your point of view) Mitford sisters, posing with a group of quite amiable-looking SS officers. On the left (notwithstanding the filename of the photo)is Unity, who had spent some considerable time in Munich hanging around Adolf Hitler during his rise to power. Shortly after the outbreak of war in September 1939, so distressed by the conflict between her country and Germany, she tried to commit suicide in a public park by shooting herself in the head. She did not die but was repatriated to England via Switzerland through Hitler's intervention on her behalf. She made a partial recovery but soon after the war died of meningitis, probably precipitated by her wound.
On the right, her sister Diana, who had already come to fame in the 1930s, married first to one of the Guinness family. She was regarded in her youth as one of the most beautiful women in England:



and she became the mistress of the Blackshirt leader Oswald Mosley. She was married to Mosley in Germany in the presence of Hitler and Goebbels in the 1930s. When war broke out Mosley ordered his blackshirts to fight in the British forces (one of the first armed forces casualties was a member of Mosley's party); but the couple were regarded as a security risk and were both interned, at first separately and then together in Holloway Prison. After the war they decamped to Paris and lived in some luxury there, Mosley making periodic unsuccessful attempts to revive his political career. Their marriage was a very happy one, and Diana a woman of great charm with many friends. But she never quite seemed to have got over the hypnotic effect of Der Fuhrer. Did she ever bother to read Mein Kampf?

Oxford: city of aquatint

I have recently been reading Evelyn Waugh's book 'Brideshead Revisted' following seeing again the 1981 TV series. In the opening chapters, Oxford is referred to by the narrator Charles Ryder (who is an artist) as still being a 'city of aquatint'. I realised I had no idea what an aquatint is: in fact it is a particular kind of print, produced by a process I have not fully understood. But I see more clearly now why the book makes this reference. Below are two aquatints of Oxford, both admittedly of a time rather earlier than the 1920s when the book is set:


In both of these but particularly the second, we see Oxford as it were through a damp gauze, softening the image and making it more redolent of a time before Oxford became mostly a park-and-ride place still crammed with traffic.

Pictures of an earlier time

These images are paintings by the artist Margaret Dovaston. Ignored by the art establishment, they have graced countless waiting rooms and living rooms, although their popularity is now quite diminished. I once bought a print of the second picture at a car boot sale but I somehow lost it at work. They are redolent of an earlier age; most take place in a country inn, or some in a squire's house. The sort of scenes which they show would have been familiar to that famous diarist Parson Woodforde; scenes of a natural life unsullied by many aspects of today. But dentistry was bad; and life could be short for the unfortunate.
A website on Margaret Dovaston can be found at http://sueburton.co.uk/dovaston/margaret/moremargaret.htm

A man and a woman

'Marriage of Convenience' by Orchardson

'Garden of Eden' by Riviere

These two paintings show a great deal about relationships. In the first, a beautiful young wife sits listless at the dinner table, bored with her much older husband in a wealthy Victorian household. In the second, painted around 1900 and much more 'modern' in style, a young couple walk in a London park. Her face is eager and she is plainly in love with the young man, who is probably in a modest white-collar job - perhaps a solicitor's clerk? Where can happiness really be found?

One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic

So said the Soviet leader Josef Stalin, in an oft-misunderstood quotation. His own death came in March 1953 and here his acolytes carry his coffin. The two front figures are (left) Malenkov, and (right) Beria, the notorious head of the secret police, who only a few months later was despatched by his colleagues. Other figures in the picture are the veteran foreign minister Molotov (black hat, behind soldier), and the Jewish Lazar Kaganovich (with moustache, two behind Molotov). Both, like Malenkov, managed to die in their beds. A few year's before Stalin died, his own suspicious nature and the rivalry between his associates had led to the murder of two promising younger men, Kuznetsov and Voznesensky, in the 'Leningrad Case'. Only three years after this photograph was taken, Stalin was denounced by Khruschev, who was himself implicated in many of the regime's less savoury activities in the 1930s. Being a comrade is hard, tovarisch!

Are things as we see them?

This is Galaxy M104, sometimes know as the Sombrero Galaxy. It is approximately 29 million light years from Earth (just under 290 million million million kilometres), so what we see today was the galaxy as it was 29 million years ago. No doubt a lot has happened there since then; it certainly has here. What's it like there now?

This picture of somewhere almost unthinkably remote from our own lives (but still quite close in galactic terms) reminds me of Elizabeth Jennings' beautiful short poem 'Delay':

The radiance of that star that leans on me

Was shining years ago. The light that now

Glitters up there my eye may never see,

And so the time lag teases me with how

Love that loves now may not reach me until

Its first desire is spent. The star's impulse

Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful

And love arrived may find us somewhere else.

The moral of which may be summarised as: someone may be trying to tell you something......

God and War

This painting by the Italian war illustrator Matania depicts 'A' Company of the 2nd Battlion Royal Munster Fusiliers, stopped en route to Aubers Ridge in Belgium on 8 May 1915. The central figure is Father Francis Gleeson, a Roman Catholic priest, who is pronouncing a general absolution on the soldiers before they go into battle. The next day, 19 out of 22 officers and 320 'other ranks' out of 520 died. World War I is notorious still for the high rate of attrition amongst troops, and the apparent pointlessness of the conflict - although it appeared otherwise at the time. If men weren't in charge, would this sort of thing happen?

An unknown woman

I saw this striking picture for the first time in the recent BBC-TV programme 'The Victorians', fronted by Jeremy Paxman. But nothing was said to identify the painting; and even more frustratingly it did not appear in the 'book of the series'. Other enquiries led to nothing. Finding out on the internet what a particular image is remains hard, despite the introduction of Google's 'similar pictures' feature this week: you still need to know what the first image is to find it. But after much searching on the internet, I finally tracked it down in the Bridgeman Art Library, a very useful resource which can be found at http://www.bridgemanart.com/ . It is a portrait of the French singer Rose Caron, by a rather obscure artist called Auguste Toulmouche, active in France until his death in 1890. He was perhaps not in the first rank of artists; the rendering of the dress, for instance, is lifeless compared with the paintings being done by John Singer Sargent at this period. Ms Caron herself had an interesting career - unhappily married young and then divorced in 1886, she appeared in many new French operas, and became the intimate friend of the politician Georges Clemenceau. She was the mistress of the Foreign Minister Delcasse and had two children, both predeceasing her. She is buried in the small town of Monnerville, south of Paris. Researching this also led me to the wonderful websites of Alice Guy Jr, whose site on Rose Caron is at http://rose-caron.blogspot.com/ . There are links on that to her many other sites. The site includes another picture of Rose Caron:

in one of her roles. Not many people know about Rose Caron today, but she is not forgotten.

A message from 1897

This postcard, which I bought a few years ago, was sent in 1897 by Muriel Hill, ending her singing lessons. Miss Hill can be tracked down even now, in the 1901 census records; at that time she was in her mid-twenties, living at home with her family still, in the prosperous suburb of Harrow . The postcard has survived because of the stamp it carries, although that is ordinary enough. But one wonders what lay behind the terse message. Had she grown weary of learning sentimental Victorian songs? Had Mr Cummings made unwelcome advances to his young pupil? Had Muriel decided to take up another interest - such as the then very fashionable occupation, for ladies, of cycling ? We shall never know. The inanimate object, the card, survives her and it both conveys and conceals something of one ordinary life. What will people know of us in 112 years' time?

nb: the card was written, posted, received and acknowledged all on the same day: 19 March. These were the days when men would send a postcard to their wives telling them which train they would be catching back from work, knowing the card would be delivered that afternoon. How things have improved in the postal service.........

Doing a simple task well

Today I sat in Bristol Cathedral for an hour before an appointment. This was a rare opportunity to do nothing but think and watch, without interruption. I watched an Italian-looking girl genuflecting twice before the altar, a Catholic practice in an Anglican cathedral. And I saw two of the cathedral workers tidying the huge paschal candle, which is lit for Easter. These candles are very substantial, like the example pictured here. This one was about three feet long and very heavy. One man removed it from its stand and took it away. Another brought a dustbin and removed the flower arrangement of white, gold and green from the candle holder, and replaced it with another arrangement. Then the candle, duly trimmed of molten wax at the top, was brought back over the first man's shoulder - they will break if carried in two hands - and the whole thing, stand and candle, was moved back into the quire, to stand near the altar. When I had first seen it, it had been by the temporary altar placed in the nave for the morning service. Then one of the men swept up the mess of dead flowers etc from the floor. This was a simple job for them, but one but done with care and commitment, a routine but not routine task in the life of a building dedicated to prayer. For an atheist, prayer is a difficult subject; but many atheists feel strangely at home in churches. In future posts, I hope to say more about other churches which I have been in and have felt - something.