‘For ever England’: The figurative colonization of Flanders

Introduction

The status of the poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ as the British Empire’s most well-known literary relic of the First World War testifies to the ongoing preeminence that Flanders, and the Ypres Salient in particular, held in the collective memory of Great Britain and the colonies and Dominions under the British Crown for decades after so many of the Empire’s soldiers were wounded or died defending the contested area in Flanders from the Germans – 270,000 in the notorious mud of the Battle of Passchendaele alone (Winter, 1989: 140). ¹ Written in 1915 by the Canadian medical officer John McCrae during the second Battle of Ypres, and initially rejected for publication by the London Spectator (Hurst, 2003: 73), the poem set the stage for the poppy’s elevation to iconic status, which was established by the subsequent symbolic use of the flower to raise money for ex-servicemen during Armistice Day observances beginning in 1921 (Gregory, 1994: 99): ²

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow.

(In Flanders Fields, McCrae, 1919: 3)

As Hugh BC Pollard, Captain of the London Regiment, noted in 1917: ‘All down the canal, and in every acre of the Salient, are English graves . . . and it is holy ground’ (pp. 104–106). To honor the more than 900,000 soldiers from the British Empire who are estimated to have died during the war, the French and Belgian governments eventually gave Great Britain the land necessary for more than 2,500 British cemeteries (Gilbert, 1994: 158–159). Writing in 1958, Leon Wolff (1958: 277–278) tellingly described the graves found in the area near Ypres: ‘In all, 174 British cemeteries cram the one-time salient. . . . These cemeteries, land ‘that is forever [sic] England,’ were conceded in perpetuity to Great Britain by the Belgian government in 1917; they contain in the Ypres area forty thousand British graves, while untold thousands still lie under unmarked soil.’

During the year following the unveiling, in July 1927, of the memorial to the British Empire’s missing soldiers at the Menin Gate of Ypres, more than 11,000 British men and women traveled across the English Channel to pay homage to fallen family members and fellow countrymen (Winter, 1978: 261). Before then, and in the ensuing years, the British routinely returned to the Ypres Salient as a kind of pilgrimage, heavily Anglicizing the city of Ypres and touring the many British cemeteries in the area, including the Tyne Cot Cemetery at Passchendaele that, containing nearly 12,000 graves (Spagnoly, 1995: 61), qualifies as the ‘largest British cemetery in the world’ (Wolff, 1958: 277). For contemporary visitors to the Salient, time can seem to have come to a stop a century ago. Guidebooks to the area have remained unchanged over the decades in describing its cemeteries and memorials in traditionally sacred terms (Wilson, 2012: 3–4). Today, visitors to Ypres can explore preserved trenches in nearby Sanctuary Wood (Eide, 2019: 36) as well as visit the In Flanders Fields Museum, whose exhibits immerse visitors in the war-time environment (Wilson, 2012: 215), and read a floor-to-ceiling inscription of the poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ on the wall of a nearby hotel’s lobby (Gammel, 2017: 56).

The current-day British conception of the First World War still largely adheres to idealized portrayals of noble British sacrifice and heroic conduct – a conception enduringly rooted in the novels and poems of the war-time period (Hanna, 2009: 12) despite the influence of prominent British literary works in the early 1930s that, in historian Ross J Wilson’s (2012: 19) words, defined ‘the conflict as one of horror, desolation, unremitting trauma, needless slaughter, and abject futility’. Indeed, the elevating imagery and imperialistic posture of the war’s two touchstone poems for the British Empire – McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’ (1919) and Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ (1915), from which come the funereal lines ‘some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England’ – continue to hold a central place in British hearts just as the once war-ravaged region from Ploegsteert to Langemarck remains a cynosure of British cultural memory. In addition, the figurative appropriation of foreign land, a trope dramatized by Brooke as a general disposition, has proven itself a self-fulfilling prophecy in Great Britain’s literal acquisition of Flemish land. With the cemeteries, the replication of the British Empire in Flanders became a fait accompli, the imperial seeds sown producing a sacrosanct crop to be harvested by visitors in an atmosphere of nostalgia for a time of unprecedented colonial domination.

The graves in Flanders extend a longstanding pastoral tradition in British literature and within British culture in general. After the Le Havre Treaty of 1917 established the initial 450 war cemeteries in Belgium (Spagnoly, 1995), officials faced the task of giving a distinctive character to those sites. As Spagnoly has remarked, ‘The impression to be created was that of a garden, with herbaceous borders, flowers and plants from England of a growth that local conditions would allow’ (p. 61). The systematic planting of grass, shrubs, and flowers in such cemeteries was undertaken with the hope that they would serve as ‘natural sacraments of hope’ (Wilkinson, 2014: 303). In 1921, when the Imperial [now Commonwealth] War Graves Commission became responsible for the maintenance of the cemeteries, these burial gardens came under the supervision of their ideal custodians – 533 gardeners who, as Denis Winter (1978: 260) notes in Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War, ‘first laid those 300 miles of flower beds which press upon the gravestones’.

It is apposite that these cemeteries – an acquisition purchased by blood, sown by the seeds of soldiers fighting for the British Empire – were established and continue to exist as replicas of English gardens. For the British, the crosses in Flanders fields, row on row, still mark their place, but it is a place memorializing the end of an empire as much as the ends of individual countrymen and relatives. As they pass between the headstones’ meticulous organization of the dead, British visitors continue to perform, in a ritualized manner, the tilling of this land of theirs, legatees of what was both gained and lost by tremendous investments of life, finances, and imperial culture.

This trope of imperialistic pastoralism, manifested in a variety of manners during the First World War, can be viewed as an extension of the British Empire’s disposition during the Victorian era, ably represented by a statement in British prime minister William Gladstone’s 1878 essay ‘England’s Mission’:

The sentiment of empire may be called innate in every Briton. If there are exceptions, they are like those of men born blind or lame among us. It is part of our patrimony: born with our birth, dying only with our death; incorporating itself in the first elements of our knowledge, and interwoven with all our habits of mental action upon public affairs. (p. 569) ³

This ‘innate’ imperialism, with its long history, naturally expressed itself in both subtle and explicit manners during the British presence in all theaters of the war but, when applied to Belgium as opposed to France, imperialistic rhetoric assumed a greater significance due to Great Britain’s prior relationship with that country. Indeed, one can view such terms of figurative equation – a ‘corner of a foreign field’ becoming ‘for ever England’ – as part of a larger figuration that would reinforce Belgium’s historical status as a de facto British satellite. The process of figurative colonization was simply a continuation of a cultural hegemony established long before the first shots of the First World War were fired.

Idealized interventions

To appreciate the importance of Belgium’s defense to Great Britain, one must consider the history of the two nations’ relationship – one in which Belgium, prior to the war, was the inferior member. British hegemony stemmed from Great Britain having been the primary architect of Belgium’s national boundaries and policies from Belgium’s creation in 1831 through the landmark treaties of 1839. ⁴ Great Britain’s construction of Belgium as a buffer against continental powers was not based on a fear of Germany, however, but on suspicions regarding France. As Sally Marks (1981: 7) observes in Innocent Abroad: Belgium at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919: ‘The treaties of 19 April 1839, which Belgium accepted so reluctantly, consisted of three related documents, all heavily influenced by British and Continental fear of revived French imperialism. On the unfounded assumption that Belgium would inevitably become a French satellite, she was deliberately made small, weak, and defenseless.’

In particular, the 1839 treaties dictated that Belgium, as a requirement of independence, abide by a strict policy of neutrality that was, in turn, collectively recognized by the major European powers (p. 8), thereby setting the stage for the outrage and legal condemnation surrounding Germany’s 1914 military invasion. Such obligatory neutrality diminished Belgium’s military and established the nation’s subservience to the policies and interests of Great Britain, its political superior and military protector – the former being exemplified by Britain’s refusal for five years to recognize Belgium’s acquisition of the Congo as a colony in 1908 (p. 13).

Against the backdrop of this history, the British Empire’s defense of the Belgian province of Flanders became one of the chief focal points in the literature and cultural identity emanating from the British war effort, ranking with the Somme and the debacle of Gallipoli. When German forces, following the Schlieffen plan, crossed the Belgian border on 4 August 1914, British leaders finally declared war on Germany after having refrained from involving the empire in what, until that time, had been deemed simply yet another manifestation of ongoing conflict in the Balkan peninsula. ‘The German demand on Belgium removed all doubts, except among a tiny minority’, summarizes the historian AJP Taylor: ‘Great Britain entered the war a united nation. She was the only Allied Power to declare war on Germany, instead of the other way round’ (Taylor, 1980: 21). As Peter Buitenhuis (1987) notes in The Great War of Words: British, American, and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914–1933, the outrage over German aggression – amplified by exaggerated claims of atrocities at the hands of German soldiers in occupied territories – became a unifying catalyst for action that transcended differences between nations: ‘“Remember Belgium” became the clarion call uniting the Allies and persuading neutral nations to join their cause’ (p. 10).

Reflecting the political and rhetorical emphasis upon Belgium, the British press ran stories foregrounding the Belgians’ plight and, in the months immediately following Great Britain’s declaration of war, British leaders defined their military aims around the central pillar of Belgium’s defense. Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, for one, stated on 9 November 1914: ‘We shall never sheath the sword which we have not lightly drawn until Belgium recovers in full measure all, and more than all that she has sacrificed’ (Asquith, 1914: 10).

After the rush of the famous race to the sea had ended in October 1914, British forces would remain entrenched in Flanders for more than three years, fighting in the three battles of Ypres, waged from 1914 to 1917. These forces experienced the futility of major campaigns during which trench lines established in 1914 were pushed forward a mere five miles by 1918 despite casualties in excess of 500,000 (Gilbert, 1994: 21). Summarizing the fighting in the province, Wolff (1958: 83) wrote: ‘By the spring of 1917 the salient that curved roughly from the Wytschaete-Messines portion of the ridge to Boisinghe was as rigid in its contours as a portrait in stone, feared and hated like death itself by soldiers of the Empire everywhere in the world. Already a fourth of all the British killed on land or sea since the beginning of the war had died there.’

Pledges to safeguard Belgian sovereignty, and the accompanying calls to avenge Belgium’s brutal treatment by German aggressors, remained paramount in official and popular depictions of the British war effort from its inception to its conclusion, including the ‘Remember Belgium’ recruitment poster. The Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, embodying from the British perspective ‘a Belgian spirit that could not be broken’, was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Leeds in late 1914 after being, as the British press described it, one ‘of the many thousand Belgians who have been driven headlong from their land by “The Rape of Flanders”’ (Declercq, 2016: 162–163). Pollard opens his 1917 book, The Story of Ypres, with a representative strain of British sentiment: ‘There is no name connected with the European War that will live longer in men’s minds than that of Ypres. It is a word that carries its suggestion of deathless heroism, its sad symbolism of sacrifice, and its glorious tradition of victory to all corners of the earth where the Anglo-Saxon tongue is heard’ (pp. 11–12).

The calls for intervention on behalf of Belgium that were widely found in the press would not have struck British citizens as unfamiliar, for the British Empire had employed them innumerable times during prior centuries as a rationale for occupying foreign lands in Africa and Asia in the process of colonization. In the 1830s, Macgregor Laird, for one, believed British merchants, in addition to seeking trade in central Africa, were motivated by such noble objectives as being ‘the means of rescuing millions of their fellow-men from the miseries of a religion characterized by violence and blood’ (Laird and Oldfield, 1837: 3). Indeed, the parallel between intervention in Belgium and the British Empire’s previous international activities suggests that the marshaling of British forces and its accompanying rhetoric during the First World War constitute a natural continuation of the imperialistic manner governing the Empire’s foreign policy during its rise and attained status as a global power.

Similarities between the British Empire’s actions regarding Belgium and those regarding colonial prospects and holdings overseas are discernible in the empire’s promotion of a set of laudatory aims and motives while downplaying, without necessarily obfuscating, other animating objectives, such as securing trade advantages in the African colonies. In the case of the First World War, Belgium’s plight offered a licit impetus for the mobilization of imperial forces whose larger, more complex strategic objectives might not have served as well, due to their complexity, as inspirational material for propaganda. As Marks (1981: 17) observes: ‘Allied leaders needed a cause to rally public opinion to the war effort. For want of anything else of high moral tone, Belgium became the cause, along with the sanctity of treaties and the rights of small nations, again symbolized by Belgium and her warrior-king in Flanders field.’

Belgium’s geopolitical circumstances had long made it a crucial zone of defense for the island power of Great Britain, as was made evident by the emphasis the British Empire placed on holding the Ypres Salient despite its many strategic disadvantages. Pollard (1917: 67–68), writing during the war, noted: ‘For political reasons it was essential that not a scrap more of the soil of Flanders should be surrendered, although the position was an unfavorable one for the Allies and a much better line of defense could have been sited on the slightly higher ground further back’.

British overtures regarding Belgium’s independence and status as a significant voice in international affairs are rightly seen as rhetorical flourishes in the context of Great Britain’s dictatorial attitudes and actions before, during, and after the war. ⁵ Indeed, the British Empire’s intervention on behalf of Belgium was conducted under a set of idealized, publicly broadcast premises that typified its modus operandi in overtly colonial interventions. Compare the tenor of the cries to come to Belgium’s aid to the morality explicit in promotions of colonial intervention as exemplified by the words of Lord Curzon – who would eventually become a member of the British War Cabinet (Marks, 1981: 62) – prior to his departure from India as viceroy in November 1905:

To fight for the right . . . to care nothing for flattery or applause or odium or abuse . . . but to remember that the Almighty has placed your hand on the greatest of his ploughs, in whose furrow the nations of the future are germinating and taking shape, to drive the blade a little forward in your time, and to feel that somewhere among these millions you have left a little justice or happiness or prosperity, a sense of manliness or moral dignity, a spring of patriotism, a dawn of intellectual enlightenment, or a stirring of duty where it did not before exist – that is enough, that is the Englishman’s justification in India. (Curzon, 1906: 241–242)

A few years earlier, writing about Great Britain’s reconquest of the Sudan in the late 1890s, Winston Churchill (1902: 9) struck a similar note:

What enterprise that an enlightened community may attempt is more noble and more profitable than the reclamation from barbarism of fertile regions and large populations? To give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain – what more beautiful ideal or more valuable reward can inspire human effort?

There is not, to be sure, an exact match between the premises employed for intervening in Belgium during a state of war and those employed for British intervention in distant lands for colonial purposes, but both sets of justifications are similarly and quintessentially imperial in their positing of Britain as a necessary savior. As David Spurr (1993: 28) notes in The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration: ‘Colonial discourse . . . effaces its own mark of appropriation by transforming it into the response to a putative appeal on the part of the colonized land and people. . . . Colonial discourse thus transfers the locus of desire onto the colonized object itself. It appropriates territory, while it also appropriates the means by which such acts of appropriation are to be understood’.

Cries to defend Belgium functioned as an effective sublimation of the overarching drive to defend the British Empire. In this light, the premise of helping Belgium defend its sovereignty can be considered a continuation of cunning statecraft, Belgium never truly having enjoyed complete self-determination. As had been the case in Africa and Asia, portrayals of Belgium as a needful other overcome by barbarism instigated a process of colonial discourse and domination that would result in a similar, albeit figurative, acquisition of Flanders as a British imperial holding.

While the rhetoric surrounding colonization heralded the transformation of so-called backward societies and untapped resources, portrayals of Flanders, and particularly the city of Ypres, suggested a possible renaissance of greatness in the manner of the mythical phoenix rising from its ashes. ‘There were two separate battles of Ypres in the first year of the war, each critical, each costly, but both victorious’, Pollard (1917: 14) noted in his account, continuing: ‘Ypres means so much to us that it is hard to realize it as a little Flemish town, the kernel of those lines of defense that twice withstood the stupendous onslaught of the German legions. The city is ashes, but its name will live for ever’.

Like colonists shouldering the white man’s burden overseas, British forces naturally assumed roles as saviors in pro-war literature. ‘Such was the British line of battle’, Pollard wrote of First Ypres, ‘a girdle of heroes round the city of Ypres’ (p. 29). Arthur Conan Doyle, who like other British authors and intellectuals was recruited by the British War Propaganda Bureau to help favorably shape public opinion (see Milne, 2016: 216–217), provided in his 1916 pro-war travel book A Visit to Three Fronts ⁶ a description of the trenches as seen by night that was equally epic:

It is a terrible place down yonder, a place which will live as long as military history is written, for it is the Ypres Salient. What a salient it is, too! A huge curve, as outlined by the lights, needing only a little more to be an encirclement. Something caught the rope as it closed, and that something was the British soldier. (Conan Doyle, 1916: 25)

In the eyes of those charged with defending the British Empire and those who were commissioned, indirectly persuaded, or independently determined to promote the cause of the war, Flanders was where British soldiers belonged and, if necessary, where they would die.

Agrarian tropes

The chief trope of British imperial activity, during both the height of Great Britain’s colonialism and its involvement in the First World War, was agrarian in character – epitomized by Lord Curzon’s (1906: 241) encouragement to his fellow laborers in India to ‘remember that the Almighty has placed your hand on the greatest of His ploughs . . . to drive the blade a little forward in your time’ and by Churchill’s (1902: 9) defense of colonialism in asking, ‘What enterprise that an enlightened community may attempt is more noble and more profitable than . . . to draw the richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning?’ British Prime Minister Henry Palmerston’s words concerning western Africa in 1860 offer a final example of this metaphor in action:

It is said that Commerce will put an end to the Slave Trade, but it is equally true that the Slave Trade puts an end to Commerce; and experience tends to show that it is necessary to begin by rooting out the overshadowing weed Slave Trade, before the nourishing Crop of Legitimate Commerce can rear its head and flourish to useful purpose. (Newbury, 1965: 120)

This agrarian trope was rooted in the long history of British pastoralism, which was employed in various manners for equally various ends during the First World War. ⁷ As Paul Fussell (1975) notes in The Great War and Modern Memory, ‘Recourse to the pastoral is an English mode of both fully gauging the calamities of the Great War and imaginatively protecting oneself against them’ (p. 235). Fussell provides many instances of British soldiers’ fascination, as actual or imagined farmers and gardeners, with the flora of their assigned positions during the many years of almost stationary fighting along the Western Front. Indeed, his commentary on these floral reveries and references functions as something of an anthology of the genre. However, others that were not included in Fussell’s pages abound, such was their plentitude as British troops sought to soften the brutality of trench warfare with Arcadian consolations (Saylor, 2008: 43). Arthur Conan Doyle (1916: 34–35), for one, inserts a pastoral interlude between violent scenes from the war zone in Flanders:

We . . . find ourselves in a garden where for a year no feet save those of wanderers like ourselves have stood. There is a wild, confused luxuriance of growth more beautiful to my eye than anything which the care of man can produce. One old shell-hole of vast diameter has filled itself with forget-me-nots, and appears as a graceful basin of light blue flowers, held up as an atonement to heaven for the brutalities of man.

The product of an optimist’s point of view as much as the passage of time, Conan Doyle’s portrayal offers a poignant contrast to the brutalized scenery encountered in freshly cratered positions. As such, the pastoral functions as amelioration and can be seen as an aspect of the figurative re-creation of Flanders, in an idealized manner, according to British standards. As Fussell (1975) masterfully illustrates, these British standards were, themselves, idealizations – English land and citizens having been routinely vested with exaggeratedly Arcadian properties and responsibilities throughout the nation’s long literary tradition. As Edmund Blunden (1929: 43) notes in Nature in English Literature, ‘the English mind in respect of Nature is sweetly compacted of direct and indirect associations, and the evening-star for us is still Hesperus as well.’

This English mind routinely endowed nature with pastoral elements borrowed, or inherited, from the culture of classicism. It is little wonder that English sensibilities operated in Flanders and elsewhere along the Western Front according to similar principles and with similar results. As landscape and garden historian Allan R Ruff has observed of the British, ‘The men enlisting in the First World War took the Pastoral with them into the trenches’ (Ruff, 2015: 189). Blunden’s memoir, Undertones of War (1965), offers numerous instances of this redirected pastoralism, such as his description of a position in the Ypres Salient: ‘This headquarters also enjoyed a kind of Arcadian environment, for the late owner had constructed two or three ponds in the grounds with white airy bridges spanning them, weeping willows at their marges, and there were even statues of Venus and other handsome deities’ (p. 136).

Even in inauspicious settings, Blunden teases out a wealth of ‘indirect associations’ that are predominantly rooted in classicism; encamped along the Yser Canal near Ypres, where the sound of machine guns regularly interrupts the silence of night, Blunden hears emanating from the company headquarters ‘such cheerful singings and improvisations as seemed to hail the Salient as the garden of Adonis’ (p. 131). Richard Aldington’s (1996[1919]) presentation of nature as a classical entity in the first section of his poem ‘In the Trenches’ makes plain the extent and seriousness of British pastoralism’s influence on both the experience of British soldiers in warfare and the construction of the war experience as a cultural phenomenon:

Each cruel bitter shriek of bullet

That tears the wind like a blade,

Each wound on the breast of earth,

Of Demeter, our Mother,

Wound us also,

Sever and rend the fine fabric

Of the wings of our frail souls,

Scatter into dust the bright wings

of Psyche! (p. 142)

Such classical pastoralism, as an emblem of British culture, was recruited in the effecting of an imitation England in Flanders. As Spurr (1993: 29) notes, in discussing appropriation through colonial discourse, ‘This doctrine of the colonizer’s natural inheritance often determines the very manner of perceiving a landscape.’ Furthermore, as Nicholas B Dirks (1992: 2) explains, conceptions of nature can be considered ‘the residues of cultural construction’. In the case of Blunden and Aldington, to name but a few representative spokesmen, what might simply have been presented as foreign land undergoes an assimilation into an extraneous system of epistemology and metaphysics. Indeed, the soil of Flanders is apotheosized, and in this apotheosis it is endowed with a British character.

Until a ‘Blighty wound’ or death cut short their guardianship, British soldiers often portrayed themselves in pastoral poses along the Western Front. The roles of gardener and shepherd that Fussell (1975) cogently summarizes in his chapter on ‘Arcadian Resources’ exemplify this metaphorical working of foreign land, with their function in Flanders being equated with their idealized function in pastoral England. Given their typical usage in imperial rhetoric as figurative terms encoding colonial possession, it is remarkable that agrarian tropes became powerful presences in wartime propaganda and literary representations of the war experience in an established country like Belgium. Enmeshed in the broader lexicon of pastoralism, such tropes arguably made the strongest claims of figurative possession, and this process most obviously stands out in the British manner of memorializing fallen soldiers, in which seeds and flowers dominated as metaphors and eventually became the paramount symbols of the war in British culture.

The British appreciation of local flora thus not only coded the representation of Flanders in the literature of the time but played a central role in the memorialization of the dead. ‘In Flanders Fields’, as such, takes its place in a long line of British literary works drawing upon the tradition of the Englishman – whether farmer, gardener, or simple lover of nature – as being inexorably and dynamically affiliated with nature. As Blunden wrote in 1929, ‘The inheritance of writings in which English aptitude for every contact with Nature has been made sure is so vast that the Englishman very rarely obtains a view of it, or permits himself to be proud of it’ (p. 11). British pastoralism finds its most memorable expression in elegies in which the identities of the dead are conflated with natural forces. Isaac Rosenberg’s (1979[1916]: 103) ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ develops McCrae’s use of poppies by making the connection explicit: ‘Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins / Drop, and are ever dropping.’

Such blunt literalism is also, in turn, a development of the long tradition of highly aesthetic pastoral elegy perhaps best represented by Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ (1821), composed on the death of Keats. Soldier poet Wilfred Owen was conversant enough with this tradition to turn it on its head, collapsing Shelley’s lines about Keats in his wryly entitled poem ‘A Terre’ 1994[1919]: 65), which in part reads:

‘I shall be one with nature, herb, and stone’,

Shelley would tell me. Shelley would be stunned:

The dullest Tommy hugs that fancy now.

‘Pushing up daisies’ is their creed you know.

Despite Owen’s suggestion that romantic pastoralism of the Shelleyan order has been rendered colorless by its commonness, such ‘man becomes nature’ poems retained a central place in the poetry of the First World War – and, in the case of the poppy, in the legacy of the war. Appreciating local flora became, then, a kind of morbid national self-study, whether earnest or ironic. To be sure, it remained one of the chief tropes of mourning, and in this necessarily earnest form its figuration can be seen as facilitating the process of equation and sublimated acquisition. Consider, for example, the closing lines of IA Williams’s poem ‘From a Flemish Graveyard’ (1978[1915]):

And may the circumstantial trees

Dip, for these dead ones, in the breeze,

And make for them their silver play

Of spangled boughs each shiny day.

Thus may these look above, and see

And hear the wind in grass and tree,

And watch a lark in heaven stand,

And think themselves in their own land. (p. 47)

Such poems’ ‘one with nature’ portrayals, employing the resources of the British pastoral tradition, significantly dovetail with the imperialistic trope of sowing seeds – the British government’s decision to inter soldiers where they died rather than repatriating its war dead having established the prosaic basis for this poetic frame of mind (Mawrey, 2014: 33). In an act of equation, Flemish soil becomes English soil, and British bodies are the seeds that create this transformation.

The most famous example of this general figuration was penned by the previously mentioned Rupert Brooke, who served in the defense of Antwerp during the early months of the war and was buried on the Greek island of Skryos after dying from sepsis in 1915 while en route to Gallipoli. Written shortly after Brooke’s first experience in the trenches, his poem ‘The Soldier’, the fifth part of the sequence ‘1914’, is unabashedly pastoral, elitist, and acquisitive:

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England’s, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. (1970[1915]: 23)

The speaker’s ‘body of England’s’ is synecdochic, one soldier connoting an entire body social, and this body exerts, in the imagination, something of an ultimate influence, transforming the land of another country – albeit a modest ‘corner of a foreign field’ – into that of one’s nativity. Like the imperialistic seeds sown by British industriousness in Africa and Asia, the bodies of British soldiers here function as a metaphor of acquisition under the rubric of British superiority, the ‘richer dust’ of British sacrifice.