Behind Their Lines

Poetry of the Great War

Friday, August 14, 2015

Violets from oversea

"Summer & trenches don't go together somehow," Roland Leighton wrote to his sweetheart, Vera
Brittain in April 1915.
Later that month, Roland wrote to Vera and described a discovery he'd made while walking in
Ploegsteert Wood (known to the Tommies as "Plug Street Wood"). Roland had found "the body
of a dead British soldier hidden in the undergrowth a few yards from the path. He must have
been shot there during the wood-fighting in the early part of the War. The body had sunk down
into the marshy ground so that only the tops of the boots stuck up above the soil. His cap &
equipment beside him were half-buried and rotting away." Leighton ordered that the body be
covered with dirt, "to make one grave more among the many in the wood" (Chronicle of Youth,
25 April 1915).
The next day, Roland started a poem, and while on leave that August (during which time he and
Vera became engaged), he showed Vera the finished villanelle that he had titled and dated:
"Violets," April 25, 1915. Her journal records, "I remembered how on that day he had written
me a letter he was then in Ploegsteert Woodenclosing some violets from the top of his dugout which he said he had just picked for me."
Villanelle
by Roland Leighton

From the film Testament of Youth

Violets from Plug Street Wood,

Sweet, I send you oversea.
(It is strange they should be blue,
Blue, when his soaked blood was red,
For they grew around his head;
It is strange they should be blue.)
Violets from Plug Street WoodThink what they have meant to meLife and Hope and Love and You
(And you did not see them grow
Where his mangled body lay
Hiding horror from the day;
Sweetest it was better so.)
Violets from oversea,
To your dear, far, forgetting land
These I send in memory,
Knowing You will understand.
The poignancy of the poem lies in the tension between two voices: a man writing to his
sweetheart in a "dear, far, forgetting land," and a soldier talking to himself, trying to puzzle out
how the horrors of war can coexist with simple flowers that recall "Life and Hope and Love and
You" (this is the voice that speaks in the parenthetical comments).
The soaked blood and mangled body of the dead man are literally entwined with the violets that
are gathered for the "Sweetest" and sent to her in memory. But in memory of what? Do the
violets recall the golden age of innocence and romance before the war? Or are they sent in
memory of the dead man whose body has lain forgotten for months? There is a bittersweet irony
in the poem's last line as it vows she "will understand." He knows she cannot fully grasp what he
faces, because his darling "did not see" where the violets grew, hiding the horror of the neglected
corpse. And yet the soldier is grateful for her ignorance: "Sweetest, it was better so."

By August of 1915, Roland was having difficulties in

finding beauty anywhere on the Western Front. He wrote to Vera, "I used to talk of the Beauty of
War; but it is only War in the abstract that is beautiful. Modern warfare is merely a trade." In
September, he was even more direct about his altered opinion of the war: "Let him who thinks
that War is a glorious golden thinglet him look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover
half a skull and a shin bone and what might have been Its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its
side, resting half-crouching as it fell, supported on one arm, perfect but that it is headless, and
with the tattered clothing still draped around it; and let him realise how grand & glorious a thing
it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of hideous putrescence. Who is
there who has known and seen who can say that Victory is worth the death of even one of
these?"
Roland and Vera were to have been married during his Christmas leave that began December
24th, but while waiting expectantly for his arrival, she received a telephone call informing her
that Roland had died of wounds on December 23rd. He was buried in France in the Louvencourt
cemetery. The inscription on his headstone reads, "Goodnight though life and all take flight
Never goodbye." The lines are a reference to a W.E. Henley poem that Roland had shared with
Vera in a letter in May of 1915, describing how as he crossed a field in the starlight, a little poem
of W.E. Henley's came into his head:
Goodnight, sweet friend, goodnight!
Till life & all take flight
Never goodbye.
He again alluded to the poem as he was returning to the Western Front after his August leave,
sending Vera a telegram that read "Till we may live our roseate poem through," and a brief letter
that read, "Nearly at Folkestone now. I am trying not to think of it, but the thought will come.
Oh damn, I know it
Goodnight, sweet friend, goodnight!
Till life & all take flight
Never goodbye."

Vera Brittain visited Roland Leighton's grave twice, once in 1921, and again in 1933. I'd like to
think that she left violets.

Roland Leighton, Louvencourt cemetery