Details

Written by Administrator

Category: The First Fab Four

Published: 24 May 2022

Hits: 2027

Spend 40 minutes in

the poet's company with

Songs that draw on around

two dozen Shelley poems and give access

to the poet’s empowering lyrical genius.

Click cover to download

Streaming now - listen on Spotify 

With a major reassessment of Shelley taking place around

the 200^th anniversary of his death (8^th July 1822), and with

figures such as Benjamin Zephaniah and Ben Okri trumpeting

his role as a supporter of political and personal freedom,

‘Shelley Songs’ is a timely and valuable contribution to

the developing enthusiasm for the poet, providing an

easygoing encounter with his work.

So what's he all about?

Not only a poet, translator, essayist, but a radical democrat in his time,

the poet still fascinates with the modernity of his thinking:

'The quantity of nutritious vegetable matter consumed in

fattening the carcase of an ox could afford ten times the sustenance ...

if gathered immediately from the bosom of the earth.'

''A political or religious system may burn and imprison

those who investigate their principles; but it is

an invariable sign of their falsehood and hollowness'

'Hope, as Coleridge says, is a solemn duty

we owe alike to ourselves and to the world'.

With a major reassessment of Shelley taking place

around the 200^th anniversary of his death (8^th July 1822),

and with figures such as Benjamin Zephaniah and Ben Okri

trumpeting his role as a supporter of political and personal

freedom, ‘Shelley Songs’ enables a better understanding of his

work - fusing lyrics from around 2 dozen poems

into a 40 minute album.

Track listing:

Many a Green Isle

Rise like Lions

Wild Spirit

The World’s Great Age

Spirit of Delight

Heart of Hearts

Immortal Deity

Paradise of Exiles

The Pine Forest

The Triumph of Life

To Jane

The Funeral

Adonais

Background info, lyrics at:

https://www.thefirstfabfour.co.uk/index.php/lyrics

AND IF HE REMINDS YOU OF.... 

HERE ARE SOME THOUGHTS .... 

Through a Shelleyan lens:

The life (and death) of John Ono Lennon

John Lennon once wondered whether he would be compared to George Formby

or Leonardo da Vinci,thereby acknowledging the two possible poles of  his reputation:

popular entertainer through to immortal artist. Given the continuing interest in him,

the question of his reputation and how he will come to be seen has a clear pertinence.

 

 

What I want to do is cross the well-established (and voluminous) literature

on the nineteenth century poet Shelley with the burgeoning and  increasingly

serious-minded discussion of John Lennon's life and work.

 

 

As an admirer of Shelley I have long been intrigued both by the striking 

similarities in their respective livesand the way that Shelley's thinking on the

social role and personal dynamics of poetry illuminates Lennon's life.

 

 

To do this is to cut across the mental categories we build for ourselves,

so I must plead for more indulgence than once granted to me when I  proposed

a connection between Lennon and Shelley. The very idea was ludicrous I was told:

the immortal Shelley and that drug addicted Lennon !

 

 

 

Actually that was not a very happy attempt at creating a distinction

between the two,for laudanum (opium dissolved in brandy) was freely  available

in Shelley's era,  and though the records of his use of it are scanty -  restricted to

Thomas Love Peacock's description of his  reliance on it during the turmoil

of his separation from Harriet and his new love for Mary Godwin -

an educated guess would be that he  consistently used it (at the very least)

as a pain killer during his attacks of nephritis. And the comment was hardly fair

to John Lennon;   he may have used different drugs at different times of his life

but he consistently broke the hold that any managed to gain over him

and  cannot be considered to have had an addictive personality.

 

 

 

Most admirers of Shelley would uphold his relevance to the contemporary world:  

thinking perhaps, of lines from The Masque of Anarchy when  freedom was snuffed

out in Tiananmen Square or remembering lines from Adonais at the death of some

loved figure. Shelleyans would uphold his  insights into artistic processes and 

creativity and see them borne out in the modern world.

 

 

To look at John Lennon through his eyes - though  this cuts across time,

generations,'high' and 'low' culture and (curse this British class system) class -

is therefore not so outlandish as  it might appear. However, it requires a sense of

history and of the movement of culture to see through their differing artistic media

and appreciate the  connection of spirit that the two share. Shelley was a highly

literate writer who drew ona wide range of sources - from the myths and philosophy 

of Ancient Greece to the social theorists of the French Revolution to the most

recent theories in the fields ofgeology and zoology. Lennon was an 

intellectual working in a field which has usually prided itself on its

unintellectual nature. 

 

 

 

"Don't know much about history .... don't know  much about biology ..."

the song proclaimed: pop/rock music aimed for the lowest common denominator

- a fact that Lennon in his last interviews  said he found frustrating at times. 

There were subtleties he could not express in his medium.

 

 

Yet their different art forms - poetry and rock/pop - are not mutually exclusive.

(It could indeed be argued that the poetic impulse in society  is now,

to a large degree, expressed in popular music). John Lennon certainly drew on the

same kind of inspiration that has always informed the  finest poetry.

This can be demonstrated by looking at the model of poetic creativity

that Shelley put forward in his 'Defence of Poetry',

and  comparing it to how John Lennon saw his muse.

 

 

 

Lennon distinguished between what he called 'craftsman' writing and

what he saw as pure inspiration. He described how he had written

'Across the  Universe':  lying in bed one night with his wife Cynthia - who was talking ...

and talking ... and talking ...suddenly the first line came to  mind. 

He described it as being seized by something which would not let him go and

would not let him sleep until he had gone downstairs

and  completed the lyric.  It began, in a pleasingly tangential manner,

with the line: 'Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup .....'

 

 

The similarity with Shelley's thinking on poetic inspiration is obvious.

"A man cannot say 'I will write poetry'. Not even the greatest poet  can say it, for

the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence,

like an inconstant wind,awakens to transitory brightness".  Like Lennon,

who talked at length about the creative impulse in his final interviews,

Shelley saw 'the toil and perspiration recommended by critics'  as secondary.

He conceded however, that 'though the origin of poetry is native

and involuntary, it requires severe labour in its development'.

 

 

 

So there is this core connection between the two, relating to their experience

of the creative impulse.  In the realm of their social and political  thinking there are

also striking similarities.  On religion:  for Lennon Christianity would 'vanish and shrink'

while for Shelley 'Faiths and Empires  gleam/Like wrecks of a dissolving dream'. 

They both expressed a sense of political frustration and a desire for greater

individual freedom, Lennon  calling for 'Power to the people'

and Shelley issuing his ringing call: 'Rise like lions after slumber'.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Both supported women's rights as a matter  of principle, with virtually identical

thoughts on her status: for Lennon 'Women are the slaves of the slaves'

while Shelley had asked 'Can Man be  free if Woman be a slave ?'

 

 

 

They both abandoned their first wives for a partner who fulfilled the

Shelleyan definition of true love - a love that went beyond sex and was

a  'thirst for communion not merely of the senses but of our whole nature,

intellectual, imaginative and sensitive'. (The comparison, incidentally, 

reveals that the passing of divorce laws in the intervening period enabled the deserted

twentieth century Cynthia to do what the nineteenth century  Harriet could not: 

begin her life anew).

 

 

 

Both had utopian aspects to their work and realised the value of

putting forward a vision  - Lennon in Imagine and Shelley in the final

Act of  Prometheus Unbound, Hellas and other works. This relates to something

we can see fairly clearly about Shelley but only dimly about Lennon: their 

role as 'unacknowledged legislators', Shelley's formulation that poets were ultimately

more influential than 'reasoners'. They anticipated  movements in consciousness

and in society and established them in people's minds. But they did this in a curious way -

not by overt preaching  but by bringing pleasure through their work, which,

however, went on to have a social and moral impact. 'Poetry strengthens

the moral nature  of man like exercise strengthens a limb'.

 

 

 

This poetic model, put forward in Shelley's 'Defence of Poetry',

(compare to Keith Richards'  comment that the fall of communism in Eastern Europe 

might have had more to do with rock n roll than most people realise) helps to explain

the relationship between Lennon's place in the business of  'entertainment' and what

may come to be seen as the high seriousness of his role as 'unacknowledged

legislator'. For an artist like this there is a tension between instruction and pleasure.

Lennon's song Imagine can be seen as working because art and  politics

were perfectly combined: his album 'Some Time in New York City' on the other hand

  failing because the politics overwhelmed the artistry.   It was a tightrope Shelley

walked as well, though he would claim, when faced with the complaint

that he had too great a 'passion for reforming  the world',

that 'didactic poetry is my abhorrence'.

 

 

 

'Poets are the antenna of the race' John Keats wrote, and Shelley

can be seen as a poet who picked up on the social changes of his era - such 

as the increasing energy available to humanity at the dawn of the industrial revolution

and the increased demand for democratic rights in the  emerging urban society.

  Similarly Lennon picked up on the changes in twentieth century society - the world

as a 'global village' as seen in  NASA's photographs and the accompanying feeling

that humanity could and should evolve away from warfare - and used them in his art.

 

 

 

Those are the large brush  similarities to which attention can be drawn

but there are others - smaller, quirkier, but perhaps no less revealing.   They both

picked up influences from outside, or rather, we find tiny mundane things of life

sparking off some train of creativity.  One example  of this in Shelley's work is the

manner in which his poem 'Swellfoot the Tyrant' (a porcine satire on the marital

difficulties of the British  royal family) was suggested:  reading one of his poems

aloud to some friends on the balcony of a house in the village of San Giuliano di Pisa 

(which overlooked the village market square) he had been interrupted

by the increasingly riotous noise of pigs in the square.

 

 

 

A corresponding example from Lennon's work was the way his song

'I am the Walrus' came about - the melody of the first line being based on the sound

of an ambulance siren heard in the distance.   And it is, incidentally, astonishing to

find the idea expressed in the first line of the song  ("I am he as you are he as

you are me and we are all together") almost exactly echoed in a line from

Shelley's prose:  "The words I and you and they are grammatical devices

invented simply for arrangement, and totally devoid of the intense

and exclusive sense usually attached to them".

 

 

 

Another significant intellectual equivalent is 'All you need is Love' (Lennon)/

'Love is .... the sole law which should govern the moral world'  (Shelley). 

But there is something else to be found in their works that is even more significant.

Both of them referred their audiences back to  one of their key lyrics, lyrics that

had expressed something central about themselves as artists. 

 

 

 

It may seem odd to compare Lennon's 'Strawberry  Fields Forever' with 

Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' but they have a common  root: 

both were written at times of personal crisis or uncertainty. 

Shelley, in the autumn of 1819, faced ferocious attack from reviewers,

a domestic crisis due to the loss of his children and, in the Peterloo Massacre, 

the apparent death of his democratic political ideals. Lennon, with the Beatles'

touring days just ended, was going through a kind of crisis of  identity

-- where was he to go from here ?

 

 

 

The lyrics confronted these situations and as an expression of their

importance were later overtly pointed out: 'I told you about Strawberry Fields' 

said Lennon on the White Album; 'The breath whose might I have

invoked in song' wrote Shelley in Adonais.  They both looked back to childhood,

Shelley remembering how he could seemingly outrun the wind -

'when to outstrip thy skyey speed/Scarce seemed a vision'

and Lennon recalling youthful  days in the garden of the Strawberry Fields

home in Liverpool. 'When I was a boy, everything was right' was how

he had expressed it elsewhere.

 

 

 

Both lyrics restored a kind of confidence and cleared the way for future creative work:

Lennon going on to work on Sergeant Pepper and Shelley  completing

Prometheus Unbound. They were examples of artistic renewal;  hence Shelley's

scribbled  quote from Euripides in his notebook under  the finished poem:

'By virtuous power, I, a mortal, vanquish thee a mighty god !'

 

 

 

There are those today who look for political motives behind both Shelley's

and Lennon's early deaths: the Italian authorities contriving to ram  his boat

(it was found with its bow stove in) or the CIA somehow

managing to eliminate Lennon. There is not a shred of evidence to support

these  theories, yet their deaths do have certain more subtle things in common.

 

 

 

On the back cover of Double Fantasy John and Yoko are pictured

on the pavement outside their Dakota home, very deliberately looking out towards 

Central Park. The symbolism is clear:  they are looking out to the world,

ending the isolation of the previous years. Similarly, at the time of  Shelley's death,

he was in the process of engagement with the world, setting up a journal as a literary

and political mouthpiece.  It was on a  journey connected

with it that he was drowned, like Lennon having his life cut short,

his work left unfulfilled.

 

 

 

It is in Adonais, Shelley's elegy for Keats, that one can find a poetic reading

of John Lennon's puzzling, almost accidental death. The  physical facts of his death

in the dark doorway of the Dakota seem to find expression there: 

'when he lay pierced by the shaft which flies  in darkness'.  Then, 'he went, unterrified,

into the gulf of death; ('Death is getting out of one car into another' - Lennon)

but his clear  Sprite (spirit) still reigns o'er earth' - not an exaggeration when his phrase

'Give Peace a chance' now regularly appears on politician's  lips.

 

 

 

The murderer (Shelley had been told that Keats had been hastened to his

death-bed by cruel reviews) is 'the noteless blot on a remembered  name',

but as for the poet - 'from the contagion of the world's slow stain

he is now secure' being 'part of the loveliness he once made more  lovely'. 

That final touch might seem over-sentimental to a modern reader, but there is nothing

sentimental in the final ominous image of Adonais,  with which Shelley provides

an image of the poet, not dallying among flowers, or as Keats put it, being some

'pet lamb in a sentimental farce',  but as someone driven out to sea

by the very wind (of inspiration) that, in the Ode to the West Wind,

he had welcomed unreservedly.

 

 

 

 'The breath whose might I have invoked in song              

  Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven

  Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

  Whose sails were never to the tempest given ....

  I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar .....'

 

 

 

What Lennon's death confronted the post-war generation with was exactly this

(previously unsuspected) perspective - the perils of the poetic life. 

The poem concludes with a deliberately pointed compliment to Keats:

 

 

 

  ...While burning through the inmost veil of heaven

     The soul of Adonais, burning like a star

     Beacons from the abode where the eternal are'.

 

 

 

Shelley, in opposition to the critics of the age who had sneered at Keats

and his wor  k,  was placing him in his pantheon of the great and illustrious  dead.

The question is then, will a similar process occur in the case of John Lennon ?

Will he come to be seen - as the parallels between them suggest - 

as a poet in the Shelleyan mould, not just a simple rock n' roller but

an 'unacknowledged legislator' who 'touched the world with living flame' ?  

Though no one can be sure of the judgement of posterity,

it is certainly a strong possibility.

 

 

 'He was a morning star amongst the living

  Now that his spirit is fled   

  He shines in the heavens like the evening star

  He gives new splendour to the dead'.

 

 

 

 

Click images for more on Shelley's fellow poets

 

 

                                               

 

 

 

 

TOGETHER THEY WERE THE FIRST FAB FOUR!

 

 

 

 

Details

Written by Administrator

Category: The First Fab Four

Published: 17 May 2022

Hits: 3543

Keats YouTube biography

John Keats - his life and achievements

A brief (9 minute) audio biography of John Keats

 with images of locations associated with the poet.

Why 'strangely encouraging'? Because Keats:

• overcame childhood traumas,
• put those traumas into his creative journey,
• abandoned a potentially lucrative career to be true to his vocation,
• turned himself into a world-class poet in a three-year period, arrived at his achievement through determination and false starts as well as instinctive genius, and
• created a body of work that would eventually secure his place as a poet as great as any of his time.
• More on Keats from Leigh Hunt's perspective in the video 'The First Fab Four'

DIP INTO TWO OF HIS GREATEST LYRICS HERE,

                           TO AUTUMN                                               ON THE SHORE

         'Among the river sallows, borne aloft'... Keats Walk,              'Then on the shore I stand alone and think

           Winchester, at the time of year To Autumn was composed        Till love and fame to nothingness do sink'

(How beautiful the season is now, a temperate sharpness in the air...

Somehow a stubble plain looks warm,

this struck me so much on my walk that I composed upon it....)

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd  cottage-trees,                               
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease
For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells.


Where are the songs of Spring ? Ay, where are they ?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

In the song’s spoken introduction (from a letter of 22/9/1819) Keats says that the poem was inspired by seeing the setting sun turning the stubble fields red. But this key image figures almost casually in the final verse – ‘and touch the stubble plains with rosy hue’.

Shortly before writing To Autumn he had written: ‘Autumn is encroaching – for the Autumn fog over a rich land is like the steam from cabbage water’. Could this down-to-earth image of the fog be the beginnings of the poem’s famous first line?

Scholars say that manuscript evidence indicates that verses 1 & 3 of the poem were written at the same sitting, and that verse 2 was added later. In it he compared the autumn to the various occupations of the Hampshire people he observed around him in Winchester.

Some say that the reference to the gleaner in verse 2 has a political resonance. Keats was probably aware of prosecutions that had taken place for gleaning after the passing of the 1815 corn laws (they had been denounced in the letters page of the Examiner, which he read regularly). 'By reinscribing the word ('gleaner') into poetry and into the poetic tradition, Keats was making (consciously or not) a claim for the legitimacy of the act of gleaning: he discovered another way of writing politics into poetry, one that, through its silence, exerted a political pressure of presupposition' (andrew j. bennett).

To Autumn was written shortly after the Peterloo massacre, when demonstrators in Manchester calling for the vote for all British men and women had been attacked by yeomanry and cavalrymen. 11 had been killed, 600 wounded. Keats had been in London recently and had witnessed a tumultuous demonstration there greeting the main speaker Henry Hunt and survivors from the event.

Could the tone of the poem, so full and calm, be a reaction to the political and financial chaos that Peterloo threatened to unleash ? It has been said that Britain at this time was closer to revolution than it had ever been since the Civil War – though memories of that civil conflict were fresher than they are now and very few will have wanted to repeat those days.

Underlying the poem is the theme of change, but change unfolding peacefully and naturally. Maybe this is Keats’s subliminal political message after Peterloo. He had written once ‘I hope to put something to the liberal side of the question before I die’.

Rock and pop stars often comment on current political matters. Very often there’s a directness of approach: perhaps Keats’s poem To Autumn shows another way of reflecting such issues ?

7. ON THE SHORE

Source: Untitled sonnet ‘When I have fears’

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain;
Before high-piled books in charactery
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain
When I behold upon the sky’s night face
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance
And when I feel fair creature of an hour
That I may never look upon thee more
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love
Then on the shore I stand alone and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink

Keats’s sonnet ‘When I have fears’, titled here ‘On the Shore’, is on the theme of untimely death. Though his early death at the age of 25 gives the poem poignancy, it was written as a literary exercise, before Keats knew of his fatal infection with tuberculosis, perhaps in response to one of Shakespeare’s sonnets (no 64). The ‘fair creature of an hour’ is thought to refer to a girl glimpsed at the Vauxhall gardens in London.

The poem reveals Keats's sceptical attitude towards the idea of an afterlife. As a freethinker who refused the consolations of religion even on his deathbed, he could not be satisfied with such predictions, or any other conception of an afterlife. All he can say, confronted with the issue of death ‘before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain’, is that: ‘On the shore, I stand alone and think/Till love and fame to nothingness do sink’.

A longer read:

Even in the World War I trenches Keats's work lived on: 

Keats's 'To Autumn' and Wilfred  Owen's 'Spring Offensive'.

Every autumn weather forecasters in Britain quote the line

‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ from Keats’s great poem ‘To Autumn’.

This essay assesses its influence on a poem written in a battle zone in 1917.

• In 1917 one of Wilfred Owen’s junior officers, John Foulkes, who incidentally had no idea that Owen was a poet,

• quoted a piece of Keats’s work to him and noticed how his face ‘shone with wonder and delight’. Unknowingly, he had touched a sweet spot for Owen. The late scholar of Wilfred Owen’s life and work Dominic Hibberd called him ‘the last great heir to the Romantics’, and though he also noted that Owen thought Shelley a ‘greater genius’ than Keats, with a conception of the social role of the poet that would sustain him in the trenches, it was Keats rather than Shelley whose influence can be traced in what Hibberd described as Owen’s ‘last and best war poem’, ‘Spring Offensive’.

   Owen had absorbed Keats’s work in his late adolescence, and Hibberd’s assessment is that ‘Keats taught him how to use the sound of words and the shapes of poems’. My contention is that ‘Spring Offensive’ draws on the atmosphere and words of Keats’s ‘To Autumn’, to evoke a scene of beauty poised on the brink of hell. It was not that Owen had a copy of ‘To Autumn’ open in front of him as he wrote ‘Spring Offensive’, but the subconscious influence I would argue is clear.

   That very situation of ‘Spring Offensive’ recalls ‘To Autumn’, for the scene that Keats conjured up in his poem, the Hampshire landscape around Winchester, is also trembling on the brink of destruction. Winter will sweep in and, we all know, put an end to the warm tranquil landscape Keats was describing. It was poised, like the soldiers in ‘Spring Offensive’ on the brink of change.

   Owen’s poem begins with an image of ease: having walked up a long valley some of the soldiers ‘carelessly sleep’ (‘on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep’ - Keats) . On the march through the ‘warm field’ (‘until they think warm days will never cease’ – Keats ) ‘the buttercup had blessed with gold their slow boots coming up’(‘conspiring with him how to load and bless’ - Keats) and now, on the ridge, the soldiers who did not sleep looked back on the valley and saw ‘the long grass swirled by the May breeze’.

   ‘In a wailful choir the small gnats mourn’ wrote Keats in To Autumn; the grass that the soldiers look upon is ‘murmurous with wasp and midge’ and though ‘the summer oozed though their veins/Like an injected drug for their bodies’ pains’ ‘(Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours ….. Drowsed with the fume of poppies’ -Keats) they know this cannot last. ‘Sharp on their souls hung the imminent line of grass’; the ridge over which they would have make their attack and leave their temporary haven of warm restfulness behind is beckoning ominously.

   There are other echoes from Keats: The men who look back over the valley (‘Marvelling they stood’ seem like ‘stout Cortez’ looking for the first time on the Pacific in Keats’s On first looking into Chapman’s Homer). And a fragmentary line in Spring Offensive - ‘they breathe like trees unstirred’ – as well as the entirety of the poem’s first three stanzas - recall for me the deep stillness evoked in the opening lines of Keats’s ‘Hyperion’:

   Deep in the shady sadness of a vale

  Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,

  Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,

  Sat gray-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,

  Still as the silence round about his lair;

  Forest on forest hung about his head

  Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,

  Not so much life as on a summer’s day

  Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass,

  But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.’

   The soldiers, one could say, were in that kind of suspended zone, it’s the same kind of atmosphere, and is, I would say, an importation of a tone and ambience originating in Keats’s work into the midst of a battle zone in 1917.

   'They remained there

   ‘Till like a cold gust thrills the little word

   At which each body and its soul begird

   And tighten them for battle’…..

   The order has come, and

  ‘Soon they topped the hill, and raced together

   Over an open stretch of herb and heather

   Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned

   With fury against them; earth set sudden cups

   In thousands for their blood…..’

    And so Keats’s hidden destructive winter is brought into play by Wilfred Owen. He goes beyond Keats, or realizes the hidden and implicit element of To Autumn, and leaves him behind at that point.

  But he has used him, I would argue, to great effect, creating a hugely poignant contrast between images drawn from Keats relating to warmth, rest, peace, tranquillity and natural bounty and the hellish realities of the First World War.