Spring/Summer 2006: Land

A Square Foot of Beauty

Finding meaning in World War I trench gardens

By Kenneth I. Helphand

Who made the law that men should die in meadows?

Who spake the word that blood should splash in lanes?

Who gave it forth that gardens should be boneyards?

Who spread the hill with flesh, and bloods and brains?

--Sergeant Leslie Coulson, killed in France in October 1916

Trench gardens reveal something about the character of soldiers in World War I, as well as about the nature of gardens. First, that the line of trenches at the front remained stable long enough to plant and even harvest a garden. Second, although their primary purpose was to yield fresh produce for the troops, gardens also assuaged the horrific conditions under which the men lived.

Nearly a century later, gardens in that landscape present natural questions for us. Why were they made, how were they made, what did they mean to their makers, what did they mean to others who witnessed them, and what do they mean to us now?

Most people even now, and surely most soldiers in World War I, understand what it takes to create a garden: the process stretches from a vision and design to selecting a site, marshalling materials, actually putting hand to plow or shovel, monitoring, and maintaining. Such actions are part of the creation and maintenance of every garden. The extreme setting of the war, however, exacerbated each task in every dimension.

Soldiers created gardens as a response to their basic needs and as an aid to their physical and mental survival. [Gardens] also represented desire, a wish for the comforts of home, a concrete expression of hope, and the desire for life, peace, and a future. But the paradox of the garden is that, although we associate gardens with the natural world, gardens only exist as human creations; they are places where we have exerted control over the natural world. At the front--a profoundly chaotic and unnatural situation--human success in exerting control over anything is extraordinary in itself, and a powerful reminder of our humanity.

In the trenches, even as soldiers fought for survival, their actions and preoccupations often transcended that essentially human struggle for basic comforts, which were well beyond the reach of these men: palatable food, a reasonable toilet, protection from artillery and bullets, and a dry, vermin-free place to sleep. With none of these essentials available to them, they were free to reach for the impossible; why not wrest control of the war-torn environment to create a square foot of beauty? Their gardens were a manifestation of the soldiers' transcendence of their environment.

Gardens in the war offered a mechanism of survival and exemplified the struggle to create something normal [under] the most abnormal conditions. By their mere existence, defiant gardens were extraordinary. John Oxenham found that the "amazing self-adaptation to these new conditions of elemental life and death fill one with the supremest wonder." It could be said that the war-zone garden softens a harsh situation, but it does so by forcing nature into an otherwise distinctly human creation--the war itself. As nature transforms, it humanizes the place, much as the ancient agricultural traces on the shores of Rhodes announce that people are here and that they are domesticating this place. In a sense, gardens help make such places a home or, in this situation, perhaps something more akin to a nest.

At and behind the lines, many soldiers fashioned what became known as trench art, objects made by soldiers and civilians during and after the war. The ephemeral garden could be thought of as trench art as well. Trench art was constructed from the materials and waste of the war environment. Its most characteristic object was the decorated artillery shell, often embossed with the juxtapositional ornamental pastoral patterns of leaves and tendrils. Anthropologist Nicholas Saunders finds them to be "a testament to the skills and fortitude of human beings under the almost unbearable pressures of modern war. Each item, however humble, is a potential symbol of the human spirit in extremis." Created out of the waste of war, these arts--and gardens may be their most fleeting form--alleviated boredom, provided an outlet for soldiers' emotions, and allowed soldiers to express their creativity and skill. Such trench arts celebrate human adaptability and resilience and the persistence of the creative impulse. Gardens also functioned as a form of cultural expression, a way of declaring that this is an English, a French, or a German place.

The following sections briefly cover the themes that emerge when we examine the meaning for the World War I soldiers who created or claimed, and cared for, gardens in war-torn areas. A garden could be a combination of the task of the moment and a hope for the future.

Soldiers were continually presented with the extreme contrasts in their war-torn world along the front. The incongruity of nature surviving alongside the devastation of the trenches offered soldiers a way to reclaim their humanity in that bit of normalcy and to separate themselves from the chaos of the war. Pleasure was more intense amid such pain, beauty more vivid when confronted with unbearable ugliness, and hope desperately wished for in such despair.

Ludwig Fink, a law student from Freiburg, wrote from a village in the range of heavy guns, but where snowdrops were in bloom and farmers were plowing. He described the experience as "a queer mixture of joy in life and proximity in death." On a Sunday, Georg Stiller wrote from the front, "Elsewhere there is rest and peace; here the murdering goes on--everlasting shells, shrapnel, and rifle fire. Nature wears its most beautiful soaring dress, the sun laughs from the brown tent of heaven, but through the blossoming, green-growing Nature fly the shells, destroying trees and fresh bushes, tearing deep holes in the earth, and annihilating the young, blossoming human lives." Having accepted the incongruity in their nightmare world, soldiers found that nature offered solace. "Greenness was our dream scenery," said Edmund Blunden [poet and author of the war memoir Undertones of War].

The garden was a palliative, not a cure for the soldier's plight. They were living in another land, a place of strange sensations, where Blunden is surprised by the incongruity of "a garden gate, opening into a battlefield," and where they could only imagine what one soldier described as the "garden over the wall" of the nightmare.

Major R. S. Cockburn reflected on his experience and response to these dramatic juxtapositions, noting in his diary the simple pleasures he now felt in watching the sun rise in the woods or hearing the birds sing, and marveling that "nature [seems] to take on a new aspect for the first time. There [is] something almost miraculous in the way of contrast between the peace and loneliness of Haurincourt Wood and the filthy slaughter-ground not far away."

In a letter, Paul Nash described to his wife, Margaret, the particular contrast of nature and war that surrounded him: "Ridiculous mad incongruity! One can't think which is more absurd, the War or Nature; the former has become a habit so confirmed, inevitable, it has its grip on the world just as surely as spring or summer. Thus we poor beings are double enthralled." For a French soldier writing to his parents, the beauty of autumn in the Vosges, and the proximity of the most awful and degrading destruction manifested "life and death side by side."

Farther from the front, soldiers found solace and refuge from the war in gardens. As a modest antidote to shell shock--the war's name for the various forms of debilitating psychological trauma afflicting soldiers--gardens were an oasis in the war's desert. The dramatic contrast between the green, watered, life-giving interior of the oasis and the harsh world around it accentuates its meaning. In a world of omnipresent death, nature in any form represented life.

The horrific conditions of the trenches acquired their own normality, but in their struggle to cope with their new world, soldiers experienced a palpable desire to create a new "normal." Lieutenant Robert Sterling was "longing for some link with the normal universe detached from the storm." He found it in seeing a pair of thrushes building a nest: "they seem to repeat in some degree the very essence of the Normal and Unchangeable universe carrying on unhindered and careless amid the corpses and bullets and madness."

Soldiers tried to create an alternative reality by engaging in activities familiar from home. The accoutrements of everyday life such as trench newspapers, boxing matches, music, gardens, the creation of art, and writing letters were critical in this endeavor--a half million letters were sent weekly by British soldiers from the front. Even in military terms, all these activities and actions were good for morale. The garden thus became one more weapon in the arsenal against the enemy, a paradoxical and surprising warrior, a counterattack to the war itself.

When life, human and not, dies, it decays and returns to the body of the earth. A garden, and especially a plant emerging from the ground, is a sign of regeneration and an indication of the continuation of life. War magnifies our awareness of our human connections to these forces of life and death. ...

Gardens near or at the front were a powerful reminder to soldiers that their home world still existed. The word Blighty (unrelated to the word blight) was synonymous with England. John Brophy and Eric Partridge describe Blighty as "a sort of faerie, a paradise which [soldiers] could remember, a never-never land." A garden could even be a miniature Blighty landscape, where sights, smells, flavors, or flowers could remind soldiers of Blighty--home.

On life back from the line, Phillip Gibbs found that "it was good to go into the garden of a French chateau and pluck a rose and smell its sweetness, and think back to England, where other roses were blooming. England!" Near Armentieres on Christmas Day 1914, Henry Williamson wrote in his diary: "Even the German shells and our axes have not yet spoilt the beauty of these great woods. ... One cannot help thinking of the high woods of home."

The men also constructed reminders of home. Trenches were named after actual streets back home, and there were crudely made signposts designating Trafalgar Squares or Piccadilly. On the walls of the Talbot House, "Tubby" Clayton posted maps of England, Canada, and Australia.

Soldiers hoped to be spared from death, and they hoped for peace. The cycle of life--birth, growth, maturity, and death--is perhaps nowhere more visible than in a garden, where the cycle plays itself out each season and over years. But the cycle cannot be ignored in battle, where perhaps the strongest emotion is the soldiers' fear of dying.

For Tubby Clayton, part of the significance of the Talbot House garden was the beauty it offered: "How far a little beauty went amid such surroundings as ours. To live day after day not only in danger but in squalor; ... to be homeless amid all that is hideous and disheartening, habituated only to the filth and to a horizon of apparently invincible menace; to move always among the wreckage of men's lives and hope, haunted not only by a sense of being yourself doomed to die, but by an agony of mind which cried out at every step against the futile folly of the waste of time and of treasure, of skill and of life itself--this is what war meant to a soul sensitive to such impressions."

These responses to the war landscape and situation fit into a tradition and a set of conventions many soldiers on the Western Front knew well: those of the pastoral. The hellish landscape of no-man's land had a paradisiacal parallel in poetry and literature, an imaginative green literary escape in which British soldiers expressed a longing for the modest pastoral pleasures of the English landscape. These literary landscapes had a counterpart not only in imagined gardens and landscapes, but also in actual gardens created on the war front. The literary responses were an imaginative resistance to the circumstances of war. The retreat into the comforts of the pastoral is intuitively comprehensible, but there were defiant acts of gardening that combated despair.

In the literary landscape of the pastoral, there are interludes or pastoral oases in the narrative. These too had actual counterparts in the war environment. Friedrich Georg Steinbrecher wrote home, "When one has seen how brutal, how degrading war can be, any idyllic interlude comes like a reprieve from the gallows." Many soldiers' memoirs recalled brief pastoral interludes, a hiatus from horror. They could occupy these short-lived physical and emotional oases only for a brief period. Henry Williamson's description recalls a classical pastoral interlude. "We are having a peaceful happy rest away behind Albert, at Baisieux, in lovely unspoilt country, cornfields, woods, leafy trees, and streams." Rudolf Moldenhauer, a high school student who died in the first months of the war, wrote, "When we have the treat of a beautiful sunset over the watery marshes of the Somme; when a beautiful, cold, December morning breaks through the mist of dawn and the red clay of the trench glows in the sunshine; then we are happy and rejoice like children in the beauty of it."

It did not take much. Major R. S. Cockburn described the pleasures away from the line: fresh fruit and vegetables, the comforts of a soft hat versus a steel helmet, and the trees that were not scarred and broken stumps. In Liam O'Flaherty's wartime novel, he describes a platoon crossing no-man's-land: "The men caught sight of a green slope, far off on the left, beyond a hollow. 'Look,' said Jennings, 'there's grass there. Astonishing.' With the exception of Lamont, none of them had seen a blade of grass in five months. ... They became quite cheerful at the sight of green grass."

Since the Industrial Revolution, the garden and nature have assumed new meaning as forces in opposition to the world of technology. The most terrifying technology of war emphasized this contrast. Blunden often notes the dramatic contrast in the visible evidence of war and peace. Even in the trenches, some respite was possible: "Still, in daytime, we sometimes got out of the trench into the tall grass behind, which the sun had dried, and enjoyed a warm indolence with a book. ... The war seemed to have forgotten us in that placid sector." In a country that was "raving mad," occasionally "that bad spell was broken. Here we saw life in her rural pretty beauties." At the headquarters at Ypres, the men "enjoyed a kind of Arcadian environment," a garden with ponds and bridges and a chateau.

The contrast was stark and complete, the associations of war with hell and nature with heaven explicit. Describing an artillery shelling of Chateau Coupigney where they had been, seemingly safe behind the lines, [medical officer Philip] Gosse wrote, "hitherto we had been left entirely alone by the enemy, but Satan was now about to ravish our Garden of Eden."

Published in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2006 Oregon Council for the Humanities