A Rose a Day No.18

An especially moving place to see roses in the company of the dead is the Somme in north-west France. Another flower, the poppy, is of course most famously associated with the First World War, but the rose also played an important role. In fact, the War gave birth to a brand new rose-woman symbol: the Red Cross nurse. Here are the last two verses of a popular song from 1916:

There's a rose that grows in no-man's land

And it's wonderful to see

Though its sprayed with tears,

it will live for years

In my garden of memory

It's the one red rose the soldier knows

 It's the work of the Master's hand

 'Neath the War's great curse stands a Red Cross nurse

 She's the rose of no-man's land.

The region of the Somme is still today predominantly rural, and in many places you can see the traces of trench-lines, and shell and mine craters left over from the years of fighting. On the first day of what became known as the Battle of the Somme, July 1st 1916, the British sustained an appalling 57,470 casualties, with 19,240 killed, and as it was agreed by the combatants that the fallen should be buried as near as possible to where they died, the area around the front line in the Somme is  recorded by small and sometimes large cemeteries. The one illustrated is Gommecourt British cemetery No.2, near the village of Hébuterne, about 25 miles south-west of Arras.  It contains 1,357 burials and commemorations, of which 682 are unidentified, commemorated with the simple epitaph ‘A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR. KNOWN UNTO GOD’.

The British, French, and Germans each adopted their own style for interring the ‘glorious’ dead. To read the names on the cemetery headstones, or the simple phrase ‘A Soldier Known Unto God’ carved on the headstones is profoundly moving. Among the immaculately maintained lines of headstones in the many British Somme cemeteries, bunches of roses in various stages of decomposition are usually in evidence, as well as plastic ones, resting upon the graves or next to them where someone had left them. But roses also grow in the cemeteries’ own flowerbeds. My visit was made in wintertime, alas, so there were no flowers, and the cemeteries’ severely pruned specimens looked like miniature versions of No-Man’s-Land.

Whichever nation we are from, the convention is to leave roses for our war dead, and even though the ones I saw upon the British graves in the Somme were almost certainly purchased in French florists (and not even French, as they were no doubt shipped in from the Netherlands or even Kenya) in this context they are somehow quintessentially British roses – lying or growing there in the corner of the ‘foreign field’ celebrated in a poem by Rupert Brooke.

During and after the War there was also a great demand for memorial roses back home. Every village and town in Britain, France, and Germany had a War Memorial built. London had the Cenotaph. One poem of the period, written by a real ‘Rose of No-Man’s-Land’, the nurse Charlotte Mew, called ‘On the Cenotaph (September 1919),’ includes the following sorrowful lines:

And over the stairway, at the foot—oh! here, leave desolate, passionate hands to spread

Violets, roses, and laurel with the small sweet twinkling country things

Speaking so wistfully of other Springs

From the little gardens of little places where son or sweetheart was born and bred.

 Ernst Jünger, a citizen of the land responsible for the annihilation of the British during the Battle of the Somme, used the symbolism of the rose to great effect in Storm of Steel,  his memoir of fighting on the Western Front, published in 1920. He reflected on the restless spirit that made young men like him so eager to go off to war and to exalt in death. ‘Grown up in an age of security,’ he wrote, ‘we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war. We had set out in a rain of flowers, in a drunken atmosphere of blood and roses.’