Marching to Elysium
Classical Allusions in the World War I Poetry of Winchester College
“[He] declared that, had he not chosen the teacher’s profession, he would have wished to be a soldier: he writes of Sparta and Xenophon with evident sympathy.”
Thus Montague John Rendall, then Headmaster of the historic English boarding school Winchester College, commemorated a brilliant former student in an introduction to the young man’s published dissertation on ancient Greek education. The student, Kenneth John Freeman, was a gifted classicist who passed away prematurely in 1907 after a struggle with an unknown illness. It is chilling to read these lines when we remember that hundreds of Freeman’s schoolmates would, just a few years later, become soldiers on the battlefields of World War I. They, like Freeman, often saw war through the prism of the ancient world. And, like him, too many of them died young.
In November 2018, as nations around the world marked the centenary of the Armistice, Richard Stillman and Suzanne Foster of Winchester College compiled a collection of poems by alumni who fought in World War I. Their works are the outpourings of young souls in hard times: tender, bitter, funny, and profoundly moving. The poems also hold a special interest for classicists. Because the curriculum at schools like Winchester before and during World War I was dominated by the study of classical antiquity, these verses are laced with classical allusions. They provide an opportunity to examine how Greco-Roman literature shaped soldiers’ perspective on the war. As Elizabeth Vandiver writes in her wonderful book on this subject, Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the First World War, the classics which boys learned in school formed “one of the primary well-springs of their imaginations.”
World War I hit these English boarding schools — called “public schools,” despite their elite character — especially hard. Edward C. Mack remarks that public school graduates “volunteered almost to a man for service in the trenches.” 2,488 members of the Winchester community (including both students and staff) served in the war; 514 of them died. There were only about 500 students in the school at any one time during the war. Other public schools sent similar proportions of their communities to war and experienced similar death tolls. Eton lost 1,157 alumni, more than a fifth of those who fought; 27% of Harrow graduates who left for battle never came home.
Why did so many public school graduates enlist? There are, no doubt, many reasons: for instance, public school graduates automatically became junior officers when they joined the armed forces, and the prestige of such positions might have appealed to them. Public schools ran Officers’ Training Corps to prepare boys for the call of duty. Perhaps equally important was the military ethos of self-sacrifice and patriotism which had long been integral to public school culture. That ethos drew on the study of the Classics. Classical texts could — when read in a certain light — provide exempla of disciplined valor. Vandiver explains, “The public schools fostered a…reading of classics that worked with a romanticized view of chivalry and with Christianity of the ‘muscular’ variety to impress upon their pupils the beauties of sacrifice, whether in the service of school, country or empire” (36). This function of the Classics is evident, for instance, in Rendall’s commemoration of Freeman and in Freeman’s dissertation itself. Rendall wrote approvingly of his former student’s admiration for the martial aspects of Greek antiquity, and Freeman likened the military training groups of Sparta to English boarding schools:
Such was the Spartan system of education. To an Englishman their schools have a greater interest than those of any other ancient State. Sparta produced the only true boarding-schools of antiquity. The “packs” of the Spartan boys, like the English public schools, formed miniature States, to whose corporate interests and honour each boy learned to make his own wishes subservient. They, too, learnt endurance by hardship, and were early trained both to rule and to obey by means of the institution of prefects (older boys with authority) and fagging (the practice by which young boys acted as servants for older ones).
To sacrifice oneself for the benefit of the State (or the miniature State that was the school); to learn “endurance by hardship”; to “rule and to obey”: these were values which might be taught both through the academic study of ancient Greece which prevailed in public schools and through those schools’ social fabric and customs, such as “prefects” and “fagging.” Wilfred Owen, that most famous of World War I poets, both captured this classically-inspired ideal and voiced a bitter rejection of it in his “Dulce Et Decorum Est”:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The Latin comes from Horace’s Odes 3.2 and means, “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”
Owen was among the war’s harshest critics, and his poems often illustrate the gruesome realities of battle. Some poems by Winchester alumni (known as Old Wykehamists, or OWs, for short) contain similarly clear-eyed descriptions of war. A.P. Herbert, for instance, writes in “Cold Feet” that soldiers “learned too well the way a dead man smells, / And in what pasturing the green flies feed.” Such poems are largely free from classical allusions, divorced from the vision of war as a grand tradition stretching back to ancient times (though one gritty, satirical piece, “Ode to a Tank,” does feature the Roman war goddess Bellona). But no OW poem is as fiercely critical of the war as Owen’s works are, and many wholeheartedly embrace the ideal of self-sacrifice for a higher cause. Herbert Asquith’s poem “The Volunteer” expresses that ideal in both classical and chivalric terms:
Here lies a clerk who half his life had spent
Toiling at ledgers in a city grey,
Thinking that so his days would drift away
With no lance broken in life’s tournament
Yet ever ‘twixt the books and his bright eyes
The gleaming eagles of the legions came,
And horsemen, charging under phantom skies,
Went thundering past beneath the oriflamme.
Here the romantic world of medieval knights (the oriflamme being a knight’s banner) combines with “the gleaming eagles of the legions” — iconic symbols of Roman military might — to create a noble vision of warfare. In the end, the volunteer of the title gets his wish: he dies in pursuit of this heroic ideal. Asquith asserts that he leaves the world “content”: “And falling thus, he wants no recompense, / Who found his battle in the last resort; / Nor needs he any hearse to bear him hence, / Who goes to join the men of Agincourt.” His small life has been rendered sublime by his devotion to patriotic, warlike heroism.
Classical heroism appears even more prominently in a four-line poem composed by a group of anonymous OWs — or perhaps current Winchester students — in ancient Greek. They call themselves the “Archaeologici,” presumably referring to their shared interest in the ancient world, and address their poem to “Archaeologico In Galliam Abeunti,” which we might translate, “To A Classicist Going Away to France.” Here is the poem in full:
Archaeologici Archaologico In Galliam Abeunti
Οἱ τὰ παλαιὰ πάρος συνερευνήσαντες ἑταιροι
Πολλά σε νῦν χαίρειν εὐχομεθ᾽ ἐν στρατίᾳ
Σοὶ μὲν ἀγῶν᾽ ἡμῖν δὲ πόθον δοῦσ᾽ οἰχομένοιο
Μοῖρα σ᾽ ἀριστεύσαντ᾽ οἴκαδε θᾶσσον ἄγοι.[We, companions who once sought out ancient things together,
Pray that you are faring well in the army.
May Fate, who has given this struggle to you, and made us long for you in your absence,
Bring you home swiftly, when you have performed valorous deeds.]
The lines are explicitly epic in style. The authors use the -oio- genitive ending characteristic of Homeric Greek and the verb ἀριστεύω, which is closely associated with the martial prowess of classical heroes. On the eve of battle, before he had even reached the front lines in France, this OW was already being written into a triumphal poem with echoes of the Iliad.
Yet not all the poems use the Classics to glorify war. Images from classical texts are also invoked as a means of mourning. In his poem “Lament: For a Young Soldier,” J.L. Crommelin Brown grieves that his friend will no longer wander with him among the natural beauties of England: “this England that was ever dear to you / Bright now with blossom and the bloom of May.” He finds some solace in the feeling that the “young soldier” has not altogether left him:
Yet though I ne’er shall meet you in the body,
Hourly I find you near me where I pass;
Lingers your laughter round each well-known corner,
Rustle your footsteps beside me in the grass.
And when the time shall come for me to follow
Over the flood where Charon plies his oar,
Well do I know that I shall find you waiting,
First of the phantoms on the Stygian shore;
Gaily you’ll greet me in remembered fashion,
Taking my arm the old familiar way,
And wander down Elysian meads, recalling
Faces and fancies of a bygone day.
The “Elysian meads” have replaced the “blossom and bloom” of England; the memory of the young soldier no longer “lingers round each well-known corner,” but the poet has faith that he will be the “first of the phantoms” waiting on the banks of the Styx. Crommelin Brown implies that he knows what will happen in the classical underworld with just as much certainty and detail as he knows places in the land of the living. That knowledge mitigates the terrible strangeness of death. And just as the underworld is somehow knowable and familiar, so is the phantom of his departed friend: not really a phantom at all, but a flesh-and-blood being who can “take my arm the old familiar way.” While Asquith’s volunteer joins the legendary fighters of Agincourt after death, Crommelin Brown can imagine no better heaven for his friend, no sweeter Elysium, than one that mirrors their happy life together.
Classical allusion in OWs’ poems, then, can play a part both in celebrations of military heroism and in expressions of grief. In one poem, the two themes are combined. Alexander Douglas Gillespie’s “I.B.B.” –a memorial poem for his friend Isaac Bayley Balfour — depicts an afterlife in which the young man will be welcomed by Homeric heroes:
For your brave spirit wanders free
To islands in that summer sea,
And your light feet will pass with joy
Over the windy plains of Troy:
And all the heroes Homer sung,
Hector, Patroclus ever young,
And Nireus with the flowing hair,
Will smile to give you welcome there,
And weave into another lay
Your golden deeds of yesterday,
For half the tale was left unsaid,
Until you shone among the dead.
Like many writers during the war, Gillespie was inspired by the location of his friend’s death: the Dardanelles, near Troy. This poet was an accomplished classicist during his time at Winchester, where he won numerous prizes for his Latin and Greek compositions. Hubert M. Burge, his Headmaster at Winchester, followed his pupil’s career at Oxford and wrote that he had shown himself to be “intellectually one of the most distinguished men of his generation” in the Classics. So it should come as no surprise that Gillespie honors Balfour’s courage — his friend had died while leading his men into an attack — by placing him among the great classical warriors: Hector, Patroclus and Nireus will all “give him welcome.” Balfour’s “golden deeds,” Gillespie suggests, are worthy of inclusion in an epic “lay” like the Iliad, just as the “Archaeologici” predicted Homeric greatness for their friend.
Yet Gillespie’s selection of classical allusions reveals something more complex than a paean to his friend’s military accomplishments. Hector, the greatest Trojan warrior, seems an obvious choice for praising a fine soldier. But why Patroclus and the obscure Nireus? Patroclus, it is true, fights bravely before he is killed; but his name also evokes the passionate friendship between himself and Achilles. And far from being a great fighter, Nireus is described, in the Iliad, as being weak in body (“ἀλαπαδνὸς,” 2.675). But he was “the most beautiful of the Greeks, after peerless Achilles, who went to Troy” (Iliad 2.673–4). So the heroes who welcome Balfour into their midst are not exclusively accomplished fighting men. They are symbols, too, of youthful beauty and love.
The final line quoted above, “until you shone above the dead,” contains another classical resonance which relates more to love than to war. In the original printing of the poem, a Greek epigram is connected to this line by a footnote. Gillespie remarked in a letter about the publication of this poem that he had “scribbled” the Greek at the bottom of the page:
Ἀστὴρ πρὶν μεν ἔλαμπες ἐνὶ ζωοῖσιν Ἐῶος
Νῦν δὲ θανὼν λάμπεις Ἕσπερος ἐν φθιμένοις.[Aster, once you shone among the living as the morning star; now you shine as the evening star among the faded dead.]
The subtlety of this epigram, which has been attributed to Plato, lies in the fact that the morning and the evening star are in fact two names for the same body, seen at dawn and dusk: Venus. Through this allusion, Gillespie suggests his friend’s enduring loveliness and goodness, his radiance even in death.
Shelley had used the same Platonic epigram as an epigraph to his mourning poem for John Keats, “Adonais.” As memorialized by Shelley, Keats became a symbol for all young, beautiful souls who perish before their time. So the classical allusions of “I.B.B.” connect the young soldier both with Greek heroes and with Romantic poets; they honor bravery in battle and the memory of a loving friendship.
Perhaps the most poignant sign of this friendship is that Gillespie does not allow Balfour’s spirit to rest among the ranks of Homeric heroes, but rather calls him back to the land of the living. The poem continues:
Then, swift as thinking, you will come
To Flanders, where the bullets hum:
Your spirit will come to mine and tell
My loneliness that all is well;
Yes! To the friend who knows his friend
And knows himself, Death’s not the end,
And every day until I die,
We’ll walk together, you and I.
In words similar to those of Crommelin Brown’s “Lament,” Gillespie imagines walking once again with a departed soldier. But unlike Crommelin Brown, Gillespie is not content to wait for death to reunite him with his friend in Elysium. His “loneliness” is urgent and immediate amid the humming bullets of Flanders. Though Gillespie wants Balfour to be honored among the warriors of Troy, he cannot let him stay away, even in that exalted company. Ultimately, Gillespie wants not a far-off hero to worship, nor the hope of a meeting in heaven, but rather a friend to walk through life beside him.
“I.B.B.” was an important poem for Gillespie. He describes working hard on it to capture the essence of his grief. At the time he lost Balfour, his brother Tom had also been killed in battle; though he could not know it, his own death was only about two months in the future. He wrote sadly in a letter home:
The world is a poorer place without Tom and Bay [short for Bayley] Balfour, and I do feel that, if it wasn’t for all of you at home, I should be quite content to follow them. If “getting used to it” means that one slowly forgets how much there was to love in them, I would rather keep the pain forever. Perhaps Daisy would show you some verses I wrote about Bay Balfour; afterwards I worked at them to make them rather better, but still not nearly good enough.
The classical tradition helped the poets of World War I express not only their fellow soldiers’ military valor, but also “how much there was to love in them.” To study their poems, and their richly inventive use of the Classics, is to remember and honor that love.
[The poems in this essay are drawn from an online collection, The World War I Poetry of Winchester College, prepared for publication by Jessica Glueck, which may be found here.]
With deepest thanks to Richard Stillman, Head of the English department at Winchester College, for his help throughout this project.
Jessi Glueck is a Harvard and Oxford alum currently teaching at Winchester College. She is a book lover, a Kansan, and sometimes a poet.
