The "Tommies" of WWI

A commemorative speech from my 2022 novel

Reader: Do you like speeches? My 2022 novel Renaissance Radio has one speech, and here it is. During the course of my career, I’ve written 2,000 speeches for America’s elected leaders, so I suppose it was inevitable that one of my fictional characters would make a speech. He delivers it in a national radio broadcast nine years after the end of World War I, on November 11, 1927:

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Francis Calderon.  While the other speakers today have focused our attention, rightly, on our American “doughboys”, I ask your forbearance in focusing our attention on the British “Tommies”. 

Throughout my four years caring for mules in the Great War, it was the British soldiers I came to know.  It’s the “Tommies” with whom I worked and spent time.

I step forward today to speak of the chaps I knew – a generation of England’s best – a generation of young men who merit the esteem of all who live in this world today and all who will live in this world tomorrow.

Here’s what I can share with you from my experience in the Great War:

The frontlines are just seventy miles from London.   Each young man – each miner, each shopkeeper, each clerk – comes over from his city, town, hamlet, or farm. 

Tommy’s life’s been blessed.  He’s a fair-haired lad, all smiles, with hopes and dreams for his future, with plans to shake the world.  He has a sense of adventure and a sense of wonder.  His eyes are serene and radiant, his face glowing, gleaming, eager.  All his limbs are intact, he is sane, he is happy, he is whole.

In 1914 and 1915, the young Brits come across full of ardor, expecting the battlefield to be full of glory.  Even in 1916 and 1917, the young men who join up still want to prove their soldierly qualities in battle and they believe in the rightness of their cause.

However young, they are men.  They want to be noble and strong and brave, to have a soul of iron, to meet the war with dignity, to live their lives worthy of honor.  Each exchange of gunfire rouses each man’s inner fire, and each thinks victory is up to him. 

Tommy is devoted to country, king, and duty as well as to a civilized and free world.  But he never talks about these things.  He doesn’t need rhetoric, because no matter what happens he has the resolve to carry on.

Over time, each young man develops a calloused surface.  But he knows viscerally the value of camaraderie, friendship, kinship.  Tommy sings his favorite song:

       The roses round the door

       Make me love Mother more

And he sings “I’m Dreaming of Home”.  He’s wistful for the happy life of his childhood and youth.  A simple thing like a bicycle ride through the countryside is now a sublime memory.  He aches for home, but home has never felt so far away.  Letters from loved ones ease his pain.

His joys are simple ones.  A singing lark or thrush, a wash and a shave, cigarettes or a tobacco pipe, a mug of coffee or tea, a shot of rum, a huddle with biscuits or bread, a breakfast of eggs and bacon and toast with marmalade, a parcel from home with gingerbread, strawberries, chocolate, a tart.

Tommy dreams of the girl whose last letter to him rests on his knee.  He reaches into his pocket, takes out a leather fold, looks at and kisses her photo, and tells us “she’s waiting for me”.

Most of all, these soldiers have each other.  They start out curious.  “Where you from?”  “What did you work at?”  “What’s the news?”  Some are liked at once.  “Clever chap.”  “Good man.”  And then they are bound by the experiences of war into a rough, protective care.  “This hell.”  “They have sent us here to die.”  

Through the danger, through the pain, their spirits are lifted into fellowship.  Bonds woven with sorrow are woven with kindness.  They champion each other’s good.  “What I have is yours.”   

The soldiers share the food in their parcels from home.  They share their magazines: Bystander, Burlington, Country Life, Tatler, Punch.  They share in games of poker and bridge as they drink and smoke and jibe and laugh and compete to say wise and witty things.

Tommy still loves life.  He appreciates the gift of life more than ever.  However few or many days he may have left, he wants to drain even deeper the cup of life.  He’s quietly cheerful.  He hums.  He sings with equal fervor his favorite church hymns and his favorite drinking songs like “We’re Here Because We’re Here Because We’re Here”. 

“I mean to beat this game,” he declares, and “I mean to come through this”.  He’s been robbed of a beautiful and happy way of life.  But again and again Tommy steps forward, challenging fate, and “sticks at it”, vowing to “see it through”, confident in himself and his gun and the triumph of his cause. 

Europe’s youth and pride, the pinnacle and promise of our civilization, spend their days and nights in the trenches.  Waking up each morning in the ground, in the dirt, in the mud.  Down there in the icy, sodden, putrid ditches.  Down there with the grime and the slime.  Down there with the lice and the rats.  This is where Europe’s best young men are living for four long years.   

Most days the rain sluices down on our British friends.  Tommy lives knee-high in water that stinks and he’s soaked, chilled, and wretched.  When the water that reaches Tommy’s knees rises even higher, he jokes “it’s time for us to be relieved by the Navy”. 

As Tommy looks up at the sky from his trench, he says to another British soldier, “when the bullet reaches you, be merry, be singing and glad, before you die”.  All the while, Tommy wonders who’ll be next.  Next to be felled.  Next to die.  Will my buddy here die before me or will I die before him?  If you’re unlucky, Tommy says, you’re gone.  If you’ve got to go, Tommy says, it’s awfully soon.  However near you are to death, Tommy says, somebody else is nearer. 

Tommy asks not for happiness; he asks for bravery.  As he sits on an ammunition box, he hopes these battles confer on him the attributes of “a fine fellow” and “a real soldier”.

For five days and nights at a time, Tommy takes his turn in the front trench.  He sits, lies, and squats in extreme discomfort.  He fills sandbags up with dirt, pats them flat with a spade, then piles them seven feet high.  Each night, there arrive more sandbags and more timers, A-frames, duckboards, stakes, wire, iron, tarps, bombs, and ammunition.  By 4:30 each morning, there must be no visible sign to the Germans of Tommy’s work that night.

At dawn one day the battle is joined again.  “Don’t let the bastards shoot me!” Tommy tells himself.  “Don’t let them snuff me out like a dog!”  “Spare me, God!”  “Spare me, Death!”  “Will I escape again?” he asks himself.  He sees no valid reason why he will.

Tommy peers through a periscope over the top of the British trench.  The ladders are propped against the parapet.  “Step up,” says the lieutenant.  Minutes pass.  “Steady now, lads.”  Another minute.  The whistle.  “Over the top!”  Tommy places his hand on the uppermost sandbag.  He leaps up and out. 

The mud is like porridge.  He worms himself through the barbed wire.  He flounders his way 200 yards across No Man’s Land.  Tommy and his brothers-in-arms stride into the thick of things.  They walk into the bullets.

“Keep going!” the British officers yell.  “Keep on!  No matter what!  Kill the Bosch!  Shoot the Huns in the head!”  Tommy knows the score: it’s the Germans or us.  The thought of this warms his blood.  It’s all up to us, he thinks.  “We aim to settle things,” he tells himself; “we aim to put more Germans beyond the power to harm us.”  Tommy shoots.  Tommy keeps shooting. 

What next befalls the British befalls them with sudden fury.  The German gunners fire 450 rounds per minute.  They don’t even have to aim.  They just fire and the British boys go down in waves.  They go down by the hundreds.  The Germans’ shooting gallery leaves a thousand Tommies as its carnage.

The Brits carry away from the line what is left of their platoon.  They sit beside their dead friends with their heads in their hands.

As for the living, hour after hour they limp away from the battlefield or they are lifted away on stretchers.  There is nothing more sublime than watching a man help another man who is just a little more wounded than he is.   

The dead, their hair matted with dried blood, were our companions.  Those who dropped to the ground and never got back up – we knew them and we loved them. 

After each death, Tommy sits and writes a letter to his friend’s closest kin.  He sends his letter and his dead friend’s letter, which his friend wrote “in case I become one of the costs”.  Tommy writes about how his friend, their loved one, braced himself bravely and nobly as he faced his end.  How he shed his blood with a heart worthy of this trial.  How he must have, while stretched out on the ground, felt himself drawn home in Divine Embrace.  How the Spirit of Divine Love moved across the battlefield and was present in his sorrow, in his most grievous suffering. 

In his own real-life prayers, Tommy beseeches the Lord to hide His Face from our unpardonable species.  Everything is breaking asunder, all Tommy’s illusions are shattered, and he fears what he may have become.

Death may have us by the throat, Tommy says, but the dice have not yet claimed us.  It’s true, says Tommy, that there may be little left to recommend our future to us.

For each soul who goes now to eternity, Tommy and his fellow soldiers provide a military funeral – solemn, simple, and beautiful.  The horror drifts away for a few moments as they sing each hymn.  Then they bury each body beneath freshly shoveled soil.  Just a few short days ago, they talked with this chap about his future.  Now he lies silent in this field of crosses.

Death has free run of this place.  This is a war that Death is winning.  More and more of our peers are being fed to the guns.  More and more young men, in the prime of their life, are going marching into No Man’s Land, never to return.  So much promise left on the ash heap, so much potential bloodied, felled, and squandered.  How could so many of our peers have been pulled under to this cruel fate?

In that war, one out of 11 British males under age 45 lost his life.  For those who lived, there were tens of thousands of artificial legs, artificial arms, artificial eyes.  Ever since, the disabled veterans have moved among us – at our family gatherings, at our churches, in our public squares, on our street corners, everywhere – with the War inscribed on their bodies. 

Men with deformed faces have turned to each other and have been making life better for each other.  They’ve been social pariahs – hidden, exiled, excluded.  But they are not allowing that to be the end of their story.  They’ve been struggling and overcoming obstacles together – and maintaining simple dignities – in the everyday life they share in their isolated brotherhoods.

We were exposed to so many heinous crimes.  We were disfigured by radical evil.  And we were outraged by the sight of “civilized” nations slashing each other’s throats.  The War itself is a wound that will never heal.   

The Great War ended nine years ago today.  And yet for so many of us it has not yet ended. 

We try to memorialize the dead and wounded with speeches, like this one, and with gravestones and wreaths and sculptures and monuments and memorials and processions and moments of silence when we meditate together on the loss of those now absent.  It’s all meaningful.  And it all falls short.

A decade after the War ended, we still kneel before the graves of our friends and kin.  We still struggle to offer something, however symbolic, that is worthy of their devotion, their sacrifice, and their memory.

The War robbed us of the narrative that we live in a moral universe and a just world.  The War fragmented or shattered our identity.  The War wounded our being.  The War left us numb, constricted, alienated, withdrawn.  We’ve been living ever since in No Man’s Land.  We’ve walked in twilight and too often it’s felt as if the sun has long since set on us. 

And yet the War taught us some things that are profound.  Yes, that evil is real.  But also, that beyond all the grotesque unfairness, beyond the abyss and beyond anger, we still say yes to life.  No matter how difficult the adversity, no matter how painful the suffering, we still affirm that life has meaning. 

We wonder at Creation, at the cosmos, at beauty, at life itself.  We take joy in belonging to humanity.  We take joy in the goodness that we find in people’s souls.  We convert trauma into wisdom, compassion, and action. 

We yearn for a community of the beloved, for a civilization based on wisdom and love, and for a society based on a new vision in which each individual’s well-being is bound up in the flourishing of us all. 

If you will, listener, join me in sensing and trusting that God’s Love is still prodding us forward toward cooperation, concord, unity, and reconciliation.  And if you will, listener, join me in sensing and trusting that we can pierce the Veil and sense the presence of the spirits, still abiding close to us, of those whom we have loved.  There were angels over those battlefields, cradling dying soldiers, and through all the horror there was the uplift of a Spirit that transcends this Earth.

We too may someday march off into the sunset, reborn.  May we, in a hall of the brave and the good, meet our friends and our kin again.  In the meantime, let us feel ourselves as one with the departed soldiers.  In the sacred No Man’s Land between the living and the dead, let them visit us, walk through the fields with us, whisper to us, talk with us.  Let them lead us by the hand.  For when they passed on from here in their youth they still had much to say.