On Tuesday (October 13) Marlborough College staff, students and many former students and staff will be remembering a College student who became a noted poet – only to be killed, aged twenty, during the final attack made during the Battle of Loos. And it is with that battle that David du Croz, formerly head of history at the College, begins his tribute to Charles Hamilton Sorley – one of Britain’s greatest war poets…lost to war.
One hundred years ago the Battle of Loos was fought on the Western Front in France. Starting on September 25th and finishing just over four weeks later on October 18th, it was by far and away the biggest offensive launched by the British in the war so far.
It was also the bloodiest with over 60,000 casualties in that relatively short space of time on a front no more than four miles wide.
It was one of the most God-forsaken battlefields British soldiers had fought on since the war began, with little if any clear strategic objective – a totally flat expanse of land leading to nowhere significant which lent itself to defence but not to attack.
The battle was fought in support of a bigger French offensive a little further south, but despite some success on the first day it ground to a futile halt in the face of intense German counter-attacks.
Further British attacks followed in a desperate attempt to break the stalemate, but even the Official History was forced to conclude that these renewed attacks “had not improved the general situation in any way and had brought nothing but useless slaughter of infantry.”
Many of those infantry were soldiers of Kitchener’s New Army – the volunteers of late 1914 and early 1915 whose first experience of war this was to be, and in many cases their last.
The last of those attacks was launched on October 13th.
It was the day that Charles Hamilton Sorley was killed by a sniper’s bullet. He was just 20 years old when he died, but had already by then in his short life established such a reputation for his poetry that John Masefield was able to maintain that Sorley was potentially the greatest poet lost in the war.
Sorley has no known grave, like so many of those who fought at Loos, and is commemorated on the Loos Memorial, at Dud Corner cemetery.
Charles Hamilton Sorley was educated at Marlborough College, and came from a family of academics, writers and clergymen. As a boy and enthusiastic cross-country runner he grew to love the countryside around Marlborough, a love reflected in a poem he wrote from the trenches to one of his former teachers at Marlborough, John Bain, a classicist and master in charge of the Army Class, himself something of a poet who Sorley referred to as the ‘Marlborough Laureate’:
And so I sign myself to you:
One, who some crooked pathways knew
Round Bedwyn: who could scarcely leave
The Downs on a December eve:
Was at his happiest in shorts,
And got – not many good reports!
That same poem which refers to Marlborough as “our old wrinkled red-capped town” describes his joy of being “high up among the sheep and sky”, the views of Liddington and Barbury, the “Ogbourne twins” and “lovely Aldbourne downs”, and one of his favourite landmarks, an old signpost on the Poulton Downs above Rabley Wood which appears in a number of his poems – “well I knew that crazy signpost, arms askew, old mother of the four grass ways”.
There is no doubt that Sorley had a precocious talent for language and literature, and quickly acquired a reputation as one of the stars of the Literary Society at school. He gained many friends at school with whom he corresponded extensively in the twenty-two months between leaving school and his death on the Loos battlefield, and those letters reveal as natural a gift for prose as well as his talent as a poet.
Even in the darkest of war-torn circumstances they are full of wit and enthusiasm, but at the same time instinctively perceptive of people and place, letters that search out some of the deeper meanings of life in a totally unselfconscious and unpretentious way.
Having won a scholarship to Oxford he decided to leave school early in order to be able to spend some time studying in Germany, a country whose language and literature he loved and whose people and culture he admired.
He ended up at the University of Jena in April 1914 where he became good friends with an English Assistant, Arthur Watts, to whom some of his most entertaining and insightful letters are written.
In the summer of that year he planned a walking holiday in the Moselle valley with an old school friend, Arthur Hopkinson -‘Hopper’ – before returning to start his time at Oxford. As he wrote to his former Headmaster: “September will see me trying to remember my Latin, which I shouldn’t mind if I forgot! I was never meant for a scholar; but I suppose the farce of making me one will go on for another four years.”
He and ‘Hopper’ were in fact imprisoned in Germany when war broke out, but managed to secure their release, an experience which did nothing to diminish Sorley’s love of the country.
His admiration of all things German is clear in the very poignant poem he wrote shortly afterwards, entitled “To Germany” in which he bemoaned the fact that his country was now at war with Germany:
But gropers both through fields of thought confined
We stumble and we do not understand.
He looks forward to the time
When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each other’s truer form
And wonder. Grown more loving kind and warm
We’ll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain.
The fact that he rose to the rank of Captain in a relatively short period of time suggests that he was not averse to soldiering, though equally there is never a hint of the glorifying of war. His letters are full of humorous references to life at the front, complaining that “the mosquitoes trouble us far more than Brother Bosch”, and that “this healthy outdoor life softens the brain.”
He comforts his mother with news that “weather is ‘no bon’; food, ‘plenty bon’; temper, fair; sleep, jamais.” But as the battle approaches his attention turns more to matters military, his final letter to his former Headmaster written just eight days before he died showing that he retained his great skill with words even in the midst of conflict: “The chess players are no longer waiting so infernal long between their moves. And the patient pawns are all in movement, hourly expecting further advances – whether to be taken or reach the back lines and be queened. ‘Tis sweet, this pawn-being: there are no cares, no doubts: wherefore no regrets.”
His final poem was found in his kit bag after he had been shot, and is perhaps his most famous: When you see millions of the mouthless dead. The poem ends thus, an appropriate way to end this small tribute to one of Britain’s greatest war poets:
Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.
[Black and white photos courtesy Marlborough College – whose copyright they are. Colour photos copyright David du Croz – with our thanks. Click on photos to enlarge them.]
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