Their stories may be passing out of living memory, but the voices of those who lived and died during the first world war are being kept alive in a major literary project to commemorate the centenary of the Armistice.
Each day over the 100 days from 5 August until 12 November, one 100-word piece of prose based on the life of a real individual will be published as part of the 100 Days project, covering the centenary of the hundred days offensive.
Each piece of prose is called a centena, a literary form specially created for the project by the writers’ collective 26 Characters Ltd, whose members have produced the works. Each runs to exactly 100 words with the opening and closing three words repeated.
In collaboration with the Imperial War Museums, the centenas will be published on the First World War Centenary Partnership website one at a time from Sunday.
The stories of a diverse collection of individuals from Mahatma Gandhi and Elsie Inglis, founder of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, to Karl Kraus, a Jewish Austrian satirist and Jeanne De-Neve, a Belgian refugee needle worker, aim to reflect experiences of the conflict around the world.
The subjects also include soldiers on the western front, attendants on the hospital ships, nurses protecting patients as bombs fall, wives, husbands, parents and siblings all coping with loss, refugees fleeing their homes and, sometimes, finding hope elsewhere.
The Belfast-based poet Therese Kieran chose the Belgian embroiderer De-Neve, who fled Mechelen with her family and ended up a refugee with her two sisters in Monaghan, Ireland, where they set up a sewing business. They were among up to 250,000 Belgian refugees to flee to the UK and Ireland.
“These three sisters could sew and embroider. Jeanne De-Neve was the eldest and very entrepreneurial, and she immediately got business cards printed in 1914,” said Kieran. They sought work from the “big houses” belonging to landowners, who needed embroidery and lacework.
The sisters, appalled at the poverty they found in Ireland, began teaching local women, “going around in a horse and cart to farms where a lot of the men were out of work, or were serving. They knew this would help women generate an income.” They helped establish a lingerie and undergarment factory in Monaghan – Bel-Broid – which Jeanne continued to visit long after she returned to Belgium.
Kieran said: “The refugee story inspired me. These people came to the UK at a time people were poor. Yet we accommodated them. These Belgians were proud. Those women taught embroidery and sewed. Other refugees did carpentry, or taught French. Their skills were quickly discovered and employed. And, I just think, what a contrast to what we are hearing today. That gripped me.”
Lisa Andrews, a Surrey-based freelance writer and editor, chose her great-grandfather Horace Reginald Sumner, a religious man, believed to have been a pacifist, who worked on the hospital ships as part of the Royal Navy’s Sick Berth Reserves.
Andrews never knew him. But a family story passed down generations told how he once prevented somebody on a hospital ship taking their own life. “So I chose this moment, inspired by him, but seen through the eyes of someone who must have been in a desperate situation,” she said.
“I do know Horace was on the HM Hospital Ship Plassey, which responded to the Battle of Jutland. So Horace would have seen some pretty shocking injuries.”
Of the centenas, which are also to be published in a crowdfunded book, with the profits going to charity, she added: “They reflect a generation that is no longer with us – many of whom felt unable to speak of what they saw, or died before they even had the chance.
“There is a power in the constraint of short-form writing. One hundred words is not very much. But, actually, you can say so much in 100 words. All of our writers have done that. Some of them will absolutely break your heart.”
John Simmons, 26 Characters Ltd founder director, said it was the biggest, most ambitious project in the group’s 15-year-history. “It’s the most moving collection of 100-word stories, each written as a new form, the centena, that provide a memorial to the past and through the act of remembrance gives hope for the future.”
Stitches in Time
By Therese Kieran
A needle’s eye threw her a lifeline:
between finger & thumb
she pinched silver to make a little gold,
told her story via business card:
JEANNE DE-NEVE & SISTERS,
Belgian Embroiders, (late of Maline)
to Ireland’s muddy hem, she trailed a running stitch:
each stitch a step from Mechelen to Monaghan
each stitch a suture mending hearts of women, of men.
She knew the good of soft tarantulle on skin
trained local women,
helped Bel-Broid spread its wings,
clung to kith & kin:
refugees, she never knew they’d be,
their French knots undone, in history-making
steely, through a needle’s eye.
Inspired by Jeanne De-Neve
In service of humanity
By Lisa Andrews
says his name is sumner and that life is sacred
but tell that to the fishes and the higher-ups
since this husk is a tatter of nerves and a glister of scars
says his name and it is a bugle-bright call to arms
that I cannot answer with his too-fresh skin
and his old-as-Methuselah eyes
says his name and it sounds like summer
and for a moment the stink of blistering flesh is swept away
by the sweet tang of newly-mown grass
it is a smell worth fighting for
but the question is am I?
so I says his name.
Inspired by Horace Reginald Sumner
