Have You Seen my Browning? - column

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Have You Seen my Browning?

…in the army…(e)very few days one seemed to meet a scholar, an original,

 a poet, a cheery buffoon, a raconteur, or at the very least a man of good will”

-C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Field Marshal Viscount Wavell G.C.B., G.C.S.I., G.C.I.E, C.M.G, M.C. was a remarkable man. He lost an eye in the First World War…let us amend that: young Major Wavell did not carelessly misplace his eye; it was blown away by German mischief in the 2nd Battle of Ypres in 1915.

Wavell remained in the army and served as a liaison officer in Russia (he was fluent in Russian as well as Urdu, Pashtun, and Persian), and then in combat against the Turks in Palestine. During the Second World War, with inadequate forces and supplies, he led brilliant campaigns against the Italians in East Africa and against the Italians and Germans in North Africa. Posted to lead the Allied defense against the triumphant Japanese in the Far East, he was given the blame for an impossible situation, and sent to India as Governor-General.

In India, toward the end of his life, Wavell was persuaded by friends to collect and edit his favorite poems into a book.

Wavell loved poetry and could recite hundreds of poems from memory like many people raised without the curse of glowing screens (your scrivener heard Robert T. Holmes of Kirbyville, Texas, a farmer and a practical man, well into his seventies, recite John Milton’s “When I Consider How my Life is Spent” over coffee one morning).

As Wavell quotes from an obscure play, The Story of Hassan of Bagdan, and How He Came to Make the Journey to Samarkand:

      Caliph: Ah, if there shall ever arise a nation whose people have forgotten poetry or whose poets   
      have forgotten the people, though they send their ships around Taprobane and their armies across
      the hills of Hindustan, though their city be greater than Babylon of old, though they mine a league
      into earth or mount to the stars on wings–what of them?

      Hassan: They will be a dark patch upon the world.


Wavell’s anthology, with the unfortunate title Other Men’s Flowers, was published in 1944, and continues to be available. A better title might be Manly Poetry for Manly Men, for that is mostly what it is. Modern critics savage Other Men’s Flowers, which in itself is a good reason for reading it, for here one will not find the pallid, self-pitying, free verse, me-me-me, I, I, I wallowings that (for now) have supplanted poetry.

Other Men’s Flowers is divided into nine sections containing hundreds of poems, mostly English, Irish, Scots, Canadian, and Empire, with a few token Americans and a very few women, so we can’t have that, eh. But then Wavell was putting together what was important to himself and to brave men he knew, not for the ovine credential harvesters of seventy years later. Wavell gives us Belloc, Kipling, Shakespeare, Wilde, Browning, Chesterton, Masefield, Kipling, McCrae, Buchan, Emerson, Fitzgerald, Burns, Macauley, Sassoon, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Housman, Stevenson, Scott, Yeats, Milton, and dozens of others whose work proudly occupied bookshelves and kitchen tables and backpacks before the sorrows of 1968 vetoed civilization.

And about Browning. The phrase “When someone speaks to me of culture, I want to de-cock my Browning” appears in a German play of the early 1930s, but is often credited to Hermann Goering or some other Nazi oaf. In 1942, when the Japanese were expected to invade India from Burma at any moment, Wavell is said to have asked someone to help him find his Browning. The aide looked everywhere for the field marshal’s pistol, and couldn’t find it. But the field Marshal was wearing his pistol; what he wanted was his copy of the poems of Robert Browning.

Now there was a soldier. Does one consider that any member of the current British or U.S. governments would understand any of that?

Not that every man appreciates poetry. Wavell says of his boyhood:

     Horatius…was the earliest poem I got by heart. Admiring aunts used to give me threepence for
     reciting it from beginning to end; a wiser uncle gave me sixpence for a promise to do nothing of
     the kind.

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