War and Displacement in the Twentieth Century

Global Conflicts

Sandra Barkhof, Angela K. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415719810
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317961857
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Human displacement has always been a consequence of war, written into the myths and histories of centuries of warfare. However, the global conflicts of the twentieth century brought displacement to civilizations on an unprecedented scale, as the two World Wars shifted participants around the globe. Although driven by political disputes between European powers, the consequences of Empire ensured that Europe could not contain them. Soldiers traversed continents, and civilians often followed them, or found themselves living in territories ruled by unexpected invaders. Both wars saw fighting in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Far East, and few nations remained neutral. Both wars saw the mass upheaval of civilian populations as a consequence of the fighting. Displacements were geographical, cultural, and psychological; they were based on nationality, sex/gender or age. They produced an astonishing range of human experience, recorded by the participants in different ways. This book brings together a collection of inter-disciplinary works by scholars who are currently producing some of the most innovative and influential work on the subject of displacement in war, in order to share their knowledge and interpretations of historical and literary sources. The collection unites historians and literary scholars in addressing the issues of war and displacement from multiple angles. Contributors draw on a wealth of primary source materials and resources including archives from across the world, military records, medical records, films, memoirs, diaries and letters, both published and private, and fictional interpretations of experience.

Part I

Military Displacement

1 Displacement and the Combat Soldier

Poetic Interpretations

Angela K. Smith

Alberta Prairies

Dusty, dead-golden, deserted the prairies lie

Under the brilliant swerve of a soulless sky …

I may never gather the harvest again, before I die.¹

In 1951, the poet Charles Causley published a collection of short stories, Hands to Dance, exploring life in the Royal Navy based on his experiences during the Second World War. In a later reprint he added an afterword, Skylark, at the end of the collection. This is a short autobiographical piece that locates him within the wider context of military life. He begins:

‘It sounds as though your time in the Navy was a bit of a skylark,’ a friend once said to me, after reading the stories in the original edition of Hands to Dance. As it happened it wasn’t; but the risk of fiction being interpreted as fact, and of a very selective part of one man’s experience used as a basis of imaginative prose being seen as a complete whole, is an occupational hazard.

I disliked life in the Royal Navy, and my sole ambition was, if possible, to emerge in one piece. I spent almost six years in its salt and hairy grasp, and it was an experience I could well have done without.²

As the friend suggests, the stories in Causley’s collection, on the surface, give a rather jovial impression of Navy experience, focusing as they do, entirely on leisure and recreational activity. Although Causley insists that the stories themselves are not autobiographical, many of them include a central character or narrator who is a Cornishman and who embodies recognizable characteristics of the author. Indeed, the emphasis on the Cornishness of the protagonist does have the effect of emphasizing his displacement, located as he often is at the various points across the globe where Causley served: Gibraltar, Africa, Australia, Southeast Asia. Arguably, although Causley does not address his own feelings of discomfort with Navy life in an overt way, they can be traced through the location of the Cornishman in a range of alien landscapes, always looking forward to his return to his native county.

Effectively, Charles Causley spent six years displaced. This collection of essays considers a range of different forms of displacement in war. War, by its very nature displaces people from their familiar surroundings. Prisoners of war (POWs) are removed from their own countries. Alliances force the citizens of different nations together. Evacuee children must negotiate worlds that are alien to them. And when wars finally reach their conclusions, many thousands of civilians find themselves in the wrong place. But I wish to begin by arguing that all participants in war are displaced, as Causley was. And perhaps nobody more so than the conscripted or volunteer combat soldier. A great many of the combat soldiers, in both world wars, for many countries, were, after all, ordinary men, quite unprepared for the experience of war. And although the two world wars were fought in very different ways, the various logistics of combat encouraged some soldiers toward poetry as a medium for the expression of that experience. James Anderson Winn has suggested:

Soldiers in combat employ a stripped-down language of curses, screams and commands—a language far removed from the reflective and formal idioms of poets. Yet in order to come to grips with the full range of their thoughts and feelings about war, soldiers, mourners, victims, and prophets have turned to poetry.³

Whether they saw themselves as writers, intending to publish their works, or were merely attempting to find a way to articulate their thoughts and feelings, many soldiers wrote poetry, and much of this poetry gives an insight into the way combat soldiers related to their war, with themes of isolation and displacement never far from the surface. This chapter seeks to explore how this displacement is represented in the poetry of combat soldiers, as a way of foregrounding the discussion of displacement that will follow. As the combined poetries of two world wars form a rather large topic, it must, by definition, be a survey rather than a detailed study. But I hope to give an indication of how poetry enables us, as contemporary readers, to gain an insight into the ways in which combat soldiers related to and felt isolated by the wars in which they fought.

Charles Causley’s stories only hint at this displacement, but it can be found more poignantly in his poetry of the war, much of which juxtaposes disparate environments that serve to emphasize this anachronism. He never really confronts the bitterness of war experience head-on, as Vernon Scan-nell has argued:

Instead of exploring and recording the bitter realities of lower-deck service in time of war, the boredom, physical discomfort, lack of privacy, fear, violence and claustrophobia, [he seems] more concerned with transforming and idealizing, consciously making literature from carefully selected parts of his experience as a sailor.⁴

Despite this, he develops alternative techniques for articulating his under-standing of displacement. This can be seen in one of his most famous and much anthologized poems, “Chief Petty Officer,”⁵ first published in the same year as Hands to Dance. In the poem, Causley satirizes a naval institution, a caricature of a noncommissioned officer that is already an anachronism:

He is older than the naval side of British history, And sits

More permanent than the spider in the enormous

wall.

His barefoot, coal-burning soul

Expands, puffs like a toad, in the convict air

Of the royal Naval Barracks at Devonport.

Here, in depot, is his stone Nirvana:

More real than the opium-pipes,

The uninteresting relics of his Edwardian foreign-commission.

And, from his thick stone box,

He surveys with prehistoric eye the hostilities-only

ratings.

He has the face of the dinosaur

That sometimes stares from old Victorian naval photographs:

That of some elderly lieutenant

With boots and celluloid Crippen-collar,

Brass buttons and cruel ambitious eyes of almond.

He was probably made a Freemason in Hong Kong.

He has a son (on War Work) in the Dockyard,

And an appalling daughter

In the W.R.N.S.

He writes on your draft-chit

Tobacco-permit or request-form

In a huge antique Borstal hand,

And pins notices on the board in the Chiefs’ Mess

Requesting his messmates not to

Lay on the billiard table.

He is an anti-Semite, and has somewhat reactionary views,

And reads the pictures in the daily news.

And when you return from the nervous Pacific

Where the seas

Shift like sheets of plate-glass in the dazzling

Morning;

Or when you return

Browner than Alexander, from Malta,

Where you have leaned over the side, in harbour,

And seen in the clear water

The salmon-tins, wrecks and tiny explosions of

crystal fish,

A whole war later

He will still be sitting under a pusser’s clock

Waiting for tot-time,

His narrow forehead ruffled by the Jutland wind.

The chief petty officer is used in this poem as allegorical representation of the Navy. He seems to embody Causley’s discomfort. He is an anachronism, representing all that Causley resents about his military service, embodying the institution in which Causley will never feel at ease. With his ‘coal-burning soul,’ his ‘prehistoric eye,’ and his ‘celluloid Crippen-collar,’ he not only represents an obsolete world, but his presence carries with it a sinister undertone. He sits where he has always sat and behaves as he has always behaved, ‘His narrow forehead ruffed by the Jutland wind.’ He seems to have no connection with Causley’s Navy, but is instead the epitome of displacement, highlighting the extent to which the young conscript will never be able to fit comfortably into his wartime world. It is he who signs the chits and controls the port life of the matelots. His presence ensures that their displacement will be waiting for them whenever they return.

The final section of the poem articulates a displacement of a different kind. The actual experience of naval warfare takes its combat sailors far away both in space and time, from all that is aged and familiar, however uncomfortable. There is no satire in this section of the poem. The sheets of plate-glass reflect an alien sun and the tiny explosions of the crystal fish serve as an echo of the real war experience far away from the bureaucracy of Devonport, in the ‘nervous’ Pacific. These are tranquil seas, but they still change men, making them ‘Browner than Alexander...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Routledge Studies in Modern History
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The No-Man’s-Land of Displacement
• PART I Military Displacement
• PART II Civilian Displacement
• Contributors
• Index