Flex Mentallo

After the end of the First World War Matania turned his hand to other subjects - daily life, historical themes, and Edgar Rice Burroughs...

We laughed, -knowing that better men would come, And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags. Wilfred Owen

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours! We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum. No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.

Our eyes wept, but our courage didn't writhe. He's spat at us with bullets and he's coughed Shrapnel. We chorused when he sang aloft, We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.

War's a joke for me and you, While we know such dreams are true. - Siegfried Sassoon Out there, we've walked quite friendly up to Death,- Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,- Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand. We've sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,-

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack-- And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men? Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back With dying eyes and lolling heads--those ashen-grey Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay? Have you forgotten yet?... Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you'll never forget. Seigfried Sassoon

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz-- The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets? Do you remember the rats; and the stench Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench-- And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain? Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'

Have you forgotten yet?... For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days, Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways: And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you're a man reprieved to go, Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare. But the past is just the same--and War's a bloody game... Have you forgotten yet?... Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for them from sad shires. What candles may be held to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes. The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds. Wilfred Owen

Whether his deeper sleep lie shaded by the shaking Of great wings, and the thoughts that hung the stars, High-pillowed on calm pillows of God's making, Above these clouds, these rains, these sleets of lead, And these winds' scimitars, -Or whether yet his thin and sodden head Confuses more and more with the low mould, His hair being one with the grey grass Of finished fields, and wire-scrags rusty-old, Who knows? Who hopes? Who troubles? Let it pass! He sleeps. He sleeps less tremulous, less cold, Than we who wake, and waking say Alas! Wilfred Owen

And soon the slow, stray blood came creeping From the intruding lead, like ants on track.

There, in the happy no-time of his sleeping, Death took him by the heart. There heaved a quaking Of the aborted life within him leaping, Then chest and sleepy arms once more fell slack.

Under his helmet, up against his pack, After so many days of work and waking, Sleep took him by the brow and laid him back.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin, If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. Wilfred Owen

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.- Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

For after Spring had bloomed in early Greece, And Summer blazed her glory out with Rome, An Autumn softly fell, a harvest home, A slow grand age, and rich with all increase. But now, for us, wild Winter, and the need Of sowings for new Spring, and blood for seed. Wilfred Owen

War broke: and now the Winter of the world With perishing great darkness closes in. The foul tornado, centred at Berlin, Is over all the width of Europe whirled, Rending the sails of progress. Rent or furled Are all Art's ensigns. Verse wails. Now begin Famines of thought and feeling. Love's wine's thin. The grain of human Autumn rots, down-hurled.

Yet the vast majority were published in black and white, which perhaps, from our perspective, seems more suited [as though it were shocking to make beauty out of suffering and slaughter].

It may be worth noting in passing that Matania painted war in glowing color.

In keeping with this, is the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Seigfried Sassoon, both of whom fought in the trenches. Sassoon himself was a decorated hero who became progressively more disillusioned as the war progressed. After the war ended, he threw his medals in the sea. His friend Wilfred Owen did not survive the war. And this perhaps is the difference, that what Matania observed, they experienced. Perhaps we need both their words and his pictures to understand my grandfather's war.

In this he was by no means alone. Here, for example, is Frank Earle Schoonover's depiction of Sergeant York. In October 1918, as a newly-promoted corporal, Alvin York was one of a group of seventeen soldiers assigned to infiltrate German lines and silence a machine gun position. After the American patrol had captured a large group of enemy soldiers, German small arms fire killed six Americans and wounded three. York was the highest ranking of those still able to fight, so he took charge. While his men guarded the prisoners, York attacked the machine gun position, killing several German soldiers with his rifle before running out of ammunition. Six German soldiers charged him with bayonets, and York drew his pistol and killed all of them. The German officer responsible for the machine gun position had emptied his pistol while firing at York but failed to hit him. This officer then offered to surrender and York accepted. York and his men marched back to their unit's command post with more than 130 prisoners. By all accounts, York was a humble man and a genuine hero who ardently refused the limelight.

It is this latter point regarding morale that I think sheds light on Matania's depictions of the battlefields.

The Battle of the Somme was an Anglo-French offensive of July to November 1916. The opening day of the offensive (1 July 1916) was the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army, suffering 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 dead. The entire Somme offensive cost the British Army some 420,000 casualties. The French suffered another estimated 200,000 casualties and the Germans an estimated 500,000. Gun fire wasn't the only factor taking lives; the diseases that emerged in the trenches were a major killer on both sides. The living conditions made it so that countless diseases and infections occurred, such as trench foot, shell shock, blindness/burns from mustard gas, lice, trench fever, cooties (body lice) and the ‘Spanish Flu’, so-called because reports of a flu epidemic among the soldiers was censored to maintain morale, while journalists were free to report on it's impact in neutral Spain.

When I was ten or eleven, I asked my grandfather if he fought in the Great War. He told me that he had participated in many battles in the trenches, and had survived the Battle of the Somme, which he singled out as the worst of all, and far from describing heroic deeds, he talked about the endless suffering - and the mud. I asked him how he'd survived where so many others had died, and he said there was no particular reason. Many of his friends had died, he'd just been lucky.