War of Words: Soldier-Poets of the Somme

In 1917,

at this hospital for shellshocked soldiers,

the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen met.

Amid the traumatised of the First World War

they established a famous literary friendship.

But their time together in Dottyville wasn't long.

After two months, the army medical authorities

decided to send Owen back to the Western Front.

Sassoon was very distressed about this,

and gives him a present.

And this is the present.

And it's beautifully judged.

The book is called "Nothing Of Importance".

And you can imagine Sassoon saying to Owen,

"I'm giving you Nothing Of Importance."

The book itself was of very great importance.

It is the memoir of an officer who had served with Sassoon

in the so-called poets battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers,

during the build-up to the Battle of the Somme.

In his own hand, Sassoon listed the officers

at the moment they arrived on the Somme.

And he showed how a year on, all but four were either dead or wounded.

So this book obviously meant a great deal to Sassoon.

One has to see it as a very special and generous gift.

The Battle of the Somme had taken Sassoon

to the edge of human experience.

And he wasn't alone.

More poets and writers were present at this battle

than any other in history.

As officers and private soldiers,

they fought alongside each other on the same 14-mile battlefront.

Here, they were soldiers first and poets second.

These men did not come here to die for their country,

they came here to kill for their country.

That was their sole purpose of being here.

Nothing prepared them for the sights they saw.

What they witnessed at the Somme was a new form of industrial warfare.

It reshaped them as individuals and inspired poetry and prose

that still relays what this particular battle felt like.

To prepare for action on the Somme's first day.

To attack a wood filled with enemy troops.

To get by in the muddy,

louse-infested trenches at the battle's end.

Wanting to alert the world to what had happened to them

they waged their own war.

A war of words.

But this literature can only be fully understood

when it is reconnected to THIS landscape.

There had never been a battle like the Battle of the Somme.

And each soldier-poet who fought here

would have to invent a new language to describe it.

Together, they changed how the First World War as a whole

would be remembered.

MILITARY DRUMBEAT

VEHICLE APPROACHING

In early 1916, the British had a name for the troops lucky enough

to find themselves stationed near the River Somme in northern Picardy.

They were known as "the Deathless Army".

This area of northern France was mostly a quiet sector.

The trenches engraved ribbons of chalk on a rolling landscape.

But one stretch of line was known for being particularly hot.

Bois Francais.

These trenches were the backdrop to Siegfried Sassoon's other great

literary friendship of the war, with Robert Graves.

In the build-up to the battle, they both served here

as part of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

This is a British panoramic photograph taken

almost from this very spot,

at the time that Siegfried Sassoon

and Robert Graves were serving in this sector.

This was their trench.

These images are especially important

because they show you just how close together in places the lines were.

Here for example,

Sassoon would have been able to smell German sausages cooking -

if the wind was in the right direction.

They would be able to hear them talking.

Bois Francais sat on top of a slight ridge.

Here the front lines converged.

In places, British and German trenches were only 50yds apart.

From their front line,

Sassoon and Graves looked over a seemingly empty landscape.

In fact, it was filled with German soldiers.

Some so close they could hear them cough.

This was the focus of their service life.

This is why they joined up.

They came to be in THIS front line

to kill the Germans in THAT front line.

Sassoon and Graves had both joined up at the very start of the war,

when hundreds of thousands of volunteers had been recruited

to create an army big enough to meet the demands of the Western Front.

There was a place for all walks of life.

Even poets.

Prominent among them was Rupert Brooke,

the first of a new breed, the soldier-poet.

"Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,"

he would write,

capturing the patriotic sentiments of 1914.

Brooke seemed to relish the sacrifices that

the nation would have to make,

famously imagining himself as a soldier

buried in "some corner of a foreign field".

But the Army did not exactly welcome literary types,

as Sassoon and Graves soon discovered.

Graves and Sassoon were young second lieutenants,

in a very old army regiment,

in the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

And the idea that young warts,

young officers would stand around

talking about poetry in the mess

was something that would be really frowned on by their fellow officers.

So they had to develop this code of how they spoke to each other.

So if they wanted to show one another some poetry,

they would say, "Can I show you my recipes for rum punch?"

Despite being fellow poets, they didn't see eye to eye.

Even before he had arrived in France, Robert Graves had deployed

visceral images of modern warfare in his poems.

"It's hard to know if you're alive or dead

"When steel and fire go roaring through your head."

Sassoon was older, but less worldly,

and his early war poetry aped Rupert Brooke's style.

"The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes

"Till beauty shines in all that we can see.

"War is our scourge, yet war has made us wise,

"And, fighting for our freedom, we are free."

Sassoon wanted to make something beautiful out of his experience

and turn it into poetry.

"There was an hour when we were loth to part

"From life we longed to share no less than others.

"Now, having claimed this heritage of heart,

"What need we more, my comrades and my brothers?"

As far as Graves is concerned,

Sassoon's poetry was too sentimental,

too romantic, too heroic.

Graves said to him,

"You'll soon change your tune once you've seen a bit of action."

And of course, that's exactly what happened.

In both Sassoon and Graves' post-war memoirs,

Bois Francais is the place where the war becomes personal.

A single tragedy overshadowed both men's time here.

It arose from the mundane business of keeping

the front line in good repair.

In February 1916,

there was a new commanding officer for the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

He arrived and he said that the barbed wire was rubbish,

"You could drive a wheelbarrow through it."

He said the parapets, "You could fire a bullet through them.

"Get it fixed."

So from that moment on, there were working parties out every night

doing these repairs.

They're putting a spider web of barbed wire up.

And they're using these things - barbed wire pickers.

It's effectively an oversized corkscrew.

And in its application,

you just made a hole in the ground,

put the point in it,

got your entrenching tool handle,

put it through one of these loops

and literally turned it silently into the ground.

And that was the secret - you could deploy these silently.

On the night of Saturday, March 18th, 1916,

all four of the battalion's companies

were in the line repairing the trench front.

At half past ten,

Robert Graves, leading A Company's working party, heard rifle fire.

An officer was hit.

The casualty was 20-year-old, Second Lieutenant David Thomas.

Shot through the neck while out with the wiring party.

Tommy was the archetypal young Englishman.

And Sassoon loves his innocence, his sweetness, his naivety, if you like.

He wanted to die for Thomas.

And the awful thing is he realises that Thomas is heterosexual.

David Thomas and Siegfried Sassoon had met

while both were in training back in England.

In the summer of 1915,

they had attended an army course in Cambridge,

sharing rooms at Pembroke College.

It was here that the two became close friends.

When Sassoon came to Pembroke College with Tommy,

he was thrilled to discover that the name on the door of the rooms

that they were sharing was Paradise.

To be with Tommy in rooms for several weeks was paradise indeed.

In fact, he even brings it into one of his poems.

"Your lips that kissed me once in Paradise."

It implies that something might have gone on,

but of course it doesn't prove it.

It may have been a chaste peck on the cheek.

It certainly wasn't, as far as I can work out,

anything more seriously physical than that.

David Thomas was buried at Point 110 New Military Cemetery,

a few hundred yards behind the Bois Francais lines.

He was laid to rest with two other officers,

all had died in the preceding 24 hours.

The funeral is recorded in Siegfried Sassoon's diary,

source material for the autobiographical novel

Memoirs Of A Fox-Hunting Man.

"I saw his shrouded form laid in the earth with his two companions.

"In the half-clouded moonlight the parson stood above the graves

"and everything was dim but the striped flag laid across them.

"Robert Graves beside me,

"his white, whimsical face twisted and grieving.

"And when all was finished a canister fell a few hundred yards away

"to burst with a crash.

"So Tommy left us. A gentle soldier.

"And so he will always remain in my heart fresh and happy and brave."

Fox-Hunting Man is picture of an idyllic life.

And right at the end, you get a kind of turning point

when he realises that actually it isn't what he thought it was, war.

It's a very good place on which to end the book I think.

The men buried that evening were the first officers of

the Royal Welch to die in the Bois Francais lines.

The shock of their deaths is also recorded by Lieutenant Bernard Adams

in his memoir Nothing Of Importance,

the book Sassoon would later give to Wilfred Owen.

On hearing of Thomas's death, Adams was overwhelmed

and ordered the German trenches opposite to be bombarded.

The following day, he questioned his response.

"Had I called down death?

"Had I stricken families?" he asked himself.

"Probably. Nay, more than probably. Certainly."

One of the most important books, in my opinion, of the First World War

is Nothing Of Importance.

The title says a great deal because this phrase appeared regularly

when HQ considered that very little of note had happened on that front.

But of course what was happening was the daily loss

and wounding of many a man.

Adams himself would be wounded while laying barbed wire at Bois Francais.

And it was during his recuperation that he wrote his book.

His readership was a public desperate to know about

the mechanics of trench warfare,

and Adams uses Bois Francais as a case study.

This is exactly the kind of trench that Adams would have walked up

and down every day, cut in chalk, leading to the tunnel entrances,

leading to the front line.

Adams draws his own diagrams to explain trench design,

how to snipe and the different applications of barbed wire.

Then there are the daily routines

and the comforting names the Army gave the trenches here.

Shaftesbury Avenue. Old Kent Road.

And he had a keen ear for the language

of this part of the front line.

He describes coming into the line as,

"approaching the place where the dragons are dozing".

Wonderful term.

He describes the song of the shells in the air, he talks about

the birds singing, but also every shell made a different noise.

He talks about a wonderful word,

the "griding" of a big German shell coming over.

Griding - a tremendously effective word.

From late spring, 1916, it would have been obvious to the men here

that a major offensive was being prepared.

The Somme was the point on the Western Front where the British

and French Armies met.

An ideal launchpad for a joint attack that it was hoped

would smash through the German lines

and help break the deadlock of trench warfare.

But the land here was a lightly populated backwater.

An infrastructure to support an army of hundreds of thousands

had to built from scratch.

The signs would have been everywhere.

Units would have been taken out of the line to be trained.

Then there would have been the unmistakable signs of

artillery batteries being moved, of ammunition being stockpiled,

of supplies being brought up,

of field hospitals being set up,

and then brigades' divisions

being moved and concentrated in different areas.

All of that would have begun to build to a sense of

the inevitable closeness of something big.

And we know from Sassoon's diary, for example,

that he spent several weeks after joining the battalion

engaged in training for open warfare

which, after all, was what was going to follow the Somme.

In April, Sassoon was taken out of the line for officer training.

It was of the utmost importance that an aggressive spirit

be drilled into men grown complacent by trench life.

April the 25th.

"There was a great brawny Highland major here today

"talking of the bayonet.

"For close on an hour he talked,

"and all who listened caught fire from his enthusiasm

"for he was prophesying. He had his message to deliver."

This is Siegfried Sassoon's diary,

and the bayonet training in particular impressed him.

Partly because it was the bayonet which created the soldier.

If the Army could produce a man who could without compunction

or hesitation plunge cold steel into another man's chest,

you had produced a soldier.

This is what the instructor told them.

"The bullet and the bayonet are brother and sister.

"If you don't kill him, he'll kill you.

"Stick him between the eyes, in the throat, in the chest,

"or around the thighs.

"If he's on the run, there's only one place.

"Get your bayonet into his kidneys, it'll go in as easy as butter.

"Kill them. There's only one good Bosche, and that's a dead one."

That same day, Sassoon translated the major's bloodthirsty rhetoric

into The Kiss, one of his first published war poems.

"To these I turn, in these I trust,

"Brother Lead and Sister Steel.

"To his blind power I make appeal,

"I guard her beauty clean from rust.

"He spins and burns and loves the air,

"And splits a skull to win my praise,

"But up the nobly marching days

"She glitters naked, cold and fair.

"Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this,

"That in good fury he may feel

"The body where he sets his heel

"Quail from your downward darting kiss."

And I think Sassoon got very caught up in this.

The major got them all fizzing and going.

In the poem, I think he's giving it to us pretty straight.

And afterwards of course, he felt embarrassed by this

because he then had seen rather more of what

lead and steel can do to people,

and he tried to say it was satirical and things.

It can be read that way, but I don't think for my money

that's not what he meant when he wrote it.

It was during the build-up to the Battle of the Somme

that Sassoon discovered he was a born soldier.

Before joining the Army he had drifted,

failing to excel at anything other than

the gentlemanly pursuit of fox-hunting.

But at Bois Francais he found purpose

leading suicidal sorties into no-man's-land,

which earned him the nickname Mad Jack.

This is the pistol that Siegfried Sassoon used as a young officer

during his time at the front in the First World War.

And he would have used it during the raid at the end of May,

which was such an important part of his experience in the front line.

At the end of May, 1916, the 1st Battalion of the Royal Welch

were ordered to raid the enemy front lines opposite,

a position the British called Kiel Trench.

Their orders - to examine portions of the trench,

capture prisoners, bomb dugouts and kill Germans.

I'm standing here directly on the British front-line trench.

It runs across this field, close to this embankment

and curves around and goes around the edge of Bois Francais -

the wood over there on the left.

This green area, with the big depression, is no-man's-land.

Running along the edge of the wood on the far side of no-man's-land

is the German front line.

At the end of it is Kiel Trench.

It was at 11:50pm on the night of May 25th,

it was a dark night, that with blackened faces,

25 men and one officer crept out of the British line,

managed to cross no-man's-land quietly...

and came up against the German wire on the far side.

It was so dense and so heavy, they found that they couldn't get through.

There were no gaps to get through.

And whilst they were deciding what to do, the Germans spotted them.

They came under enemy fire of course.

And someone who was particularly close to Sassoon,

Corporal O'Brien, was hit and fell into a big crater.

O'Brien, a dock worker from Cardiff's Irish town,

had bonded with Sassoon on previous patrols

despite their opposite backgrounds.

Sassoon had been tasked with counting the raiders back to

the British lines, but aware his corporal might be in trouble

he crawled out into the darkness.

Sassoon slipped down into the crater, very similar to this one,

very steep, wet at the bottom,

and found O'Brien lying there with a head wound and several other wounds.

They were being sniped from the crater rim,

five or six Germans Sassoon thought -

he could hear the rifle bolts being clicked into place,

and they were being bombed.

He knew he couldn't get O'Brien out on his own.

He was a big Irishman.

So he crawled back out of the crater, went back to his own line,

got two men and a rope,

came back into the crater and tried to drag O'Brien up.

Three men could only get him halfway.

So Sassoon left the crater again, went back to his own line again,

found another man, and this time they managed to drag him all the way out.

And gradually dawn came.

And Sassoon thought the Germans would've probably seen

what was happening, but they didn't fire on him.

Unfortunately O'Brien died on the way back to the British lines.

But this was the episode that won Sassoon the MC.

And he was very proud of the fact that he won the MC

for saving a man's life rather than for taking a man's life.

This attempt to save his friend was possibly

the most meaningful action in Sassoon's life to date.

He'd always been something of an outsider,

but now Sassoon found himself lionised.

He was a war hero.

Something that would make his future criticisms

of the conflict more telling.

The upcoming Somme offensive would mark a step change

in the First World War.

The soldier-poets who had joined in 1914,

were about to be flung into a battle larger than anything

previously seen on the Western Front.

To be able to write about it, first they would have to survive it.

You had these young men all being shipped across the English Channel

to a very small part of the world,

where they were all together sharing very similar experiences

and seeing very similar things.

And there was this great virus, this outbreak of poetry

that went through the armies on the Western Front.

We've seen short, emotionally intensive, highly descriptive poems

of what it's like to be there in that particular moment.

What I'm feeling. What I'm seeing.

A few hundred yards to the east of the Royal Welch,

in a stretch of line running behind Mansel Copse,

was William Noel Hodgson,

a widely read soldier-poet,

then serving with the 9th Devonshire Regiment.

His first published work is 1913,

so even before the war he's intent on writing.

He uses a pen name. So when he gets to the Army,

his fellow soldiers don't know that he writes for publication.

They know that he's good with words

and they know he can write

funny poems,

but that was a part of his life

that he kept separate.

During the build-up to the battle,

Hodgson and his unit had been studying their position closely

in preparation for the big attack.

But they had come to a grim realisation.

They were almost going into a sort of cup of enemy positions.

They had positions...

It sounds awfully like the Charge of the Light Brigade,

but they were Germans on the right...

..in front...

and higher up the hill looking down on them.

They knew from what they'd seen

that they were in a peculiarly dangerous spot.

And...

basically it will take a miracle to get them across.

It was probably early June when Hodgson wrote the poem

Before Action, in which he prepared himself for the forthcoming battle.

"By all the glories of the day

"And the cool evening's benison

"By that last sunset touch that lay

"Upon the hills when day was done,

"By beauty lavishly outpoured

"And blessings carelessly received,

"By all the days that I have lived

"Make me a soldier, Lord."

Before Action is a prayer before death, put very simply.

It's three verses.

The first one ends, "Make me a soldier".

The second one ends, "Make me a man".

And the third one, "Help me to die".

"I, that on my familiar hill

"Saw with uncomprehending eyes

"A hundred of thy sunsets spill

"Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice,

"Ere the sun swings his noonday sword

"Must say goodbye to all of this, -

"By all delights that I shall miss,

"Help me to die, O Lord."

And it's summing up the whole of his experience.

The things he loves.

Everything.

The things he might have looked forward to

if he hadn't found himself in this situation.

And he's saying,

"This is it and I'm going to have to give those things up."

Hodgson's Before Action is powerful because you can place it.

This is his familiar hill, we're on his familiar hill.

Those hundred sunsets spilled over there.

There's something very special about that poem because what he seems to

have done to me is used his poetry as a bolster to his own courage.

Particularly because all of them knew what had happened to every

single other British attack that had taken place up to that date.

They had all been disasters.

Under his pen name Edward Melbourne,

Hodgson's work ran alongside that of George Bernard Shaw

and GK Chesterton in weekly paper The New Witness

before being syndicated nationwide in the regional press.

The New Witness printed Before Action on the 29th of June, 1916,

two days before the start of the Battle of the Somme.

The public at home was reading about the Somme in poetry

before the fighting had begun.

The 1st of July, 1916.

It was a beautiful sunny morning.

In a massive joint offensive,

the British advanced from a 14-mile front,

while the French Army extended the attack to the south

by a further ten miles.

The Germans had been subjected to a week-long bombardment

by the largest concentration of artillery ever assembled.

But too much hope had been placed in these guns.

Once they stopped, the Germans emerged from

deep, prepared dugouts with machineguns

ready to fire into the advancing waves.

At Mansel Copse, the Devon's front line

was being subjected to its own bombardment by the Germans.

They've started from a position around about here, 250yds back.

And they gave themselves

an extra three minutes to reach the front lines.

So instead of attacking at half past seven,

they attacked at 27 minutes past.

Came up out of the trenches,

crossed all these other intermediate trenches,

down into Mansel Copse and then into no-man's-land.

For three long minutes Hodgson and the Devons

would be the only figures in their sector

to be moving in the landscape.

If you're the only people

moving on the battlefield for three minutes...

anybody who's got his machinegun ready...

..you're going to be the only target.

For those that did get through the Copse,

there was still no-man's-land to cross.

But once they got to this point out of the woods,

they were hit by machinegun fire from guns

not in the German front line, but in their support line.

And it was a line running through the cemetery,

past the shrine over there, in a trench called Shrine Alley.

The 9th Devons had gone into the attack in four waves

with 775 men and 18 officers.

During the attack, they lost 17 out of those 18 officers, eight dead,

and 463 men.

After the battle, the Devons' front line behind Mansel Copse

became the graveyard of many.

Among them was William Noel Hodgson.

His death leant Before Action an extra poignancy

that made it one of the most well-known war poems of its time.

The poem has power in its own day

because it fills the gap that

so many families must have wanted to know from a son, or a husband,

or a lover who'd gone into battle and died.

Were you all right? What did it feel like?

It's like a message in a bottle from the front

to the families at home who can't ask those questions.

The 1st of July, 1916,

was the most disastrous day in the history of the British Army,

a fifth of the attacking force were killed -

19,240 men.

Another 38,230 soldiers were wounded, missing or captured.

On the northern part of the battlefield,

the British attack had largely been repelled.

But in the southern sector, there was success.

The French caught the Germans by surprise south of the River Somme.

And by the following day, Montauban, Fricourt and Mametz,

the villages overlooked by Bois Francais, were in British hands.

These small villages were nestled in pockets of dense woodland.

The next objective would be this land that lay beyond.

The new phase of the battle

would bring challenges high command had again not anticipated.

Nobody knew how many Germans were in the woods

that peppered this part of the battlefield.

And woodland was one terrain that the British Army

had no training or experience of fighting in.

The push into the woods was immortalised by a man who was

several ranks below Sassoon and Graves

in the Royal Welch Fusiliers,

but very much their equal as a poet.

Private David Jones.

David Jones's writing about the war

is coming from a different direction

from, for example, Sassoon, from Graves,

in that he's not an officer.

Essentially what he was interested in

was the experience of the private soldier,

the ordinary man in the ranks.

Not just as a record of his own experience as one,

but the mythic significance of the ordinary soldier,

who doesn't actually have any say in the way the battle is conducted,

who doesn't have any responsibilities for other men,

except as friends and comrades,

who is effectively cannon fodder.

Jones had been desperate to enlist.

And in its huge need for soldiers, the Army had scooped up this

gifted ex-arts student

and turned him into a private in the 15th Battalion of the Royal Welch,

known as the London Welsh.

As part of a Welsh division, the London Welsh were ordered to clear

Mametz Wood, called Mametz Wood by the British.

Twice he and his comrades

were marched into trenches facing the wood...

..before an attack was called off.

It seems to them absolutely futile

because they haven't got a clue about what the bigger picture is,

which I think is often part of the genesis of this myth

of the First World War about lions led by donkeys.

Well, our generals didn't know what on earth they were on about

because they didn't tell us anything.

Well, of course they didn't tell us anything

because we didn't need to know.

But it doesn't make it any easier when you're a private soldier,

and particularly if you're somebody like David Jones,

who is an educated and very intelligent man.

Early on the 10th of July,

the London Welsh arrived at Queen's Nullah.

Nullah is an old Indian Army term for valley or ravine.

This was their jumping off point for the attack.

They're hugging this bank because they know the closer to it they get

the safer they are.

Jones said he can hear singing by the, "genuine Welsh"

he calls them, because he's in the London Welsh.

They're singing Welsh songs, which gives him some courage as well.

And whilst they're hugging that bank, they look up

and they can see puffs of chalk dust along the top of it.

That's from German machineguns 2km away

waiting for them to go over the top.

No photographs or film exists of the attack on the 10th of July.

But we do have Jones' epic poem In Parenthesis.

A fusion of modernist poetry

and Welsh mythology which culminates in the attack on Mametz Wood.

Jones and his compatriots scrambled the chalky face of Queen's Nullah

to advance 500yds across a plateau filled with wheat and wild flowers.

This is Jones's view as he's going to the attack.

There's Mametz Wood in the distance.

This is the plateau.

And what Jones does here,

he tells us something which no historian ever does,

he dismantles the moment.

There's a shell burst, the sun's low in the sky,

it's early in the morning.

It goes dark with the dust and the smoke.

And then he describes particles of chalk dust sparkling in the air.

He's walking through this into the attack.

"You drop apprehensively.

"The sun gone out.

"Strange airs smite your body

"and muck rains straight from heaven.

"And everlasting doors lift up for up for '02 Weavel.

"You can't see anything but sheen on drifting particles.

"And you move forward in your private bright cloud

"like one assumed who is borne up by an exterior volition."

He's got an eye for detail,

for the tiny telling details that a film-maker or an artist would have.

His work feels like it's been broken by those events

at the start of the 20th century.

This is the kind of poetry that Eliot might have written

had he been in the wood here.

Ezra Pound.

It's a fragmented...

more, I suppose,

contemporary sounding poetic voice, and that's shocking.

After descending from the plateau, Jones and his surviving comrades

were confronted with Mametz Wood itself.

A mile deep, this old hunting ground was now a dense,

overgrown forest filled with experienced German troops.

The line of attack was through the wood's southern edge,

following a German defensive known to the British as Strip Trench.

All the while avoiding machinegun fire from the wood's flanks...

..by the time they entered the trees,

a third of Jones's unit had fallen.

This is a strange place.

Partly because it's off the beaten track

and quite difficult to get into, partly because

there are still the remnants of trenches and shell holes here.

But mainly, I think, because David Jones described it so vividly

and so much of it still feels intact

the way he describes the undergrowth.

I feel odd in this wood.

There's a beauty to it,

and you feel guilty about responding to the beauty of it

because under our feet are still countless bodies.

As the Royal Welch slowly progressed up Strip Trench, they discovered

that fighting in woodland brought its own deadly challenges.

The trees are falling, there's shelling coming down upon them.

Worse than that, the shells are actually hitting the tree trunks

and a little bit like in an ancient galleon,

say, in Nelson's time, it is blowing those tree trunks apart.

So you have trees falling, splinters flying about, shrapnel, bullets.

Machine-gun fire is coming in from both sides of the wood, because

the Germans know at which point in the wood the British are advancing.

So, they're walking through streams of bullets.

"And the storm rises higher

"and all who do their business in the valley do it quickly

"And up in the night-shades

"where death is closer packed in the tangled avenues

"fair Balder falleth everywhere

"and thunder-besom breakings bright the wood

"and a Golden Bough for Johnny and Jack,

"and blasted oaks for Jerry

"and shrapnel the swift Jupiter for each expectant tree

"After what hypostases uniting:

"withered limbs for the chosen, for the fore-chosen.

"Take care of the black brush-fall in the night rides

"where they deploy for the final objective."

He describes, at one point,

the severed head of a fellow soldier,

with a kind of Cheshire Cat rictus grin on it.

He describes other soldiers half-naked with their clothes

torn apart by the bramble and the wire, as they are stuck

and exposed to enemy fire,

trying to just get through the woods to the next stage.

That sense of...chaos and camaraderie,

but, ultimately, horror and unpredictability,

I imagine must imprint itself on your memory

so vividly you never lose it.

Jones was fighting for around 20 hours.

He helped push the Germans to the wood's northern edge,

but he and his comrades were beaten back.

Eventually, Jones felt something slam into his left leg.

He'd been shot.

It's not some huge, sudden climactic moment.

It's a slow realisation of what's happened. His left boot fills up.

He describes the fluid percolating his boot

and suddenly, he finds out his foot's wet and it's with his own blood.

Then, he has to pick up his gun

and everything takes on a weight and a difficulty,

because he's struggling to walk.

And what's just happened to him is sinking in.

So this gun, which has become part of his identity as a soldier,

the gun he could pick out of a row of guns as his,

has its own idiosyncrasies, becomes a burden for him

as he drags it through the wood, doesn't know what to do with himself.

The injured protagonist of In Parenthesis, like Jones himself,

crawls away and awaits stretcher-bearers.

Then, the action cuts back to the Spirit Queen of the woods

presenting flowers to the fallen.

Emil has a curious crown

It's made of golden saxifrage

Fatty wears sweet-briar

He will reign with her for a thousand years

For Balder she reaches high to fetch his

Ulrich smiles for his myrtle wand

That swine Lillywhite has daisies to his chain

You'd hardly credit it

She plaits torques of equal splendour

for Mr Jenkins and Billy Crower

Hansel with Gronwy share dog-violets for a palm

Where they lie-in serious embrace beneath the twisted tripod

Sion gets St John's Wort - that's fair enough.

Dai Great-coat, she can't find him anywhere -

she calls both high and low, she had a very special one for him.

It's multilayered,

and I think he felt that the...uniqueness

and the horror of the experience warranted that.

You don't write on one level, you don't just report what you've seen.

He called on every kind of resource, mythic and vernacular,

to try to come to terms, literally,

with what he had seen and experienced here.

In Parenthesis was published over 20 years after Jones's ordeal.

Included in the dedication were the German infantry,

some of who were still lying in Mametz Wood.

"The enemy front-fighters who shared our pains against whom

"we found ourselves by misadventure," wrote Jones.

Here is some unexpected evidence of the fighting

in Strip Trench we've just been exploring.

German boots.

At least a pair, probably two pairs.

And there is the heelpiece.

There are two things which a soldier never discards -

one is his rifle

and the second thing is his boots.

So these are very likely to be dead men's shoes.

Before the battle, the Germans had been an invisible enemy.

Now, as the British slowly advanced, they were seeing real Germans,

both as prisoners...

..and among the dead.

In the early waves of attacks on Mametz Wood, Siegfried Sassoon

had seen his own bit of action -

an impulsive, but futile, solo raid, in which he stormed

and briefly occupied a German-held trench on the wood's western edge.

Sassoon would be haunted by one particular sight he witnessed.

He's seen a young German who is lying dead.

So he props him up very gently against the wall,

and carries on.

When he comes back, he finds his face,

as he says in his poem on the event,

is trodden deeper in the mud.

It's a terrible realisation that it's not just the English,

and this time, I think he's beginning to realise

that they're all suffering. And it's the German mother

knitting by the fire who's going to be suffering this time.

Mametz Wood finally fell on 12th July.

It was now filled with the dead -

British and German.

Robert Graves found himself bivouacked nearby.

Now serving in a different battalion of the Royal Welch,

Graves' new comrades were deeply suspicious of him

and his German heritage.

He was, at the time. called Robert von Ranke Graves,

his mother was German, very proud of his German ancestry,

loved his German mother and cousins, proud of being a German,

carried around the poems of Nietzsche in his knapsack,

which didn't help things.

And an old rumour that he was a German spy

is resurrected by another officer.

And he was worried that somebody was perhaps going to shoot him,

a member of his own battalion was going to shoot him.

Already at a low ebb,

Graves ventured into Mametz Wood to look for German overcoats

that his men could use as blankets.

As Graves is picking his way through, he comes upon certain sights

which very clearly stick with him for the rest of his life.

He finds a Welshman and a Prussian who have both bayoneted each other

at exactly the same time, and they are both mutually impaled.

A little further on, he mentions a large Prussian guard

lying with his back against the trench,

black blood having poured out of his nose and his mouth.

In Robert Graves's war poetry, this dead soldier would achieve

a kind of immortality, as the Dead Boche.

To you who'd read my songs of War

And only hear of blood and fame,

I'll say (you've heard it said before)

"War's Hell!" and if you doubt the same,

Today I found in Mametz Wood,

A certain cure for lust of blood:

Where, propped against a shattered trunk,

In a great mess of things unclean, Sat a dead Boche,

He scowled and stunk

With clothes and face a sodden green,

Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,

Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

He thought that there was a way of writing about the war

that could be really dramatically different to anything else,

and that was to write with great realism,

and in Graves's case, perhaps an exaggerated realism.

He wanted to focus on the detail of the horrors that he saw.

Now, for his family, his friends reading that back at home,

it was quite shocking, and that was his intention.

He wanted to shout really quite loudly through his poetry

about what he was seeing and feeling and experiencing.

In strategic terms,

the victory at Mametz Wood was of great importance.

With Trones Wood also taken, the British launched a surprise attack

on the German second line of defence,

large parts of which were captured early on 14th July.

Here was open, flatter terrain,

but also the next British military objective.

High Wood.

High Wood was filled with thousands of crack German troops.

To reach it, the British first had to cross a gently rising 1,000 yards

of open ground that offered no cover at all.

After earlier failed attempts,

on 20th July a concerted British attack on the wood was launched.

Prominently marked on the brigade's map for that day is a windmill -

the location of yet another writer from the Royal Welch,

Frank Richards.

This is the remains of Bazentin Windmill.

It was a feature that Adams, Sassoon and Graves would have known well

cos you could see it from the Bois Francais trenches, miles back.

Now it was part of the front line.

Frank Richards was put here as a signaller.

And his job was to take messages from High Wood,

receive them here and relay them to HQ.

Frank Richards had a remarkable war.

As a private soldier, he served on the Western Front from 1914

until the Armistice, hardly missing a battle.

At Bazentin Windmill, he would need all his luck.

He had one of the most dangerous jobs on the entire battlefield.

He's receiving, by flag signals, messages from the wood.

He has to signal back with his flags

to say he has received those messages.

He's standing on top of a windmill,

with 15,000 hostile eyes looking at him,

with only one thought -

"Blow that man off that windmill", because the Germans know,

if they can break the communication, it will benefit their cause.

Richards, here, says shells are falling north, south, east and west

and the entire mill is shaking under this bombardment.

The barrage that we were under the day before

was a popcorn barrage compared with this one.

Everything from a 12-inch shell to a 13-pounder were exploding.

And it kept on without a break.

It kept on from about seven o'clock in the morning to ten or 11 at night.

There wasn't a break in it.

Well, how we didn't get blowed to pieces, I don't know.

Ten of the brigade's 18 signallers were lost in the attack.

But Richards survived the day and the war without injury.

His appropriately-titled memoir, Old Soldiers Never Die,

was edited by Robert Graves.

Graves helps him to structure the book, to write the book, to address

certain questions, and then finds him a publisher, Faber & Faber.

He said about Richards,

he was the only tommy who was as good with a pen as he was with a musket.

That morning, Robert Graves was only 50 yards away from Richards.

The attack on High Wood features in Graves's own memoir,

Goodbye To All That.

This book is often accused of preferring a good story

over historical accuracy.

But what was about to happen to Graves

was as bizarre as anything in his later fiction.

At 10am, Graves was in command of B Company,

awaiting orders to go forward into High Wood.

Graves and his 100 men, meanwhile, are lying here in the grass.

They can hear and see the battle raging,

the horizon is on fire, almost.

There is a slight lull for a couple of hours and then, at 10am,

a very heavy German bombardment falls directly

upon their positions in these fields here.

What Graves says then is that they fall back at a rush

and they run down this valley looking for cover.

DISTANT YELLING

And as he's running back, a shell bursts a few yards behind him

and blows him off his feet.

A piece of shell splinter goes through his groin here, another

one goes underneath his shoulder blade and comes out of his chest,

so he is pierced by a piece of shell that passes straight through him.

He's knocked off his feet, and that is the end of his battle.

"I heard the explosion and felt as though I'd been punched

"rather hard between the shoulder blades,

"but had no sensation of pain. I thought that the punch was

"merely the shock of the explosion.

"Then, blood started trickling into my eye and I felt faint

"and I called to Moodie, 'I've been hit.'

"Then I fell down."

Somehow, this high explosive, this shell,

hit one of the gravestones near this graveyard,

and marble or granite hit him in the head,

and as a child, I remember he said,

"Feel this, feel this," and you could feel the lump on his brow.

Graves was taken to an advanced dressing station close by -

the first link in a sophisticated chain of medical treatment

the British now had in place.

Here, he was judged too badly injured to survive.

He was laid in a corner and left to die.

Obviously, they have to pick out the ones who are most likely to survive.

And they just walk on. They don't even bother him.

And then, the next morning, they come by and he's still alive.

Graves was put on an ambulance for the nearest field hospital,

where, miraculously, he began a slow recovery.

But Graves's commanding officer still believed him dead.

He set the wheels of Army bureaucracy in motion,

writing to Graves's parents with the tragic news.

They received this letter saying that he has died.

They receive a telegram from the War Office saying that he's dead,

which caused a lot of problems

cos he then couldn't get into any of his pay because he was dead!

He didn't like that part.

Graves initially treated his death as a bit of a joke.

But in the years after the war,

this moment became more and more important to him.

Graves found it very difficult to adjust to civilian life,

to family life.

Part of that adjustment to the peace was how to rebuild his life,

and one of the ways he did that was by saying,

"There on the Somme, when I lay dead,

"when everybody thought I was dead for two or three days,

"maybe I DID die."

This idea reaches its peak in Goodbye To All That.

Goodbye To All That is a, sort of, suicide note

to the death that happened.

In that moment, he says,

age of 33, "In telling this story about what happened to me

"at the Western Front, I am saying goodbye to myself for ever."

And it enables him to become not just a different person,

which he does, but also a very different writer.

By the time Graves was coming round, back on the Somme,

news that he had died of wounds had already reached Siegfried Sassoon.

Sketches in Sassoon's diary show

the impact of the Somme on his psyche.

Now he, too, was in hospital, with trench fever.

As he lies in hospital in France, he sees a young man opposite him

who has lost his friend at High Wood and been wounded,

and the poem is beautifully done

because there is compassion for the young man.

"His wet white face and miserable eyes

"Brought nurses to him more than groans and sighs:

"But hoarse and low and rapid rose and fell

"His troubled voice: he did the business well.

"The ward grew dark, but he was still complaining

"And calling out for "Dickie". "Curse the Wood!

"It's time to go. O Christ, and what's the good?

"We'll never take it, it's always raining."

"I wondered where he'd been, then heard him shout,

"They snipe like hell! O Dickie, don't go out..."

"I fell asleep...

"Next morning he was dead,

"And some Slight Wound lay smiling on the bed."

A recuperating Sassoon was shipped back to England on 1st August 1916,

still believing that Robert Graves had died of wounds.

From the high summer, the advance in the south halted

and the Somme became a battle of grisly attrition.

The Germans in High Wood held out through the rest of July

and into August,

despite waves of attacks and the full fury of the British guns.

In mid-August, frustrated at the feeble British advance,

General Haig ordered a string of linked attacks

to break through the rear of High Wood, out of Delville Wood,

and to capture the bastion village of Guillemont.

By now, the British way of war was to reduce the landscape

and everything in it to ruination.

Guillemont itself was erased from the Earth.

But still, the Germans held on.

They were supremely self-critical.

If anything went wrong that allowed the British to break in

to their lines, they wanted to know why and to rectify that straightaway,

in order to defend the bastion they had created

here on the Western Front.

The horrors the German Army endured at Guillemont were captured

by Lieutenant Ernst Junger in his memoir, Storm Of Steel.

The ground all around, as far as the eye could see,

was ploughed by shells.

You could search in vain for one wretched blade of grass.

This churned-up battlefield was ghastly.

Among the living lay the dead.

As we dug ourselves in, we found them in layers,

stacked one upon the top of another.

You know, he was a young man who wanted to fight.

He wanted to go into battle, he wanted to experience battle -

his nerves, his entire body.

He wanted to get a sense of the experience of the trenches

and the excitement of the camaraderie.

But it's a battle of large forces and large armies

and masses of people that never encounter each other,

and he feels cheated, he feels that this isn't the war

he was going to fight, he wanted to fight.

The journey to Guillemont was a terrifying trudge

through a featureless landscape.

Junger and his men had to follow a white tape,

as all distinguishing landmarks,

even the road itself, had been obliterated.

The only shelter was a few sunken lanes.

This one would be their ultimate destination.

Here, Junger and the 73rd Hanoverian Fusiliers

found their own corner of hell.

They entered one sunken lane like this. It was full of corpses.

They moved on further.

They entered another sunken lane. That, too, was full of corpses.

They left that. And every shell hole was full of German dead.

And then they dropped into this lane here.

And Junger says that upon his arrival with the 73rd Hanoverians,

the men who were here, their voices tremble with joy

when they hear that they were going to be relieved.

As the first streaks of dawn appeared in the sky,

he plucked up enough courage to have a look over the top.

To the rear, he saw a carpet of German dead. To the front, here,

towards Trones Wood, it was a carpet of British dead.

He knows that this is going to be a battle of epic dimensions.

He knows that this is a battle of a magnitude never seen before.

He thinks, he's convinced, that he's going to die.

The Germans had been occupying

Guillemont and its farms for two years,

and preparations long in place allowed them to hold on here.

This is how the Germans in Guillemont

manage to escape Junger's,

what he called the "storm of steel" - the high explosive,

the avalanche of high explosive which totally destroyed the village above.

These steps lead down probably another two or three metres

below my feet here,

into, possibly, a labyrinth, to house

hundreds of men, possibly even thousands of men,

connected to other cellars of houses in the village.

The deep dugouts of Guillemont

had originally been miles behind the front line,

and with defences such as these, the Germans slowed the British advance

on the Somme to a crawl.

The British had no alternative but to keep up the storm of steel,

pulverising ground already destroyed.

This is the result of just, what, a few metres' walk, ten metres' walk,

through this field into no-man's-land.

This is shell splinters here,

fragments of bullet, a bit of copper from driving bands of shells.

A large shell splinter. Imagine that flying through the air, red hot.

Junger describes something like that hitting him on the belt.

But it had lost all its velocity by the time it did it.

It would have torn him in half, if it had been travelling at full speed.

Really, what it was here

was industrial, mutual annihilation.

That's what we are looking at at Guillemont.

And it's strange looking around the landscape now - it is so benign,

and so productive and so beautiful.

It has a wonderful light, the Somme area,

and yet, at the same time, you KNOW what has taken place here.

In Storm Of Steel, Guillemont stands as the harbinger of a new kind

of warfare, in which the individual disappeared...

..replaced by huge faceless armies fighting in a man-made wilderness.

It's a situation in which

ideologies disappear and nations disappear. Everything is just

coming together in this huge amount of energy.

It's not a class war, it's not a war of nations for him,

it's a war in which energy is mobilised, and everyone becomes

part of it, regardless of where they stand. The war, for him,

is the same, he says, as it is for people on the other side.

It's one war, it's one huge mobilisation,

that takes hold of everyone.

For a period after the war, this idea of marshalling citizens,

industry and economy to a single purpose would obsess Junger.

He would rewrite Storm Of Steel a number of times, until it became

an acknowledged classic.

But in the 1920s, it was taken up by German veterans

and by the fledgling Nazi Party.

"Chivalry here took a final farewell.

"It had to yield to the heightened intensity of war,

"just as all fine and personal feeling has to yield when machinery

"gets the upper hand.

"The Europe of today appeared here for the first time in battle."

Junger was injured and in hospital when Guillemont finally fell

on September the 3rd.

Almost to a man, his comrades disappeared,

"vanishing", as he writes, "without trace,

"in the fiery labyrinths of the battle".

The Somme, autumn of 1916,

would be remembered for its mud,

as rain slowly turned the battlefield into a quagmire.

A few miles away,

on the upper part of the original battle front,

close to where the Somme's tributary, the Ancre, flowed,

the British were pushing forward into ground

they had failed to capture on the 1st of July.

Here, at the end of September, a young signals officer

was beginning his fourth month in the battle.

His name was JRR Tolkien.

Tolkien arrives on the Somme in late June, 1916.

He had, at the outbreak of war, acquired a sense

that he wanted to be a writer, he wanted to be a poet,

but exactly the way that was going to turn out wasn't clear to him,

he was not the writer he became.

In the fellowship of the Lancashire Fusiliers,

Tolkien had seen much.

In July, he had taken part in a bloody British assault on Ovillers.

In August, at the Leipzig Salient,

he'd worked out of newly-captured trenches

strewn with German dead.

Now, he was in Thiepval Wood,

as the Battle of Thiepval Ridge raged nearby.

There were the constant stream of casualties.

There's a column of men walking through Thiepval Wood,

and at the head of it is a subaltern called Stanley Rowson

and, next to him, is a guy who bore witness to what happened

when a shell burst and he said,

"I was knocked flying, but entirely uninjured. And I got up and Rowson

"was simply gone. He had been obliterated."

So there was a kind of sense of a sort of sinister force

in the atmosphere almost,

that people could simply vanish out of existence instantaneously.

Sights witnessed on the Somme deeply affected Tolkien,

altering this young officer's world view.

Tolkien had started inventing a mythology,

which had elves, these immortal creatures,

and the idea was that the elves would bring

an enlightenment message.

After the Battle of the Somme,

mythology became a mythology of perpetual war.

The adjacent village of Thiepval, a long-standing British objective,

had largely been captured the day before Tolkien arrived.

This is the view looking to Thiepval from the wood

at the time Tolkien was there.

Just visible,

the latest British secret weapon used in the attack.

Tolkien was in the wood.

He saw the remnants of this village,

this smoking, pulverised ruin on the hillside.

And it's quite possible that he also caught his first glimpse of a new

British wonder-weapon - the tanks.

Because one tank, with the marvellous

name of Creme de Menthe, came to a standstill

with broken steering gear, just on the other side of this road here.

He couldn't get out and go and have a look at it, if he HAD seen it,

because, although this village had been taken,

the Germans still held the trenches 100 metres from here.

There was a great deal of hope invested in these monstrous, sort of,

primeval-looking machines, and their purpose was to break

into the German lines, to help the infantry break into the German lines,

because without breaking in, you cannot break through.

Nothing like a tank had been witnessed before,

and it was a struggle to articulate exactly what they were.

German soldiers reporting back their encounters

drew fantastical machines.

The Times described them as "an array of...

Immediately after his time on the Somme,

Tolkien began work on his first story set in Middle Earth,

The Fall Of Gondolin.

In The Fall Of Gondolin, the first Dark Lord of Middle Earth

unleashes an army of metal dragons,

that move on "iron so cunningly linked

"that they might flow...around and above all obstacles before them."

They are made of metal,

can smash things down in their path,

they give out fire and they have troops inside them.

So they are very much like the tanks or maybe like the rumours of tanks.

The Battle of Thiepval Ridge had seen the British take land

on the muddy uplands overlooking the Ancre.

That autumn, Tolkien would be stationed in a succession of

recently-captured German strongpoints here.

By October 20th, he was in Hessian Trench.

A few hundred yards opposite was Regina Trench.

This would be the object of a massive linked attack

along three miles of line.

As battalion signals officer,

Tolkien was in charge of communications

with the attacking force, relaying events back to HQ.

This is a map showing JRR Tolkien's final action on the Western Front.

21st of October, 1916,

at the trench upon which we are standing now.

Hessian Trench was being prepared for action the following day.

The objective was Regina Trench, a German-held trench which ran across

the front of this cemetery behind me

and then diagonally across the landscape.

The attack would use a brand-new technique perfected that autumn -

the creeping barrage.

This was a curtain of shells that exploded in front of

the attacking troops, moving with them as they advanced.

Its progression was precisely plotted out on a map

for artillery and infantry to follow.

We are right here on Hessian Trench. There it is marked.

And the green line, they're meant to reach that in one and a half minutes.

The blue line, in three minutes. That's halfway across no-man's-land.

And there, the red line, with all the wire in front of it,

that's Regina Trench. Six minutes.

They've got six minutes to get across the battlefield,

and ahead of them is this curtain

of exploding shells, which will lift and they will follow it.

And that will keep the German heads down below the parapet of the trench

until there's no more time to react. The British will be upon them,

they'll be in the trench, bombing and bayoneting.

It works.

Six minutes later, Tolkien, from this trench, will be able to see

red flags and possibly even a helmet or two, waving in Regina Trench.

He's sending forward his pigeoneers now,

so that officers over there can write down their needs

on a little piece of paper.

That goes back by bird to divisional headquarters, and they will know

how big the garrison is there.

Do they need support? How many reserves do they need to send up?

He's been a part of a great success.

They've only captured 400 metres of ground,

but nevertheless, at this point in the Battle of the Somme,

that is success itself.

It is argued that the Somme was part of a learning curve,

as the British Army grasped how to fight, and ultimately win,

a new form of industrial warfare.

But there was also a profound cost.

Two of Tolkien's closest friends

died at the Somme,

and 30 years later,

memories of the ghostly October landscape lingered,

to reappear while he was writing The Lord Of The Rings.

The passage of the Dead Marshes, where Frodo and Sam, the hobbits,

led by Gollum,

have to travel through this haunted marshland,

and they are horrified to look down into the water and see dead faces

looking up at them.

Now, this - it's not fancy, this is the reality

of the battlefield of the Somme.

Especially as the autumn rains came in,

and the valley of the Ancre

was flooded, you would get dead soldiers, unrecoverable,

just rotting in the open.

And it was a horrifying, searing experience

for anyone to witness.

He did not believe, and he said expressly, "I never believed

"in the idea of the war to end wars."

So, in Middle Earth, there is

perpetual conflict between good and evil. It will never end.

Less than a week after the victory at Regina Trench,

Tolkien would fall victim to a very different kind of enemy.

On the 27th of October, 1916, he would report sick,

stricken with trench fever.

The most common form of illness in the trenches -

and 25% of those who reported sick had this disease -

was trench fever.

It was passed on by the infected bites of body lice.

Everybody was infested with body lice -

private or officer alike.

It could take you out of the Army permanently,

because it was relapsing.

Heavy fevers, sweating, aching bones,

tired limbs, sore eyeballs, even.

The only recourse the men in the trenches had would be to strip off...

..find the eggs, which lived in the seams of your clothes,

and run a candle down.

And they would hear the eggs popping as the flame got to them.

Pop, pop, pop.

This bizarre ritual was turned into poetry by Private Isaac Rosenberg.

Rosenberg had been a pacifist from the outset of the war,

but had enlisted because he needed money.

On the week the battle officially ended, he was in the Somme trenches,

where louse-hunting was a nightly ritual.

"Nudes - stark, a-glisten, yelling in lurid glee.

"Grinning faces of fiends and raging limbs whirl over the floor one fire.

"For a shirt verminously busy, yon soldier tore from his throat,

"with oaths Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice.

"And soon the shirt was aflare over the candle he'd lit while we lay.

"Then we all sprung up and stripped to hunt the vermin brood.

"Soon, like a devils' pantomime, the place was raging."

So you can really feel, throughout all of the lines of this,

that sense of power and energy.

They rip their clothes off and they push through the seams

with their fingers, to try and get rid of these beasts

which are tormenting them. And that's not just in the language,

but also in the structure of the poem,

so the line lengths are different. He uses rhythm and metre

very, very subtly and carefully.

"See the silhouettes agape.

"See the gibbering shadows

"mixed with the battled arms on the wall.

"See gargantuan hooked fingers dug in supreme flesh

"to smutch the supreme littleness.

"See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling

"because some wizard vermin charmed from the quiet this revel

"when our ears were half lulled by the dark music

"blown from Sleep's trumpet."

Rosenberg's manuscripts are fairly chaotic.

He was a very organic poet.

There's lots of corrections and changes, so you can feel the energy

of the pencils moving over the paper.

And this more complete manuscript is very much of that mould.

The challenge of combating lice within your uniform

is one that all private soldiers would have met.

You get this sense of this mass communal experience

as they hunt out this real pest,

knowing they're never going to beat it.

And in a way, that sense of fighting a futile battle

becomes a metaphor for the war itself.

Rosenberg's antipathy towards the war

was now shared by Siegfried Sassoon, recuperating back in Britain.

Like many soldiers home from the battle, Sassoon was shocked

at how little the public knew about the reality of the front.

He came to believe that the British Establishment's complacency

was needlessly prolonging the war.

Some, like the Bishop of London,

preached that soldiers were returning

purified by their experience.

It was on people like him that Sassoon turned his fire.

"Look how little they care at home - the Church, the press,

"all these politicians. Look how they

"urge us on to greater and greater efforts."

I think it's also a vent for his feelings of frustration and rage,

because he's very angry indeed by this point.

And I think he also realises that he has a gift for satire.

"The Bishop tells us:

"'When the boys come back They will not be the same,

"for they'll have fought in a just cause:

"they lead the last attack on Anti-Christ,

"Their comrades' blood has bought New right to breed an honourable race

"They have challenged Death and dared him face-to-face.'

"'We're none of us the same!' the boys reply.