Exercise I

The War threw up as many questions about national identies as it (originally) attempted to answer. On the Western Front, for example, Saxon Regiments of the German army faced men from the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England (Essex, Sussex, and Wessex). This confusion was highlighted by Thomas Hardy, the quintessential Englishman in his poem 'The Pity Of It' published in April, 1915.

German prisoners of war

'The Pity Of It'

I walked in loamy Wessex Lanes, afar
From rail-track and from highway, and I heard
In field and farmstead many an ancient word
Of local lineage like 'Thu bist,' 'Er war.'
'Ich woll,' 'Er sholl,' and bytalk similar,
Nigh as they speak who in this month's moon gird
At England's very loins, thereunto spurred
By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are.

Then seemed a Heart crying: 'Whosoever they be
At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame
Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we,

'Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame;
May their familiars grow to shun their name,
And their brood perish everlastingly.'

T. Hardy, 1915

Here Hardy vents his anger against the people that brought such a situation into being, using the language he could hear in the Wessex countryside as a marker of the absurdity of the situation. The dialectal 'Thu bist' etc. mirrors both Modern German, and Old English (the language of the Anglo-Saxons, pre-1066, and ancestor of Modern English):

British Tommy sitting in snow

The War threw up as many questions about national identies as it (originally) attempted to answer. On the Western Front, for example, Saxon Regiments of the German army faced men from the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England (Essex, Sussex, and Wessex). This confusion was highlighted by Thomas Hardy, the quintessential Englishman in his poem 'The Pity Of It' published in April, 1915.

Now listen to this extract from an interview with Henry Williamson, who served on the Western Front with the 1/5th Bn, London Regiment, 1914–1917. Here he discusses the Christmas Truce of December 1914, and his realisation that his own perceptions were shared by a German Officer [N.B. This recording ends abruptly mid-sentence!].

Henry Williamson 'Christmas Truce, 1914'

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