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Seeking an Oasis

We come to war from many different directions. My own experiences are probably similar to those of some Slightly Foxed readers: a father who survived, just, serving in the trenches in the Great War (which he never talked about); an older brother who served in North Africa and Italy in the Second World War (which he hardly ever talked about); and childhood memories of men filling sandbags, of crouching in the cellar during air-raids, of the blackout and rationing, and the night we thought Hitler had landed in our small Worcestershire town, like something out of Dad’s Army.

Many people’s experience of war, however, will have come only through books such as The Cruel Sea or the works of Evelyn Waugh and Olivia Manning, or, in the case of the younger generation, primarily through films and television programmes – The Dam Busters, Ice Cold in Alex, Band of Brothers. Collectively, these fictional or fictionalized accounts have become our great warehouse and museum of images of war. But there is another much more immediate source, less well-known perhaps, but entirely true to the spirit of the times.

By the spring of 1942 the war in the Middle East had reached a critical stage. After fierce tank battles around Tobruk, Rommel’s forces advanced to within fifty miles of Alexandria. Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein reversed all those Allied defeats, but that was not until November. In the middle of all this ferocious military action (the precise date is not known), three servicemen – Denis Saunders, a South African airman, Corporal Victor Selwyn, and David Burk, an ex-journalist – met up in a coffee-room in Cairo. They wondered whether anyone was writing poetry about their war as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon had about the Great War, and in the course of their casual conversation began to discuss the possibility of compiling a Middle East anthology of servicemen’s poetry.

The

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We come to war from many different directions. My own experiences are probably similar to those of some Slightly Foxed readers: a father who survived, just, serving in the trenches in the Great War (which he never talked about); an older brother who served in North Africa and Italy in the Second World War (which he hardly ever talked about); and childhood memories of men filling sandbags, of crouching in the cellar during air-raids, of the blackout and rationing, and the night we thought Hitler had landed in our small Worcestershire town, like something out of Dad’s Army.

Many people’s experience of war, however, will have come only through books such as The Cruel Sea or the works of Evelyn Waugh and Olivia Manning, or, in the case of the younger generation, primarily through films and television programmes – The Dam Busters, Ice Cold in Alex, Band of Brothers. Collectively, these fictional or fictionalized accounts have become our great warehouse and museum of images of war. But there is another much more immediate source, less well-known perhaps, but entirely true to the spirit of the times. By the spring of 1942 the war in the Middle East had reached a critical stage. After fierce tank battles around Tobruk, Rommel’s forces advanced to within fifty miles of Alexandria. Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein reversed all those Allied defeats, but that was not until November. In the middle of all this ferocious military action (the precise date is not known), three servicemen – Denis Saunders, a South African airman, Corporal Victor Selwyn, and David Burk, an ex-journalist – met up in a coffee-room in Cairo. They wondered whether anyone was writing poetry about their war as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon had about the Great War, and in the course of their casual conversation began to discuss the possibility of compiling a Middle East anthology of servicemen’s poetry. The idea was preposterous, of course. Rommel was practically at the gates. But with some miraculous support from senior officers – you can imagine the kind of sceptical dialogue that must have taken place – somehow the scheme got advertised in newspapers and on the radio. Paper was found from somewhere, and over a period of three months 3,000 poems were collected and read, and a selection published in Cairo under the title Oasis: The Middle East Anthology of Poetry from the Forces (1943). The edition soon sold out, and only a few copies seem to have survived. Years later, in 1976, a reunion was held of the surviving poets and editors, and it was decided to set up a Trust (the Salamander-Oasis Trust) with the object of collecting both old and new material from the Middle East. The first collection, Return to Oasis, was published in 1980, and From Oasis to Italy followed in 1983. Gradually the Trust widened its scope to include material from all the theatres of the Second World War, including the Home Front. Many distinguished ex-servicemen and women, such as Lord Healey and Spike Milligan, gave freely of their time to help raise funds for the project. So far the Trust has collected more than 14,000 poems, lodging them for safe-keeping in the Imperial War Museum, and many have been published in various Oasis anthologies. What is vital about these poems is, of course, their authenticity. They were written by men and women who were actually there, and, as the Trust expanded its interest, we were introduced to poems not only about the horrors of combat, but also about other experiences of war – recruits in training, grumbles about food, grief for a dead enemy, descriptions of air battles, the anxiety of waiting for letters from a fiancé, accounts of Belsen, and celebrations of victory. These poems were written by people from all walks of life: sailors, soldiers and airmen, officers and privates, factory workers and nurses. Compared with the high-flown sentiments sometimes expressed at the outbreak of the Great War, few were enthusiastic about the start of the Second. Many felt that, although the fighting was necessary, they did not do it for honour or glory. Michael Thwaites, a 24-year-old Australian sailor, put it this way in his ‘Epitaph on a New Army’:

No drums they wished, whose thoughts were tied To girls and jobs and mother, Who rose and drilled and killed and died Because they saw no other, Who died without a hero’s throb, And if they trembled, hid it, Who did not fancy much their job But thought it best and did it.

Keith Douglas was already a published poet from Oxford when he joined up. A young tank commander who fought at El Alamein, he describes in ‘Elegy for an 88 Gunner’ finding a dead German in a sandpit:

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone, returning over the nightmare ground we found the place again and found the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun overshadows him. As we came on that day, he hit my tank with one like the entry of a demon.

And smiling in the gunpit spoil is a picture of his girl who has written: Steffi, Vergissmeinicht in a copybook Gothic script.

We see him almost with content, abased and seeming to have paid, mocked by his durable equipment that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.

But she would weep to see today how on his skin the swart flies move, the dust upon the paper eye and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and the killer are mingled who had one body and one heart; and Death, who had the soldier singled has done the lover mortal hurt.

Keith Douglas was killed in Normandy in 1944 aged 24. The Second World War became a total war, of course, involving not just fighting men overseas, but men and women in Britain. In ‘Behind the Screens’ Joy Westren, a nursing sister, describes the heartbreak of looking after a soldier whose injuries are terminal:

Meticulously I dress your wound knowing you cannot live . . . In ten swift rivers from my finger-tips Compassion runs into your pale body that is so hurt it is no more than the keeper of your being. Behind these screens, soldier, we two are steeped in a peace deeper than life gives, you with closed eyes and I moving quietly as though you could wake, all my senses aware that your other self is here, waiting to begin life without end.

Yet life, even in wartime, had its comic side. Elsie Cawser wrote ‘Salvage Song (or The Housewife’s Dream)’ in response to Lord Beaverbrook’s appeal to the women of Britain to donate their aluminium pots and pans, which he promised to turn into Spitfires and Hurricanes.

My saucepans have all been surrendered, The teapot is gone from the hob, The colander’s leaving the cabbage For a very much different job. So now when I hear on the wireless Of Hurricanes showing their mettle, I see, in a vision before me, A Dornier chased by my kettle.

Although a number of Oasis poems describe victory and peace at the end of the war, few of them sound triumphant or speak of the nobility of warfare. More often there is a realistic determination that an unpleasant job had to be done, and that the struggle should not be falsified by sentimental rhetoric. Dennis McHarrie, a flight lieutenant in the RAF, expresses this view in his poem ‘Luck’, which some servicemen and women have called ‘The poem of the war’:

I suppose they’ll say his last thoughts were of simple things, Of April back at home, and the late sun on his wings; Or that he murmured someone’s name As earth reclaimed him sheathed in flame. Oh God! Let’s have no more empty words, Lip service ornamenting death! The worms don’t spare the hero; Nor can children feed upon resounding praises of his deed. ‘He died who loved to live,’ they’ll say, ‘Unselfishly so we might have today!’ Like hell! He fought because he had to fight; He died that’s all. It was his unlucky night.

Finally, among all the Second World War poems collected by the Oasis Trust there are a small number by that well-known poet ‘Anon.’, among them one of the war’s best-loved works, ‘The D-Day Dodgers’. When everyone was waiting for the Second Front and for Allied forces to re-enter France, the MP Lady Astor allegedly suggested that Britain should transfer troops from Italy, where they were supposed to be having an easy time, for the real fighting that would come on D-Day. The British troops there resented the accusation, and produced this song – alas too long to quote in full – to the well-known (German) tune of ‘Lili Marlene’:

We are the D-Day Dodgers out in Italy, Always drinking Vino, always on the spree, 8th Army skivers and the Yanks, 6th Armoured Div and all their tanks. For we are the D-Day Dodgers, the lads that D-Day dodged.

We landed at Salerno, a holiday with pay, Jerry brought the band down to cheer us on our way. We all sung the songs and the beer was free. We kissed all the girls in Napoli. For we are the D-Day Dodgers. The Volturno and Cassino were taken in our stride We didn’t have to fight there. We just went for the ride. Anzio and Sangro were all forlorn. We did not do a thing from dusk to dawn. For we are the D-Day Dodgers . . . Now Lady Astor get a load of this. Don’t stand on a platform and talk a load of piss. You’re the nation’s sweetheart, the nation’s pride But your lovely mouth is far too wide For we are the D-Day Dodgers in sunny Italy. If you looked around the mountains, through the mud and rain, You’ll find battered crosses, some which bear no name. Heartbreak, toil and suffering gone The boys beneath just slumber on For they were the D-Day Dodgers. So listen all you people, over land and foam, Even though we’re parted, our hearts are close to home. When we return we hope you’ll say ‘You did your little bit, though far away All of the D-Day Dodgers out in Italy.’
As a schoolboy, I remember reading these verses, which my brother sent home in a letter from Italy in 1944. The last time I heard the poem sung was at a Memorial Poetry Reading at the Imperial War Museum to commemorate the life of Victor Selwyn, one of the three original founders of Oasis. Denis Healey paid tribute to Victor and then sang us ‘The D-Day Dodgers’, but apologized for his singing in advance. He said he could never sing the last verses without weeping. He was, you may remember, the Landing Officer responsible for the British assault on Anzio in 1944. The poems collected and published by Oasis are not always great poems, but they are authentic. They speak, sometimes in memorable language, of what it was like to be involved in a great and tragic war from a variety of points of view. Although the work of some poets, such as Keith Douglas, has become well-known, the poetry of the Second World War is especially attractive when it celebrates the reluctant warriors, the servicemen and women, who have largely remained unknown. Above all this poetry conveys the feelings of men and women in wartime more vividly and precisely than most histories or newspapers or photographs. It has rightly been called the autobiography of a generation.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 29 © Dennis Butts 2011


About the contributor

After National Service in the RAF and studying at Oxford, Dennis Butts became a teacher. His interest in the literature of the Second World War led to his being invited to join the Oasis Trust in the 1980s, and with Victor Selwyn he co-edited The Schools Oasis in 1992.

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