Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Poetry in the
Desert
A story told about Field Marshal Wavell is that while throwing
some things into a bag for a field tour of soldiers defending India from
invasion by the Japanese he asked if anyone had seen his Browning.
When someone pointed out that he was wearing it – his
Browning 9mm – he said that he was looking for his copy of the poems of Robert
Browning. In all his campaigns Wavell always carried poetry with him.
The life and career of Field Marshall Archibald Wavell
has been the subject of numerous biographies, and rightly so. He campaigned
against the Boers in South Africa, was arrested by the Russians as a spy (and
he was) in 1912, was badly wounded and lost an eye leading his soldiers against
the Germans in the First World War, served in the inter-war Palestinian
Mandate, won Britain’s first victories in the Second World War, was admired by
Rommel (who carried Wavell’s book on leadership with him in the desert) and
despised by Churchill, and was the next to last Viceroy of India. Wavell was no
Call of Duty keyboard commando; he was the real thing. Archibald
Wavell: Britain's first wartime victor | National Army Museum (nam.ac.uk)
Most of what passes for poetry now is self-obsessed,
self-pitying wailing scribbled in free verse, which of course is not poetry at
all. But this was not true in Wavell’s
Victorian youth, when poetry was written and read as a literary art, not therapy. After the disasters of the First World War,
the ‘flu epidemic, economic collapse and the deaths of millions poetry
generally ceased to be structured, artistic, aesthetical pleasing, or encouraging,
but many individuals resisted the chaos and maintained the strength and
determination of their upbringing.
Indeed, for millennia almost all literature in all
cultures was poetry. The greats we studied in school were soldiers, statesmen, businessmen,
and agriculturalists first; writing poetry was a leisure activity but also
something expected of every man or woman of substance. Prose as art comes to
humanity late; the argument has been made that Cervantes’ Don Quixote is
the first prose novel.
Thus, Wavell’s love of poetry was an inheritance of
10,000 or more years of civilization. One cannot imagine him spending an
evening staring at a glowing screen.
Like Patton, Rommel, and other military leaders Wavell
wrote scholarly articles and books on the practices of war, but reading poetry
was his after-hours hobby and late in his life he edited a volume of his
favorite poems entitled Other Men’s Flowers. One can only regret that
his editor did not change that unfortunate title, for this is a volume of
poetry mostly by men and mostly for men. The book, after all, is an anthology
of a soldier’s personal favorites while on campaign and not a compendium of
quota-driven scribbles.
Because this is an anthology one simply opens the book
and finds a poem (they are all short ones). If one poem won’t do, then another
one will. Best of all, Wavell chose
poets who respect the reader.
Both the hardback and the paperback are out of print, but
they are still available cheap on Brazos de Dios.com (or is it some other
river?). We spend much of our lives waiting for others or riding in the
passenger seat, and it’s going-against-the-stream fun to be the only one in a
waiting room with a book of instead of the omnipresent little Orwellian telescreen
made in Shanghai. We might as well catch up on the eternal wisdom of our
ancestors instead of obeying the transient lights and noises of programmers.
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