Ivor Gurney

A complicated story

Generalisation 1Ivor Gurney really enjoyed the first world war. | Too simple! True, there is a lot of evidence to show that he was healthier and happier than ever before, but there is also a lot of evidence to show that he found the war disturbing and terrifying. One example is… | Generalisations 2Ivor Gurney hated being in the trenches. | Too simple! True, his poems captured the horror of it, but there were many times when he found happiness that he had never known before. For example… | Generalisation 3Ivor Gurney’s letters and poems can only tell us about Ivor Gurney. | Too simple! True, they are probably most reliable for the attitudes and views of Ivor Gurney, but go back to each of your Steps. Gurney’s letters
Ivor sent many letters to his very good friend: miss Marion Scott; he tries his best to impress her with his courage, when he is in training and is mostly optimistic. Ivor says in one of his letters to Mrs Voynich (his novelist friend): “Well, here I am, soldier of the King! The best thing for me at present. I feel nowhere could I be happier than where I am”. In this quotation, Ivor Gurney is rejoicing that now that he is at war, his mind is distracted from his troubles, fears and depression: he is not happy to be at war, but happy to be getting cured from neurasthenia. When Gurney first joined the unit, he got “such a thrill such as” he had “not had for a long time” but little did he know of the consequences of his acts. When he wrote to Miss Scott on June 16th 1915, Gurney cursed irritatedly the armies ways of teaching and admitted his disgust and regrets: “Take ‘em for a route march, stand ‘em on their heads […] They are mad as hatters here.”. This is only the beginning of his exhausting stage in the army, but still, he remains relatively positive even after describing that due to the cold weather, they can obtain an average of only three hour sleep: he says, “the life is grey as it sounds, but one manages to hang on to life by watching the cheerier
Never before, had he experienced such happiness; but we are not sure if he chooses not to write of his sadness to not distress his friend Marion Scott. He writes mostly about his friends and only vaguely about the conditions in the trenches: “Where and How, I may not say; bang in the front seat we are…But O what luck! Here I am in a signal dugout with some of the nicest young men I have ever met”. In his poem “Pain”, Gurney inspires his work from what he sees: such descriptions cannot be made up: they can only be seen; the title also depicts how Ivor Gurney felt during the war in February 1917. “An army of grey bedrenched scarecrows in rows […] Till pain grinds down, or lethargy numbs her” from the poem “Pain” greatly expresses Gurney’s feelings at that time. Gurney also feels like a child at school, he writes to a friend at the start of February 1917 and explains the cleaning-up inspection: “When the R.S.M. came around, he chuckled and said, ‘Ah Gurney, I’m afraid we shall never make a soldier of you;’ “. We also know that the trenches weren’t nice at that time, as the book describes it: “they would had noticed a big contrast with the trenches”, “In places, there was no sign of organised trenches, just shell holes