I’m pretty sure that my least favorite soldier-poet is Richard Aldington, and I’d love to ignore him… but, you know, duty calls. And, it must be said, the bizarre double-poet marriage (H.D. is much the more important writer) at least has a dual artistic glamor/rubbernecking-at-a-collision charm to it… if you like that sort of thing.
Today’s letter is, once again, rather strained–it’s also in French, which, despite Aldington’s facility with the language, can’t help but make the thing sound even more standoffish. Let’s skip to the English translation, shall we?
My dear wife,
I am very well. I am neither wounded nor sick (unfortunately) and for some days now I, have not heard from you.
My days are such that I don’t think that there is anything of great moment to add to what I have already told you. But here we have peace — which is a lot. One misses one’s freedom sometimes, but over all one finally becomes accustomed to it.
Today is the anniversary of Waterloo. I wager you didn’t remember it–tell me. It is precisely one hundred and three years since The Old Garde launched its final attack–goodness, I am becoming heroic in the style of Victor Hugo. Let’s hope at least that this present situation will go better for the French. I don’t know exactly why I write since I have a spirit so empty that there is nothing left for me to say. So, it’s best to say goodbye, isn’t it.
Richard[1]
Well, the best I can do for a connection between that bit and the next is to note that Siegfried Sassoon‘s latest poem–though it might not please Aldington’s avant-garde tastes–could do service as a lament for the Old Guard, a century and another three years back…
I Stood with the Dead
I stood with the Dead, so forsaken and still:
When dawn was grey I stood with the Dead.
And my slow heart said, ‘You must kill, you must kill:
‘Soldier, soldier, morning is red’.On the shapes of the slain in their crumpled disgrace
I stared for a while through the thin cold rain . . .
‘O lad that I loved, there is rain on your face.
And your eyes are blurred and sick like the plain.’I stood with the Dead . . . They were dead; they were dead;
My heart and my head beat a march of dismay:
And gusts of the wind came dulled by the guns.
‘Fall in!’ I shouted: ‘Fall in for your pay!’Habarcq, June 18[2]
No–there it is, only just at the end, the true Sassoon note of irony, the bubble-burst of disenchanted modern war. Aldington is a bit of a phony, but Sassoon–as a poet, at least–always stays just on the other side of the line: you can strike that last bitter note true only if you can also write the beautiful old ballad/romance of the first two stanzas–and vice versa…
This is within a hair’s breadth of being a clever, inert bit of forgery, a faux-old-timey ballad that could be accompanied by a Celtic harp or a West Virginia string band, and find its soldier-boy on a battlefield of the 18th or 19th century… but then it does, I think, remain a real poem of 1918.
