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2. THE FIRST WORLD WAR |
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On leaving
school, Henry Williamson joined the Sun Insurance Office as a
clerk. The following spring, in May 1914, just before the First
World War broke out, he went on a holiday to visit an Aunt who
rented a cottage in the little village of Georgeham on the north
Devon coast. He immediately loved the area with its wild cliffs
and moors and it made a great impression on him which was to have
a lasting effect. He vowed to return. He had already enlisted
into the ranks of the 5th Battalion, The London Rifle Brigade,
City of London Regiment, Territorial Forces, in January 1914,
and after the declaration of war, was mobilised on the 5th August.
He was eighteen years and eight months old, and rather lost and
frightened. |
The
Brigade marched out of London for training first at Bisley and then at
Crowborough in Sussex. By November 1914 he was fighting in the trenches in
Flanders as a private in the London Rifle Brigade, and was present at the
famous Christmas Truce. His letters written to his mother at this time are
a vivid and moving record of his life on active service. In January 1915,
he was invalided home with dysentery and fever after a gas attack, but
after further training, in April, aged 19, he was commissioned as a
temporary 2nd Lt in the Bedfordshire Regiment and was made full Lt with
the Machine Gun Corps in Nov. 1916. He returned to France as a transport
officer in early 1917 but was later invalided home with severe sickness
after a gas attack and was given first sick, and then a long convalescent,
leave. He was then kept on ‘home duties’ for some time until he had a
further brief period at the Front in 1918 and was again invalided home.
Awarded three general service medals, this wartime period was
a crucial time of his life, with terrifying but thrilling battle
scenes, male comradeship, wild and extravagant leaves and an escape
from his overbearing father.
But the fraternisation on Christmas Eve 1914 made a deep and
lasting impression upon his life, in which he saw that war was
created by greed, misplaced zeal and bigotry. He could never forget
that the German soldiers thought as deeply and sincerely as the
English soldiers that they were fighting for God and Country.
This determined his life’s work to prevent war ever occurring
again by showing the world, through his writing, that truth and
peace lay in beauty and the open air.
He
first wrote of his war experiences in THE WET FLANDERS PLAIN in
1929 (reminiscences after a return to the battlefields) followed
by THE PATRIOT’S PROGRESS in 1930, which is the story of
John Bullock, an ‘everyman’ soldier, and considered
a classic in the genre of war stories. But mainly he used his
war experiences in his later long series of novels – HOW
DEAR IS LIFE, A FOX UNDER MY CLOAK, THE GOLDEN VIRGIN, LOVE AND
THE LOVELESS, and A TEST TO DESTRUCTION. (Vols. 4, 5, 6, 7, and
8 of A CHRONICLE OF ANCIENT SUNLIGHT) – which record the
horror, terror and thrill of that terrible experience.
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See Anne Williamson, A Patriot’s Progress:
Henry Williamson and the First World War, Sutton Publishing,
1998, ISBN 0 7509 1339 8 for a full account of Henry Williamson’s
war service, including reproduction of all his letters home from
the Front Line. |
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