The counterpoint of war and nature is one of the themes running through the poetry and the art that have emerged from war. The horrors of war, with all its senseless brutality, suffering and destruction, stand in hideous contrast to the life-force, the beauty and the restorative power of the natural world. In the First World War the brother-artists Paul and John Nash captured both the human and the natural tragedy of war, the contrast between the destructive power of armed conflict and of nature’s eternal creativity. But although in our remembrance we hold in our thoughts the dead of war, the waste of human lives it has wrought, and reflect on what our wars have done to the natural world, we must also reflect on humanity’s war on nature, our war against the natural world, which we have now realised – perhaps too late – is as great a threat to our civilization, even to our survival, as any we have faced. Too often we have seen nature as the enemy, but it is only an enemy because we have made it so, and our war against it can only end in our defeat. People talk about ‘saving the earth’, but the earth will roll on regardless of what we do. The danger is ours, our children’s and our children’s children’s, and it is our species that faces an existential threat, not the planet on which we have evolved and of which we are proving to be such unworthy stewards. We may do our best to wreck it but the earth will still be here long after we have gone.
But to return to the artists Paul and John Nash, their portrayals of First World War battlefields provide images of devastation that still have the power to shock and to shatter our complacency. Paul Nash’s picture, ‘The Menin Road’, shows a landscape destroyed. Beneath a lowering sky, pierced here and there with shafts of light, is a waste of mud and shattered trees, strewn with the debris of war and pock-marked with flooded shell-holes. It seems devoid of life, devoid of humanity, but here and there, insignificant in this forbidding scene, a few human figures – soldiers – pick their way through the desolation in which neither humanity nor nature seem to belong. It is reminiscent of words written by another First World War soldier who witnessed such scenes and later worked them into his fiction: “He fell and came heavily on his hands, which sank deep into the sticky ooze, so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mere…For a moment the water looked like some window, glazed with grimy glass…Wrenching his hands out of the bog, he sprang back with a cry. ‘There are dead things, dead faces in the water…’” Who were they? The answer comes back: “There was a great battle long ago…They fought on the plain for days and months…But the marshes have grown since then, swallowed up the graves; always creeping, creeping.” So JRR Tolkien reflected on the same horrific battlefields that Paul Nash depicts in ‘The Menin Road’, and other pictures, such as ‘Wire’ in which a shattered tree, swathed in barbed wire and symbolizing wounded nature, stands in a dark and devastated warscape.
Paul Nash’s brother, John, gives us a similar scene in his painting, ‘Oppy Wood’. Here too is a ruined land, a wood of broken, splintered trees, a waste of mud and noisome pools, with two soldiers in a network of trenches, looking out over a lifeless no-man’s-land. But there is a difference in John Nash’s picture. His sky is blue, streaked with cirrus clouds, nature’s inviolate beauty overarching the horrors that men have created below. Here is hope. Here is transcendence. And others experienced this too, as we know from the work of soldier-poets like Isaac Rosenberg. He writes of returning to camp from the front, “Dragging these anguished limbs” back along “This poison-blasted track” when, suddenly,
“But hark! joy-joy-strange joy.
Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.
Music showering on our upturned list’ning faces.”
Another First World War soldier-poet, Edward Thomas, was notable for his love of the countryside. While at the Front, where he was killed in April 1917, he kept a diary. In it is a day to day account of his experience of war, but it is interspersed with notes about the nature that continued on its own way while war raged on. Here Thomas found sanity and hope, reminders of the English countryside and harbingers of peace. For example, in his penultimate entry he wrote, “Hardly any shells into Beaurains. Larks, partridges, hedge-sparrows, and magpies by O,P.” Thomas’s eye for nature saw life where many would not. In one of his poems, ‘The Gallows’, he describes a gamekeeper’s ‘gibbet’, a poem that speaks of war against nature and perhaps symbolizes the ‘gibbet’ of barbed wire at the Front, with its adornment of shattered bodies amongst the shattered trees,
“…hung up there together,
To swing and have endless leisure
In the sun and in the snow,
Without pain, without pleasure,
On the dead oak tree bough.”
In another poem, about fifty bundles of sticks, or faggots, cut and stacked for firewood in an English woodland, but also the future nest site for “A blackbird or a robin.”, Edward Thomas looks beyond war to a restored world, but from which much and many will have been lost. Those fifty faggots must
“Light several Winters’ fires. Before they are done
The war will have ended, many other things
Have ended, maybe, that I can no more
Foresee or more control than robin and wren.”
Nature’s ability, given time, to heal a landscape scarred and shattered by war is remarkable. Those First – and Second - World War battlefields are now green farmland, woods and tree-lined roads as they were before war rolled over them. Neat war cemeteries, grassed-over trenches and rusted weaponry turned up by the plough and archaeology are, it seems, all that remains of those titanic battles.
And maybe that will be true of landscapes even where environmental destruction became a weapon of war, as when the Americans sprayed the forests of Vietnam with Agent Orange, or when Saddam Hussein fired Iraq’s oil wells and left them to burn. The recovery of a battlefield, thanks to nature’s resilience, is the theme with which Charles Dickens opens his story, ‘The Battle of Life’. The appalling toll of battle, the scarred landscape and the ground turned into a quagmire by blood, seem to have destroyed the innocence of the land. But time passes and nature heals the “guilty battle-ground”. Once again, “The larks sang high above it, the swallows skimmed and dipped” and, as the years pass both nature and human life reclaim the battle field, the once “fierce and bloody ground, where thousands upon thousands had been killed…” I don’t know which of England’s many battlefields Dickens had in mind when he wrote ‘The Battle of Life’ but even in his own day, never mind ours, those battlefields were already green and peaceful places once again.
But today we remember those who fought and died when all those places were battlefields, those who died both for causes which we still value and hold dear, and for causes which have receded into history and even into oblivion. Those wars too, no matter how long ago, saw people die in cruel and horrific ways. They also saw nature abused in the shape of animals, especially horses that were dragooned into war as the mounts of warriors and cavalrymen from ancient times up to the Second World War. My own grandfather had a horse shot from under him while serving as a soldier in the Boer War.
But to look back further we have the Old Testament – or Hebrew Bible – as a source. It is full of wars and battles, but one of the most vivid descriptions is to be found in the book of the prophet Joel. We read that,
“a vast and countless host appears,
their like has never been known…
Their vanguard is a devouring fire,
their rearguard a leaping flame;
before them the land is a garden of Eden,
behind them it is a desolate waste.”
Although we are told that “like cavalry they charge”, this army sounds like a modern one with all its terrible destructive power. But although the book of Joel seems to be about a human army waging human war, it is in fact about environmental disaster, which gives it a greater relevance today than might once have been thought. The onslaught of this hideous army, “in appearance like horses”, is preceded by blight and drought:
“Under the clods the seeds have shrivelled,
the water-channels are dry,
the barns are in ruins;
for the harvests have come to naught.
How the cattle moan!
…because they have no pasture;
even the flocks of sheep waste away.”
And then the marauding army arrives to destroy all that may be left, but the army is not human, it is a swarm of locusts.
As we now know all too well, our world is faced with unprecedented environmental threats, about which we hope with increasing desperation that something can and will be done. All too often, though, the fears of the human race are met with the “blah, blah, blah” of vested commercial and political interests who seem to think themselves as detached from humanity’s shared fate as Joel’s army of locusts.
What has this to do with Remembrance? One of the purposes of Remembrance Sunday, apart from paying tribute to those who have died in past wars, is to pray and work for peace in the present and the future. And one of the greatest threats to peace is the environmental crisis which is already upon us and which will get very much worse if drastic action isn’t taken – starting now! It is a crisis arising from our war against nature, against the earth of which we are part and on which we are totally dependent. With whole nations forced to move by hunger, drought and flood, one certain consequence will be conflict. That we must prevent, out of respect for those we remember today, and out of love for our descendants and our neighbours in the present and the future.