gerwyn wiliams
come to an end, as one feared it would, even if it hasn’t happened in one’s own country, is a
prettyshattering experience, and doesn’t exactly augur well for the future.^56
It was as if the experience of war—what one might venture to call the existentialist
appeal of war that he had at one stage desired—now nauseated him.^57 Indeed, the
experience seems nearly to have destroyed him, so much so that he felt that he
no longer had anything to say as a poet. And according to his biographer, Non
Indeg Evans, ‘When the war ended he did not wish to share any of his experiences
in Europe with his family and friends, and Alis Llywelyn-Williams confirms that
remembering the day when he was injured (and his driver killed) frightened him for
the rest of his life.’^58 However, rather than yielding to the nihilism and anarchy that
he witnessed all around him, Llywelyn-Williams eventually managed to discover a
new significance in art.
Survivor
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••If he witnessed signs of nihilism and anarchy anywhere, he did so in Berlin in
August 1945. By the beginning of May 1945, Berlin had been conquered by Stalin’s
Red Army, Hitler had committed suicide, and Germany had accepted defeat. The
sequence of three poems, ‘In Berlin—August 1945’—the ‘most honest’ poems that
he ever composed according to his own description in conversation toward the
end of his life^59 —is the best testimony available in Welsh, from the perspective of
an eyewitness, of the destruction wrought upon the German capital at the end of
the War. After being injured on St David’s Day 1945, in an explosion that killed
his driver, he was hospitalized for more than two months in Belgium before being
assigned to ‘a public relations unit, so to speak—an excellent job—taking war
(^56) Llywelyn-Williams to Alis Llywelyn-Williams, 24 July 1945, English-language letter quoted in
Non Indeg Evans, ‘Bywyd a Gwaith Alun Llywelyn-Williams’ (unpublished Ph.D.thesis, University of
Wales, Bangor, 1995), 185. 57
Llywelyn-Williams had been led into the Army convinced of the moral case for war. However, the
semi-autobiographical unpublished novel ‘Gwˆys i’r Gad’ (‘A Call to Arms’) quotes the response of the
protagonist, Gareth, to a letter received in May 1944 from his friend, the BBC wartime correspondent
Wynford Vaughan Thomas, who was at the time located in Anzio, Italy. Warned to stay put on the
Home Front for his own well-being, Gareth struggles to deny the attraction of war: ‘It would be
foolish and repugnant to wish to leave the peace and quiet of Brecon in order to take part in the
destruction that was sweeping through Italy and the whole of Europe. Certainly, he didn’t wish to do
so. He loathed such an irrational and dangerous attraction. And yet...and yet....’ The letter received
from Wynford Vaughan Thomas was a factual document, translated from the original English and
incorporated within the novel; four months after receiving it, Llywelyn-Williams would be venturing
abroad. An edited version of ‘Gwˆys i’r Gad’ appears as an appendix to Evans’s doctoral thesis, ‘Bywyd
a Gwaith Alun Llywelyn-Williams’. 58
Evans, ‘Bywyd a Gwaith Alun Llywelyn-Williams’, 85.
(^59) Llywelyn-Williams, ‘Bardd y Mis: Alun Llywelyn-Williams’,Barddas, 51 (Apr. 1981), 1.