7/7/25 draft: part of an attempt to trace the figure of the skylark through Blake and Shelley into the twentieth century for A Thing of Beauty.
The Lark Ascending: A Musician Goes to War
The map is heavy, stiff, on grayish linen-backed paper, springing out of its folds like a creature eager to breathe. It’s a detailed map of the area around the town of Demuin, in the Somme Department of northern France, between Lille to the north and Paris to the south. NOTE CHANGE OF COLOUR, a marginal note instructs: Enemy Trenches in Blue, British Trenches in Red. Trenches Corrected from Information Received Up To 28 7 18. That’s July 28, 1918, five months before the end of the First World War. And in my mind, above the inked whorls of ordinance-survey hills and lines of roads spread before me, rises a single violin, singing a sweet and poignant song: “The Lark Ascending” by British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), who began the piece before the war and finished it afterwards. This map belonged to him. His rendering of the lark’s song belongs, now, to all of us.
Vaughan Williams volunteered in 1914, age 42, to join the Royal Army Medical Corps because he was considered too old for active service. Already well-known as a composer by that time, he eagerly and diligently adapted himself to this new role, struggling to keep his puttees and hat on straight. “He was not one to whom the proper arrangement of straps and buckles and all those things on which the sergeant major is so keen, came easily,” wrote his second wife, Ursula. Nevertheless, he worked hard. He wrote his name, in pencil, on the outside of one of these maps, which he had obviously carefully preserved (and I may have been the first person to find it! See note below.)[1] He “impressed his comrades” with “his cheerful acceptance of difficulties, and his willingness to do everything that much younger men could do more easily,” Ursula says. He mourned the loss of friends, including the young composer George Butterworth, killed in the Battle of the Somme on 5 August 1916. But mostly Ralph Vaughan Williams carried on, looking after the wounded soldiers: “I am ‘waggon orderly,’” he wrote to his friend and fellow composer Gustav Holst, “and go up the line every night to bring back wounded and sick in a motor ambulance – all this takes place at night except an occasional day journey for urgent cases.” And he looked after the horses.
Left to right: RVW’s name on his war map of Belgium, photo by me (BL 7/1/25). Middle: Soldier and horse with gas masks, https://www.worldwar1centennial.org/index.php/brookeusa-veterinary-corps/4781-brookeusa-the-veterinary-corps-poison-gas.html; Lt Likeaux and Pitouchi from Kathryn Hughes CATLAND, bird-named trenches by me 7-1-25
RVW standing, third from left, at training camp on Salisbury Plain, summer 1916. From Moore, Vaughan Williams: A Life in Portraits (52).
To be an ambulance driver or medical orderly, positions adjacent to RVW’s, in either of the First World Wars was a way to serve without killing, and to offer your services if you were considered too old to kill. (Yet this was not without risk: Ernest Hemingway drove an ambulance in WWI and survived, while Virginia Woolf’s nephew Julian Bell was killed while driving an ambulance for a British unit supporting the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War in 1937). Being a First World War ambulance driver also meant handling horses, since they (and mules) were still used in a mixture of roles, pulling cannon and wagons alongside motorized vehicles. Vaughan Williams joked to Holst that “the war has brought me strange jobs – can you imagine me in charge of 200 horses!” Humorously, in December 1918 (after Armistice, when the winding-down of operations had begun), he wrote to Holst: “it’s a tiresome job watering and feeding horses in the dark before we start…then usually 2 or 3 waggons stick fast in the mud on the 1st start off and worry and delay ensues, and finally when one gets to one’s destination one has to set up one’s horse lines and find water and fill up nose bags etc. and if this has to be done in the dark it beggars description.”
Despite Vaughan Williams’ humorous tone, he surely would have experienced a reality difficult to contemplate, then and now: as the first war to see mass mechanized killing on an industrial scale, the Great War was uniquely terrible, for humans and for animals. All those horses and mules were shipped to France to pull cannons and wagons and carry officers on cavalry charges. And those battlefields were ripped out of existing woods and farm fields, where wildlife had been carrying on their own lives. Therefore, birds and animals accompanied soldiers in the trenches – imaginatively and literally. Reaching for normalcy, and even beauty, many soldiers carried on avid birdwatching activities in Belgian or French forests not so different from the English ones they’d known. Some adopted stray pets: one famous kitten, Pitchoux, saved his Belgian human, one Lt. Likeaux, from German discovery. Pigeons, camels, and dogs were also used as load-bearers and messengers. And more nameless nonhuman creatures perished in the Great War, alongside more nameless and unrecovered humans, than we will ever know. Tromping through a trench at night, soldier-turned-writer Robert Graves catches, in his flashlight beam, the bright eyes of frogs and mice that have fallen in. Because he must keep walking, he makes the grim decision – described in his memoir Goodbye to All That – to turn off his flashlight beam, and proceed. (He would have nodded at Anna Barbauld’s insight in “The Caterpillar” two hundred years earlier: small creatures are always too easily caught in the trap of war.)
But horses and mules are perhaps the best-known animal casualties, as WWI was the last in which they were deployed. English composer Edward Elgar, too old to enlist, raged, desolate, in a letter of 25 August 1914, shortly after the outbreak of war: ‘Concerning the war I say nothing—the only thing that wrings my heart and soul is the thought of the horses—oh! My beloved animals—the men—and women—can go to hell—but my horses; – I walk round and round this room cursing God for allowing dumb brutes to be tortured—let him kill his human beings but—how CAN HE? Oh, my horses.’ Jim Crow, a signaler in the Royal Field Artillery, was similarly troubled: “You hear very little about the horses but my God… That used to trouble me more than the men in some respects. Because we knew – well we presumably knew – what we were there for, but them poor devils didn’t, did they? No, scores and scores of ‘em…” You can see why Vaughan Williams’s driver, “usually a very silent man, asked him in a worried tone, ‘Do ‘orses ‘ave dreams, Mr Williams, do they?” Famously, WWI ushered in the birth of psychological understanding of what was then called “shell shock,” dramatized by Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway and in Pat Barker’s Regeneration, treatment for which increased through talking and the telling of dreams. Horses would have had no such relief.
In the bottom left corner of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ map, a word jumps out: OWL. It’s the name of a British trench, indicated in red lines and neat small lettering, facing 3 German machine guns: FALCON TRENCH, with OWL TRENCH behind it and CANARY TRENCH behind that. PHEASANT TRENCH, BLACKBIRD TRENCH, and SPARROW TRENCH are just northeast. SCREECH OWL TR [sic], PARROT TR [sic], and NIGHTINGALE TR [sic] are a little farther west, with CHAMELEON AL [sic] and LIZARD ALLEY nearby. Just above those is TIPPERARY TRENCH and then DUBLIN TR. SALAMANDER ALLEY above those. The lines move like people, encircling, passing, facing off, cutting through. Weirdly immediate and eerie synecdoche of movement; they almost twitch to life. Animal names. My God. They named their trenches after animals and hometowns. I take off my glasses and wipe my eyes.
This emotional reaction may be a way into my reason for telling this story in these chapters: art, and animals, have power to reach us when other things can’t. Especially in combination. In Nick Stafford’s famous play War Horse (2007), WWI horses appear as more-than-life-size equine marionettes, manipulated by visible puppeteers, activating in audience members (including me) what Kenneth Gross has called the particular sympathetic magic that a puppet can prompt. When I saw this play my tears were astonishing and feral, with a kind of desolation reaching back to terrible childhood grief at the inability to stop beloved pets from hurting, or dying – which is to say at the reality that innocents suffer. This is the reason children’s books so often feature animals, rather than other humans, as main characters: our emotions at a bit of a distance are more powerful. This is perhaps why the pity of WWI – one of the most emotionally resonant parts of military history, particularly in Britain, today – is heightened even more by animals. Especially those bird names soldiers borrowed for the names of the holes in which they hid. On the map, even now, the lines move like people, encircling, passing, facing off, cutting through. Weirdly immediate and eerie synedcoche of movement; they almost twitch. And your eye goes first to the name: OWL.
RVW was a longtime fan of both Blake and Shelley, and of Whitman, carrying notes about ammunition inspections inside a small copy of Leaves of Grass. And perhaps, like many artists, his appreciation of another medium was always tempered by questions about how it would adapt to his own. His second wife and biographer Ursula describes how “Ralph explained how difficult he found it to read poetry without the ulterior interest of looking for settable poems – it was rather like his first glance round any church when sightseeing: ‘lots of room for orchestra if I did the Passion here’ or ‘no room for players,’ before he started looking at the architecture.” Later, he would set both Shelley and Blake to music (his six Blake songs also became a ballet). But when he came home after the war, he was, Ursula says, “eager to find how his own invention had survived the years of suppression, wondering whether it could come to life again or whether it was lost for ever, and, if so, what he could do with his life.” After all, his only musical activity during the war, of necessity, had been, in the words of subaltern WA Marshall, “drooping disconsolately over the keyboard of a ghastly wreck of a piano while drivers sang sentimental songs” during concerts he organized afield. And, sadly ironically, his service as a subaltern with the Artillery in 1918 may have initiated the hearing damage that would manifest as deafness in the years before his death.
All these factors meet in one motif of both the works he’d produce immediately after the war: a bitter/sweet voice lifting, spiraling, rising up and up, intertwining with others or rising alone. “I feel that perhaps after the war England will be a better place for music than before,” he wrote Holst in June 1914, on the eve of departure, when he had already begun “The Lark Ascending.”[3] What about when the war ended and he returned to this piece? What about his Pastoral Symphony, revised with a new dedication to his fallen friend George Butterworth and first performed in 1922? Did they help this hope come true? Perhaps so, in the figure of that soaring, spiraling voice. In Pastoral Symphony it’s a soprano, violin lines, a bugler. In “Lark Ascending,” it’s the skylark.
Only in the first case is the origin directly traceable to war: “It’s really war-time music,” he wrote of Pastoral Symphony to Ursula in 1938, “a great deal of it incubated when I used to go up night after night with the ambulance waggon at Ecoives and we went up a steep hill and there was a wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset – it’s not really lambkins frisking at all as most people take for granted.” He wrote that “a bugler used to practise and this sound became part of that evening landscape and is the genesis of the long trumpet cadenza in the second movement of the symphony.”[4] Most things written about “Pastoral” ascribe it directly to WWI and analyze it in that light. Listening to it, you hear in it a journey of a man going to war: from initial doubt and hope to getting caught up in the military briskness to mixed feelings. It’s compelling. So much so that Ursula Vaughan Williams, sitting with her husband’s body in the moments after his passing, opened the windows “to the dawn” and then, eventually, played the “Pastoral Symphony.”
Perhaps the shape of “The Lark Ascending” had already begun to form before VW went to war, but its piercing, restless beauty and melancholy, like the soprano line of the Pastoral Symphony, feel intimately connected to the emotions that WWI seems uniquely able to inspire then and now, a particular kind of poignancy and loss. “With its quiet pastoral surface,” Lewis Foreman writes, “it is possible to forget what a revolutionary piece [the Lark Ascending] was in the context of the British music of 1914.” Noting that “in a large percentage of his big orchestral works there is a passage for solo violin at a point of personal involvement: it became a fingerprint,” Foreman writes of how the listener’s “involved” too: “In this summer landscape the larks soar continually from the hills – invisible to the eye – and with them soar the spirits of the listener. Heard with these associations the piece is as religious a work as his church music with biblical words.” It speaks to the spirit. It speaks of what can’t be said. And it speaks of what it saw when it was, in Foreman’s words, “astride” of WWI, begun beforehand but then revised and finished after the end. Like a young man – or RVW himself – “The Lark Ascending” went to war, and came home changed. But the birdsong remained.
So maybe it is to art that, as always, we must look for a kind of truth that doesn’t come through letters and photographs. Ditto to other locations of ineffability, elusiveness, more-than-humanness – the more-than-human world. Just as one medium can touch off another – like RVW inspired to write music for dancers by Blake – a nonhuman creature can touch off a spring of emotion and realization, a feeling, an encounter to which we might not otherwise have access, perhaps particularly in times of uncertainty and stress, and help us to make those emotions visible to ourselves and others, giving a language to interiority. A skylark does this with Blake and with Shelley, and with Vaughan Williams. Animals make a point of contact, otherness, and quickening. A place where we meet the world and feel we are not its only residents. A place where the strand of some new idea can lift out of the huddled shell of our little selves, lift and soar like the lark’s song. A place where something in our hearts can fly back home.
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[1] I looked at these maps in the British Library’s Maps reading room on Tues July 1 2025. There were seven of them total, most of France but two of Belgium. Only one (Belgium: Namur. 8.) had a penciled name, Williams, preserved under a folded-down upper right corner; when I folded the cover back, Vaughan was faintly visible. The BL staff told me they believed I was the first person to notice that! No telling when anybody last took these maps out of their gray archival cardboard box.
[2] https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/voices-of-the-first-world-war-animals-in-war
[3] In her biography, Ursula writes that in August 1914, when war had just been declared, “Ralph, walking on the cliffs looking over the Channel, where the BEF were already crossing towards the battlefields, sat down to write a tune he had thought of and grew absorbed in his music notebook. He was recalled to time and place by a small Boy Scout who gazed at him fiercely and told him that he was under arrest. “Why?” asked Ralph, puzzled. “Maps,” said the scout. “Information for the enemy.” […] Ralph allowed himself to be escorted to the police station, showed his suspicious MS paper and was let off with a caution. This was Ralph’s own version of the story. Butterworth, in a letter written after a visit to [RVW], says that he was writing a lecture on Purcell.” But other sources (Country Life) have this as “The Lark Ascending.”
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/aug/11/symphony-guide-vaughan-williams-pastoral-symphony