Are You in This?

Lieutenant General R. S. S. Baden-Powell, later Lord Baden-Powell, designed this poster for the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee. He was also the founder of the Boy Scouts.  

This poster portrays all manner of British society engaged in supporting the war effort in various roles, save the well-dressed gentleman at the lower right who is passively observing everyone else's efforts. The caption asks the viewers if they recognize themselves in the picture, strongly implying that if they cannot find themselves among those actively supporting the war, they are guilty of greed, self-interest, and abandoning the nation in its time of need.

"So don't let this birthday be less gay for my absence. It ought to be the proudest in your life-proud because your example has taught each of your sons to do the difficult things which seem right. It would have been a condemnation of you if any one of us had been a shirker."  

- Lieutenant Coningsby Dawson, Canadian Field Artillery, in a letter to his father W. J. Dawson, September 19, 1916.

Kitchener's Army being inspected by King George

Kitchener's Army being inspected by King George before being sent across the Channel to the firing line

The War of the Nations Portfolio (New York: The New York Times Co., 1919), 330.

 

Coningsby Dawson was already a successful writer by the time of the Great War, having published his first novel, The Garden Without Walls, in 1913. After graduating from Oxford in 1905 with a degree in history, he emigrated to the Untied States to attend seminary school. His family soon followed, settling in Massachusetts, where he abandoned the seminary and pursued writing. After two more novels and a poetry collection, the author went to Ontario, where he received military training and took a commission in the Canadian Field Artillery. He joined the war in France in September of 1916. Dawson survived the war and settled in New Jersey where he continued his writing through the 1930's. This letter is drawn from Carry On: Letters in War-Time 1, a collection of personal letters from Dawson to his parents and brothers, published in 1917.

Dearest Father:

   I'm writing you your birthday letter early, as I don't know how busy I may be in the next week, nor how long this may take to reach you. You know how much love I send you and how I would like to be with you. D'you remember the birthday three years ago when we set the victrola going outside your room door? Those were my high-jinks days when very many things seemed possible. I'd rather be the person I am now than the person I was then. Life was selfish though glorious.

   Well, I've seen my first modern battlefield and am quite disillusioned about the splendour of war. The splendour is all in the souls of the man who creep through the squalor like vermin- it's in nothing external. There was a chap here the other day who deserved the V.C. four times over by running back through the Hun shell fire to bring news that the infantry wanted more artillery support. I was observing for my brigade in the forward station at the time. How he managed to live through the ordeal nobody knows. But men laugh while they do these things. It's fine.

   A modern battlefield is the abomination of abominations. Imagine a vast stretch of dead country, pitted with shell-holes as though it had been mutilated with small-pox. There's not a leaf or blade of grass in sight. Every house has either been leveled or is in ruins. No bird sings. Nothing stirs. The only live sound is at night- the scurry of rats. You enter a kind of ditch, called a trench; it leads on to another and another in an unjoyful maze. From the sides feet stick out, and arms and faces- the dead of previous encounters. "One of our chaps," you say casually, recognizing him by his boots or khaki, or "Poor blighter- a Hun!" One can afford to forget enmity in the presence of the dead. It is horribly difficult sometimes to distinguish between the living and the slaughtered- they both lie so silently in their little kennels in the earthen bank. You push on- especially if you are doing observation work, till you are past your own front line and out in No Man's Land. You have to crouch and move warily now. Zing! A bullet from a German sniper. You laugh and whisper, "A near one, that." My first trip to the trenches was up to No Man's Land. I went in the early dawn and came to a Madame Tussaud's show of the dead, frozen into immobility in the most extraordinary attitudes. Some of them were part way out of the ground, one hand pressed to the wound, the other pointing, the head sunken and the hair plastered over the forehead by repeated rains. I kept on wondering what my companions would look like had they been three weeks dead. My imagination became ingeniously and vividly morbid. When I had to step over them to pass, it seemed as though they must clutch at my trench coat and ask me to help. Poor lonely people, so brave and so anonymous in their death! Somewhere there is a woman who loved each one of them and would give her life for my opportunity to touch the poor clay that had been kind to her. It's like walking through the day of resurrection to visit No Man's Land. Then the Huns see you and the shrapnel begins to fall- you crouch like a dog and run for it.

   One gets used to shell-fire up to a point, but there's not a man who doesn't want to duck when he hears one coming. The worst of it is all the whiz-bang, because it doesn't give you a chance- it pounces and is on you the same moment that it bangs. There's so much I wish that I could tell you. I can only say this, at the moment we're making history.

   What a curious birthday letter! I think of all your other birthdays- the ones before I met these silent men with the green and yellow faces, and the blackened lips which will never speak again. What happy times we have had as a family- what happy jaunts when you took me in those early days, dressed in a sailor suit, when you went hunting pictures. Yet, for all the damnability of what I now witness, I was never quieter in my heart. To have surrendered to an imperative self-denial brings a peace which self-seeking never brought.

   So don't let this birthday be less gay for my absence. It ought to be the proudest in your life- proud because your example has taught each of your sons to do the difficult things which seem right. It would have been a condemnation of you if any one of us had been a shirker.

"I want to buy fine things for you
   And be a soldier if I can."

The lines come back to me now. You read them to me first I the dark little study from a green oblong book. You little thought that I would be a soldier- even now I can hardly realise the fact. It seems a dream from which I shall wake up. Am I really killing men day by day? Am I really in jeopardy myself?

   Whatever happens I'm not afraid, and I'll give you reason to be glad of me.

       Very much love,

       Con.


  1. Coningsby Dawson, Carry On: Letters in War-time (New York: John Lane Company, 1917), 49-53.


(image 03 of 45)

England
ca. 1914-1918
Lieutenant General R. S. S. Baden-Powell
76 x 50 cm