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The theme of rejuvenation evident in Brooke’s ‘The Dead’, was prominent in the
work of many contemporary poets, among them Robert Nichols, Julian Grenfell and
Charles Sorley.49 War presented not only a chance to eradicate effeminacy, torpidity
and complacency in British society; it also offered the upper-middle classes an
opportunity to justify class hegemony. Threatened by the reforms of Lloyd George
before the war and terrorised by the thought of socialism, particularly after February
1917, chivalry proved an attractive myth to many of the upper-middle class because it
appeared to be an unchanging code of honour held by the ruling caste since the
Middle Ages. Poets who used the ideals of Galahad and chivalry had no desire to
accommodate the experience of mass-industrial warfare in their propaganda. It was
not so much a denial of modernity, as a denial of political reality. Even as late as the
1980s the public-school system, chivalry and the gentlemanly ethic were still being
touted as the reason why Britain had won the war and survived without a revolution.50
If chivalry, the ideological behavioural code of the upper-middle classes, could win
the war (or at least be presented as the underlying moral system in a victorious
‘crusade’) then the social system was, in its eyes, validated.
‘But now I’ve said goodbye to Galahad9: the end of Victorian chivalry and the
rebirth of Arthur
From 1916 there was a distinct drying up of chivalrous war poetry from the Front.
Many of the early war poets, among them Rupert Brooke and Julian Grejifell, were
now dead and new voices took their place in the numerous anthologies o f poetry the
war years produced - including a few of working-class origin, such as Isaac
Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney, who because of their class had never been indoctrinated
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in the chivalric ethos. And among the public-school officers, who formed the majority
of war poets, two years o f trench warfare had largely purged them of a chivalrous
view of war. New officers who arrived at the Front espousing patriotism ‘would soon
be told to cut it out’;51 and the notion of war as a noble activity became almost
exclusively confined to the jingoist establishment figures hundreds o f miles from the
trenches.* Others who had written patriotic verses in the first few years of the conflict
- Robert Graves and Siegfried Owen being prominent among the officer class - now
recanted their former position. In ‘Babylon’ (1917), Graves placed Galahad along
with Robin Hood, Captain Kidd, Jack the Giant-Killer and other figures of childhood
imagination; Galahad has no place in the adult world that ‘made a breach and battered
/ [the childhood home of] Babylon to bits’.52 Herbert Read ferociously debunked
Wordworth’s ‘Happy Warrior’ (a figure often used in chivalric poetry in the war) in
his Imagist poem of the same name:
Bloody saliva
dribbles down his shapeless jacket.
I saw him stab and
stab again
a well-killed Boche.
This is the happy warrior,
this is he...^5
But it was Siegfried Sassoon who produced the most vehement rejection of
Galahad and the cult of Great War chivalry. In his Memoirs o f a Fox-Hunting Man
* Chivalry at the Front did not, however, die out completely. In 1918 the Canadian writer and officer
Coningsby Dawson was still able to write in The Glory o f the Trenches of the ‘Arthurian’ nurses,
whom he perceived as ‘great ladies, medieval in their saintliness, sharing the pollution o f the battle
with their champions.’ And later, when reviewing John Don Passos’s Three Soldiers {1921), Dawson
wrote that the book was ‘a dastardly denial of the splendid chivalry which carried many a youth to a
soldier’s death with the sure knowledge in his soul that he was a liberator.’ See Fussell, ‘The Fate of
Chivalry’.
f Cf. Wordsworth’s ‘Character of the Happy Warrior’ (1807): ‘Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he /
That every man in arms should wish to be? / It is the generous Spirit, who, when brought / Among the
tasks of real life, hath wrought / Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought: / Whose high
endeavours are an inward light / That makes the path before him always bright’ (Poetical Works, 386-
7,11. 1-7)
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(1927) Sassoon articulated the abandoning of the chivalric view o f combat typical of
his class around 1916. In one scene, George Sherston, Sassoon’s protagonist and
biographical analogue, visits the Cathedral at Amiens with the knightly-named Dick
Tiltwood:
[T]he background was solemn and beautiful. White columns soared into lilies
of light, and the stained-glass windows harmonised with the chanting voices
and the satisfying sounds of the organ. I glanced at Dick and thought what a
young Galahad he looked (a Galahad who had just got his school colours for
cricket).54
Yet this language of public-school chivalry soon disappears. Fifteen pages later Dick
is killed, ‘hit in the throat by a rifle bullet while out with the mining party’, and
Sherston abandons knightly epithets in favour of a grimly realist account of his
experiences in the trenches. This episode is one of many instances in Sassoon’s work
in which the chivalric ethos is first articulated and then confronted with brutal reality.
His war poetry frequently employs this strategy - often in a fiercer tone. In ‘The Poet
as Hero’ (1917), for instance, Sassoon repented of his earlier patriotic verses:
You are aware that I once sought the Grail,
Riding in armour bright, serene and strong;
[...]
But now I’ve said goodbye to Galahad,
And am no more the knight of dreams and show55
Instead, Sassoon’s poetry goes on to chronicle the industrialised brutalities of war as
well as showing how the war has brutalised his own personality - which is
deliberately contrasted in ‘The Poet as Hero’ with the Galahad-ideal:
For lust and senseless hated make me glad,
And my killed friends are with me where I go.
Wound for red wound I bum to smite their wrongs.56
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