On 11th November, we remember the lives of the generation who had their futures taken from them by the bloody conflict they knew as the Great War. Their children would come to know it as the First World War, when it was followed only two decades later by a second earth-shaking slaughter.
Many of those who returned found it difficult to go back to ordinary life. Their families believed in the image of war that the government had worked so hard to promote: of soldiers nobly fighting for their country, and dying valiant deaths. How could those who had seen the truth, who had witnessed the horrors of the trenches, the meaningless slaughter, relate to their loved ones who could not understand their experiences?
It is difficult to comprehend the enormity of the Great War. It sent shock waves through politics and culture which can still be felt today. Instead of grappling with the movements of armies, the economic implications, and sociopolitical effects of the conflict, we can look at the war as it was experienced by one family: the Tennysons.
In 1933, Lionel Tennyson, son of Hallam, 3rd Baron Tennyson, published his memoir: From Verse to Worse. Here, he recounts some of his experiences of the war, and describes the effects the conflict had on his family.
At the outbreak of war, Lionel was already a lieutenant in the Rifle Brigade. He joined the war effort at the First Battle of the Marne and went on to witness some of its worst battles, including the Somme and Passchendaele.
Lionel skirts somewhat gingerly around these experiences in the book, saying of Passchendaele, “It was probably the foulest, grimmest, and most costly battle with the most problematical results ever fought in the history of war.” He goes on to say that as it has been “described so often in books,” he does “not propose to attempt to describe it again”. One cannot blame him for not wanting to recount such a traumatic history.
What Lionel does recount makes his silences all the more striking. He describes friends being blown up beside him while he was talking to them. After such incidents, the experiences over which he draws a veil are difficult to contemplate.
One theme which appears again and again, despite the horror of the events he is recounting, is his insistence on the unfailing bravery and good spirits of the men he was fighting with. After describing a particularly horrendous interlude, where “the unburied corpses of English, German and French soldiers were lying thick all over the countryside with the carcasses of dead horses and mules, while the stink was almost unendurable and all water in the area became undrinkable”, he reinforces the point that “no troops in the world could stand up against men like ours”.
It seems to me that Lionel is trying to explain what he went through in fits and starts, between stiff-upper-lip, wasn’t-it-all-jolly-good-fun anecdotes that attempt to disguise the extent of his pain. These tonal shifts suggest a difficult tension between describing the horror and honouring the men who endured it. For some returning soldiers who wanted to speak, the noble death of the English soldier they had been taught about at school may have seemed impossible to reconcile with the slaughter they had witnessed. How could they explain to their families why they had come home changed, while also respecting the comfort bereaved families took in the belief that their loved ones had died honourably? I cannot know whether Lionel felt caught between those pressures, but that is how these passages read to me. It makes for a rather heart-breaking read.
When Lionel describes the deaths of his two brothers and his mother, his guarded tone gives way to an open expression of grief. Each loss seems to have been a devastating blow to both him and his father. For Lionel, the war not only took the lives of his family members; it also took his home and his father away from him in spirit. He describes Hallam at the end of the war as “a kind of hermit” and Farringford as “no longer the old home that it had been before the war. It was full of ghosts.” For this reason, he went home less and less. Instead, he found solace in parties and gambling for high stakes.
Lionel himself links his reckless gambling to the war, writing that it “had produced in some of us a reckless spirit that needed the stimulus of high play to keep us going”. His gambling caused his father to make Lionel’s cousin Charles the executor of the estate. His later life was punctuated by huge gambling losses and excessive drinking; read alongside his own explanation, these suggest that the war’s effects did not end when he left the front. Trauma may help explain that behaviour, particularly in a period when it was little understood and often stigmatised.
In spite of all he had been through in the war, Lionel went on to have an impressive career completely separate from his time in the army. He is best known, now, for his time as the captain of the England and Hampshire cricket teams. In my opinion, far too much emphasis is placed on his somewhat tumultuous personal life, and not nearly enough on the things he was able to achieve, despite the horrors through which he had lived.
Usually, when I think about WWI, it is in fairly broad terms. I know about trench foot and the gas and rats; I have shed a tear over the poetry of Wilfred Owen with the best of them, but I rarely take time to try and imagine how war was for those who lived through it—those who did not believe that it would ever end, who did not know if they would ever see their families again.
Thinking of Farringford, which had for so many years been a bustling family home, emptied of all but two grieving men, gives the atrocity a human face. That grief was suffered here, and in homes all over the country. On 11th November, I want to remember not only those who never came home, but also those who returned to find that home itself had changed.
By Elisabeth Cody