Beginning of the end
This week: Magpies in Picardy by TP Cameron Wilson
HISTORIANS, when writing about war, often struggle, or indeed find it impossible to pinpoint or agree upon, with any degree of certainty, the turning point within a conflict. That moment or event that proved, above all others, to be decisive. There may be several, there may be none. It may prove impossible to draw the same conclusions or take the same definitive stance. But, something they usually can agree on, and share the same opinion about, is, the beginning of the end. The point from which an end proved inevitable. The slide toward the outcome, whether rapid or protracted, from which there will be no further major twists in the road.
Think Gettysburg in the American Civil War, or Stalingrad and Guadalcanal in WW2, or indeed The Battle of the Bulge? In more recent times The Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War (or the Resistance War Against America as we should call it considering the home team won!). All, not so much turning points in each conflict, but more a point from which the result was pretty much clear cut, at the risk of making these horrors sound like a spectator sport.
As I write, on an August afternoon, I am conscious and respectful of the 100th anniversary of the midpoint in the fiveday Battle of Amiens, in Picardy, Northwest France during The Great War (1914-18). 100 years ago last week, not alone had the tide swung decisively in the war itself in favour of the Allies, but the very nature of the horrendous conflict was set, too, to change.
A seven-mile advance on the morning of the first day alone, and a swing towards the successes of armoured warfare flagged an end to the drudgery and hellish nightmare ways of trench warfare. War is never pretty and I’m not hear to celebrate the replacement of one type of warfare with another, but, I am intent on simply marking a time which mankind can agree, witnessed the start of the finish of a living hell on earth. A chewed up, desolate, featureless, mud-bath landscape of death, decay and horror for so many, was drawing to a close.
Many wonderful poets lived and died during this conflict on the battlefields of Europe. And they left us with heart-breaking words regarding all that they witnessed. Their words and names live on. Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden to name but a few. And T.P. Cameron Wilson. ‘Jim’ as he was known to his comrades, who is best remembered for his poem Magpies in Picardy.
The magpies in Picardy
Are more than I can tell. They flicker down the dusty roads
And cast a magic spell On the men who march through Picardy,
Through Picardy to hell.
A magpie in Picardy
Told me secret things—
Of the music in white feathers, And the sunlight that sings And dances in deep shadows— He told me with his wings.
He told me that in Picardy, An age ago or more,
While all his fathers still were eggs,
These dusty highways bore Brown, singing soldiers marching out
Through Picardy to war.
He said that still through chaos
Works on the ancient plan, And two things have altered not
Since first the world began— The beauty of the wild green earth
And the bravery of man.
A poem of real simplicity, but yet rather profound, and sad. For although he celebrates mankind’s constant bravery, he also laments at the constant demand for this same bravery to be brought in to question and pushed to the test.
He reminds us of the nature of man, being driven to fight and fight and fight, again and again. And this, written from the Front, as though he was accurately forecasting the futility. How right he was. 100 years on, and, well, you know the rest.
T.P. Cameron Wilson, the teacher from Devon in England, who had risen to the rank of Captain with the Sherwood Foresters, was killed in action at the Somme Valley, on March 23, 1918.