The war that began in
August of 1914 was supposed to have been over by Christmas of that year. By November of 1915, it was clear to nearly
everyone that peace was nowhere in sight.
In 1915 alone, the
French lost over one million men, the Germans more than 600,000 and the British
more than a quarter of a million[i].
Margaret
Postgate Cole’s short poem “The Falling Leaves” evokes a dreary day in late
autumn, an afternoon awash in loss and regret -- and tinged with anger.
The
Falling Leaves
November
1915
Today, as
I rode by,
I saw the
brown leaves dropping from their tree
In a still
afternoon,
When no
wind whirled them whistling to the sky,
But
thickly, silently,
They fell,
like snowflakes wiping out the noon;
And wandered slowly thence
For thinking of a gallant
multitude
Which now all withering
lay,
Slain by no wind of age or
pestilence,
But in their beauty strewed
Like snowflakes falling on
the Flemish clay.
--Margaret Postgate Cole
The brown of the foliage
recalls the khaki of British military uniforms: both autumn leaves and gallant men
drop thickly and silently. Neither
leaves nor men are borne skyward, but instead lie “withering” and decaying on
the cold ground. So many have fallen
that the light of the sun seems obscured, and the noon-day is wiped out.
But unlike the falling of
the leaves, the death of the soldiers (who are romantically – and perhaps ironically
–labeled as “gallant”), is not natural. Neither
disease nor old age has killed these young and vigorous soldiers. Instead, struck down at the height of their
beauty and potential, the men lie carelessly tossed or “strewn” on the frozen
fields of Flanders.
Alternating between long
and short lines, the rhythm of the poem itself halting staggers to a lonely conclusion,
and the rider wanders slowly on, stunned at the overwhelming and
incomprehensible losses of the war.
Margaret Postgate Cole
became politically involved in The Great War when her younger brother Raymond
refused to be drafted into the British army.
Without a religious reason for his refusal to fight, he was denied status
as a conscientious objector and was imprisoned. Margaret wrote about her response to his
trial in her 1949 memoir, Growing up into
Revolution:
…when
I walked away from the Oxford court room…I walked into a new world of doubters
and protesters – and into a new war – this time against the ruling classes and
the government which represented them, and with the working classes, the Trade Unionists,
the Irish rebels of Easter Week, and all those who resisted their governments
or other governments which held them down….Once the state had taken my brother,
it lost his sister’s vote automatically.
 |
| Margaret Postgate Cole |
Such a sad poem, especially as her brother went to jail for refusing to fight.
ReplyDelete