We ate our breakfast lying on our backs,
Because the shells were screeching overhead.
I bet a rasher to a loaf of bread
That Hull United would beat Halifax
When Jimmy Stainthorpe played full-back instead
Of Billy Bradford. Ginger raised his head
And cursed, and took the bet; and dropt back dead.
We ate our breakfast lying on our backs,
Because the shells were screeching overhead.
First published in The Nation on October 17th , 1914, ‘Breakfast’ was one of the thirty or so poems comprising Battle (1915), a strong contender for the most significant volume of poetry to appear during the years of the First World War. It was read and appreciated by Owen, Rosenburg, Graves, and Sassoon with the latter’s poetry being most obviously influenced by its style. Nearly all the poems in Battle were short, realistic, occasionally caustic studies of soldiers’ experiences, and were written with the intention of eliciting the sympathy of civilians. Gibson wanted his poems to ‘get at’ people. In so doing they were the first attempts to move away from the patriotic, jingoistic verse and calls to arms which marked the mood of the early months of the fighting.
Their author, Wilfred William Gibson, had left his native Northumberland in 1912 for London where he befriended Rupert Brooke and Edward Marsh. Staying at the Poetry Bookshop, he ended up marrying Harold Monro’s secretary and became a central figure among the Dymock Poets in Gloucestershire. Repudiating nearly all his early work which he saw as too obviously fanciful in the manner of Swinburne, Gibson, in common with the other Georgians, sought instead a type of verse characterized by a more simplistic, spare and direct style. Monro himself was especially keen to apply this ethic to war verse and he called boldly for a new kind of poem which revealed ‘the plain facts of the human psychology of the moment’.
This clarion call was to mark the verses in Battle and nowhere more so in than in ‘Breakfast’ which was a retelling with embellishments of an anecdote that had first appeared in print (also in The Nation) two weeks prior to Gibson’s poem. Although in the original story the wound was not fatal and the football team in question was Queen’s Park Rangers, the later version, with the details moved nearer to Gibson’s own Northern hinterland, is altogether bleaker and illustrates the mundanity of death and the commensurate waste of life within the trenches.
Indeed, the most noticeable feature of the poem is that its significant event – the killing of the soldier – appears almost incidental; it is confined to just four words before the resumption of breakfast in a pattern which suggest a triolet, albeit one which has gone slightly askew. The soldiers have themselves become unsentimental about death which appears as a routine occurrence, merely an interruption and inconvenience to the normal pattern of the day. The language used to describe the incident – everyday, prosaic, that commonly used by a certain kind of man – only underscores its apparent banality. Lying on their backs with shells ‘screeching overhead’ might also imply a sense of entrapment, an above-ground relation to those sappers in Blunden’s ‘Concert Party’ who were ‘kicking men to death’. Tempting however as it is to impute deeper meaning, it should be remembered that Gibson’s particular strength was that he sought never to moralize or tell the reader what they should think. A poem such as ‘Breakfast’ is not a propaganda piece, less still agit prop; rather, it merely presents the facts and allows the reader to draw their own conclusions.
Unlike however Blunden, and for that matter nearly every other War Poet, Gibson himself never saw action. Rejected four times for service due to ill health, and following a lecture tour to the USA, he finally passed the medical in late 1917 although his work as a Private in the Motor Transport Corps and later a clerk never saw him leave London. It is thus ironic that it took a civilian and not a serving soldier to first alert the public to the realities – horrors may be too strong a word in this instance – of trench life. That he did so by gaining his knowledge second hand from reports and anecdotes hardly lessens the power of the poems. Published alongside ‘Breakfast’ was the equally anthologized ‘The Messages’ which was more obviously concerned with mental states and included the first poetic references to shell-shock: ‘Back from the trenches, more dead than alive,/ Stone-deaf and dazed, and with a broken knee,/ He hobbled slowly, muttering vacantly…’ Battle was full of such vignettes and it did not shy away from the physical and mental horrors of trench fighting nor the wider impact conflict could have on civilians.
After the War, Gibson continued to write prolifically although by now his Georgianist approach was old hat; what was once innovative had been cast into obscurity by modernism, many of whose protagonists took a dim view of the ‘celestial chimneypots’ of their forebears. This sea change was noted by Gibson who was moved to lament late in life that his books had ‘predeceased him’. Such a view has proven prophetic with little of his wider work known or read. Of the sixteen War Poets commemorated in Westminster Abbey, he and Robert Nichols remain the least well-known. Yet, whilst he undeniably wrote too much and needs to be read therefore in selection, the poems in Battle – of which ‘Breakfast’ is a fine example – display a certain kind of genius and crossed a threshold in terms of what could legitimately be portrayed and described in poetry.
By John Howlett