Churchill’s War Horse: Children’s Literature and the Pleasures of War

Even after a century, the rst day on the Somme, the rst of July, 1916, remains the dening moment in our culture’s perception of the First World War. From Blackadder to Birdsong, we all know the story only too well. Lions led by donkeys: thousands and thousands of khaki-clad soldiers going over the top, struggling out of their trenches only to nd a wasteland of death and horror. Not gardens to trenches, but trenches into an utterly unexpected and unimaginable Devil’s garden. All those “lovely lads,” as A.E. Housman might have put it, scythed down by German artillery and machine guns. Between 7:20 a.m. and dusk, the British Fourth Army, whose elite 29th Division included the 752 men of the Newfoundland Regiment, attacked the Pozières Ridge just north of the River Somme. Within a matter of hours, it had been decimated – almost 20,000 young Britons and Newfoundlanders from this and the anking Third Army were killed. Another 40,000 were wounded, missing, or captured.1 Writing in the Sunday Pictorial shortly after the opening of the battle, Winston Churchill, unlike many on the home front, sensed that the popular conception of the war as a grand imperial adventure was no longer tenable: “The faculty of wonder has been dulled,” he wrote, “emotion and enthusiasm have given way to endurance; excitement is bankrupt, death is familiar, and sorrow numb” (WSC, III: 791). Within the Devil’s garden itself, however, it was still possible to nd traces of an earlier, more innocent world, our rst garden. Many Germans appeared to be overcome with compassion for their young enemies. Lance Corporal Hugo van Egeren of the Second Guards Reserve Division tells this story: During the night I was approached by an ofcer of the Rie Brigade. He had a white ag and asked if he could remove the wounded. I could speak English and told him that I would put his request to my leutnant. My ofcer gave permission but he only informed the troops on either side, not the H.Q. in the rear. We helped the English to nd their wounded. Sometimes we carried them over to their own side, sometimes the English laid a white tape to the wounded men so that their stretcher-bearers could nd them in the dark. When it got light we got orders that we should stop what we were doing but, by then, most of the good work was done. We red warning shots to tell the English the truce was over. We were hardened, experienced soldiers. It wasn’t fair to send these young soldiers against us. Some of them were only students and we felt very sorry for them.

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