Wartime song
I thoroughly enjoyed Andrew Green’s investigation of the possible inspirations of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending (January issue), but balked slightly at his assertion that ‘the interruption of the First World War surely prevented Philip Napier Miles from visiting Italy’. In the First World War, Italy was allied with the Entente Powers (France, the UK, Russia, Japan and – after 1917 – the US), rather than the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottomans). It would therefore have been fairly easy for Miles to move back and forth between the UK and Italy then, and thus not necessarily have to cram the writing of Sword Song into a few months in early 1919. He could perhaps have worked on it throughout the conflict.
Joseph Nicholas, Tottenham
