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pamphleteering. Poets, politicians and journalists all made use o f the maiden knight.
The Times repeatedly referred to him in their war reports. Perhaps reminded of
Erskine Childers’s The Riddle o f the Sands, one journalist writing a piece on coastal
defences gave it the headline ‘A Fisher Galahad’. The article tells of a nameless man
of the East coast who had discovered a U-boat a few miles off-shore. Single-handedly
he attacks the German vessel, killing at least one sailor, though he is forced to
abandoned his assault when other submarines surface. But the journalist not only
wished to emphasise the ‘great heart’ of this unknown warrior, he was particularly
keen to state the man’s Christian generosity. For, after discovering a German sailor
had gone overboard:
Without stopping to deliberate he went over the side to rescue his erstwhile
foe, and he brought him safely on board. What do the men who shelled our
helpless ‘E ’ boat’s crew in the Baltic think of this?39
The purpose of this evocation of Galahad is, again, obscuration. Although the article
is ostensibly concerned with coastal security, the journalist chose to write of the moral
superiority of his ‘Fisher Galahad’ rather than of the establishment of effective means
of defending Britain’s coast and breaking the German blockade, which was seriously
inhibiting Britain’s war production. Where military strength was questionable, moral
strength became a perfectly good replacement for wartime propagandists.
Other newspaper articles published in The Times used Galahad as a way of
sanitising the brutalities of combat - the ‘maiden knight’ providing journalists with an
opportunity to present war as a spiritual experience. One correspondent while
describing Rembrandt’s sketch, ‘Jacob’s Dream’, was moved to write: -
It is a poem of the exaltation of a young spirit that has fought and won, the
glimpse into a spiritual world that comes now and again to finer spirits in early
manhood. Sir Galahad had seen it, and how many have seen it in these four
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thrilling years, who have left no record, but passed by the ladder to realise
their dream.40
Another article from The Times echoed Charlotte Yonge’s belief that the reading of
good, adventurous and chivalrous books - particularly those relating to Galahad -
would lead the young reader into becoming a gallant soldier of the trenches.41 In
peacetime, would-be Galahads could be inspired to enter ‘into the dark places of our
great cities’ where their Grail would be the alleviation of the ‘stale squalor of the
slums’ (as they did in the novels of A.M. Grange and J. Lockhart Leigh). In wartime,
however, the Grail was to be found, not in Christian charity, but in fighting for one’s
country. As with all uses of Galahad, to fight for one’s country was not written of in
terms of the actualities o f trench warfare, but in language reminiscent of the Muscular
Chivalry movement of Hughes, Yonge and others:
To-day the sun and the moon are darkened and the stars return not after the
rain. But the young men are searching in the darkness, if haply they may find a
light to lighten it: they are seeking - and they are not only seeking, but in the
sweat of their brows and by the blood of their wounds they are making - an
ideal of political Right.42
In all these journalistic examples Galahad remained unchanged from the Victorian
conception. He was a moral exemplar, rather than a metaphor of militarism; moral
purity, so their message went, would win out over the barbaric hordes - even if,
militarily, the hordes were often in advance of Britain.
Poetic uses of Galahad and other notions of chivalry were similarly
obscurantist, archaic and juvenile. In 1922 T.S. Eliot wrote that the popularity of
much war verse lay in the fact that it ‘ appear[s] to represent a revolt against something
that was very unpleasant and really paid a tribute to the nicest feelings of the upper
middle-class British schoolboy’.43 Indeed, the public schoolboy’s cry o f ‘Play up!
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play up! and play the game!’, first uttered in Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vitai Lampada’ of
1897,44 was reworked by numerous writers during the war to articulate the upper-
middle class’s (sometimes imagined) response to the war.*45 Much of this poetry
emerged from the officer-class, who had been indoctrinated in the chivalric ethos at
their public schools. Rupert Brooke, who had once written a dramatic treatment of the
Arthurian story in the manner of Carr,46 remains the best-known of these chivalric war
poets. He wrote in ‘The Dead’ of 1914:
Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our death,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our way again;
And we have come into our heritage.47
With sentiments dutifully learnt at public school, this is patriotism and chivalry raised
to an almost religious ecstasy.
But obscuration and nice feelings apart, this poetry - by both those who served
at the front and those who performed the ideological work at home - had a political
objective. Chivalry fought a double war during 1914-18: one against the ‘Hun’, the
other against the reformers of their own country. In the words of David Cannadine,
one of the aristocracy’s most elegiac historians, the Great War:
was their chance - to demonstrate conclusively that they were not the
redundant reactionaries of radical propaganda, but the patriotic class of
knightly crusaders and chivalric heroes, who would defend the national honour
and the national interest in the hour of its greatest trial.48
* Newbolt himself believed that the games mania of the public school was ultimately derived ‘from
tournaments and the chivalric rules of war’ (The Book o f the Happy Warrior, vii). Cricket, football and
rugby were frequently evoked as metaphors of the English gentleman’s carefree attitude to war, as in
Jessie Pope’s ‘Cricket - 1915’ (Roberts (ed.), Out o f the Dark, 22):
Our cricketers have gone ‘on tour’,
To make their country’s triumph sure.
They’ll take the Kaiser’s middle wicket
And smash it by clean British Cricket!
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