Week 4 Discussion

HISTORY 167A

POEMS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Rupert Brooke (1887-1914)

Peace

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,

And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,

Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,

And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,

And all the little emptiness of love!

Oh! We, who have known shame, we have found release there,

Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,

Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;

Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there

But only agony, and that has ending;

And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England’s, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thought by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Alfred Lichtenstein (1889-1914)

Prayer Before Battle

The soldiers pray fervently, every man for himself: God, protect me from bad luck. Father, son and holy ghost, Please don’t let any shells hit me, Or those scoundrels, our enemies Imprison or shoot me, Don’t let me kick the bucket like a dog For the dear Fatherland. See, I would like to still live Milk cows, bang girls, And beat up that rascal, Sepp. And get boozed up many times Before I meet my holy end. See, I’ll pray well and willingly Say seven rosaries daily, If, God, in your mercy You kill my friends Huber or Meier But spare me. But if I’ve got to take it Let me not be wounded too heavily. Send me a light leg-wound, A small arm injury, So that I return home as a hero Who can tell many a story.    Translated from the German by Peter Appelbaum

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

Base Details

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath

I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base,

And speed glum heroes up the line to death.

You’d see me with my puffy petulant face,

Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,

Reading the Roll of Honour. "Poor young chap,"

I’d say—"I used to know his father well;

Yes, we’ve lost heavily in this last scrap."

And when the war is done and youth stone dead,

I’d toddle safely home and die—in bed.

Attack

At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun

In the wild purple of the glow’ring sun,

Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud

The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,

Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.

The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed

With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,

Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.

Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,

They leave their trenches, going over the top,

While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,

And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,

Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

The General

"Good morning; good-morning!" the General said

When we met him last week on our way to the line.

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead,

And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

"He’s a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

They

The Bishop tells us: "When the boys come back

They will not be the same; for they’ll have fought

In a just cause: they lead the last attack

On Anti-Christ; their comrades’ blood has bought

New right to breed an honourable race,

They have challenged Death and dared him in the face."

"We’re none of us the same!" the boys reply.

"For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s gone stone blind;

Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;

And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find

A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change."

And the Bishop said: "The ways of God are strange!"

Glory of Women

You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave,

Or wounded in a mentionable place.

You worship decorations; you believe

That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.

You make us shells. You listen with delight,

By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.

You crown our distant ardours while we fight,

And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.

You can’t believe that British troops “retire”

When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,

Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood.

O German mother dreaming by the fire,

While you are knitting socks to send your son

His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

Counter-Attack

We’d gained our first objective hours before

While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,

Pallid, unshaved and thirsty, blind with smoke.

Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,

With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed,

And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.

The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs

High-booted, sprawled and groveled along the saps

And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,

Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;

And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,

Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.

And then the rain began,—the jolly old rain!

A yawning soldier knelt against the bank,

Staring across the morning blear with fog;

He wondered when the Allemands would get busy;

And then, of course, they started with five-nines

Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud.

Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst

Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell,

While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke.

He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear,

Sick for escape,—loathing the strangled horror

And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.

An officer came blundering down the trench:

"Stand-to and man the fire-step!" On he went…

Gasping and bawling, "Fire-step… counter-attack!"

Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right

Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left;

And stumbling figures looming out in front.

"O Christ, they’re coming at us!" Bullets spat,

And he remembered his rifle… rapid fire…

And started blazing wildly… then a bang

Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out

To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked

And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,

Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans…

Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,

Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.

Repression of War Experience

Now light the candles; one; two; there’s a moth;

What silly beggars they are to blunder in

And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame—

No, no, not that,—it’s bad to think of war,

When thoughts you’ve gagged all day come back to scare you;

And it’s been proved that soldiers don’t go mad

Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts

That drive them out to jabber among the trees.

Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand.

Draw a deep breath; stop thinking; count fifteen,

And you’re right as rain…

Why won’t it rain?...

I wish there’d be a thunder-storm to-night,

With bucketsful of water to sluice the dark,

And make the roses hang their drooping heads.

Books; what a jolly company they are,

Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves,

Dressed in dim brown, and black, and white, and green,

And every kind of colour. Which will you read?

Come on; O do read something; they’re so wise.

I tell you all the wisdom of the world

Is waiting for you on those shelves; and yet

You sit and gnaw your nails, and let your pipe out,

And listen to the silence: on the ceiling

There’s one big, dizzy moth that bumps and flutters;

And in the breathless air outside the house

The garden waits for something that delays.

There must be crowds of ghosts among the trees,—

Not people killed in battle,—they’re in France,—

But horrible shapes in shrouds—old men who died

Slow, natural deaths,—old men with ugly souls,

Who wore their bodies out with nasty sins.

You’re quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;

You’d never think there was a bloody war on!...

Hark! Thud, thud, thud,—quite soft…they never cease—

Those whispering guns—O Christ, I want to go out

And screech at them to stop—I’m going crazy;

I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns.

The Poet as Hero

You've heard me, scornful, harsh, and discontented, 

   Mocking and loathing War: you've asked me why 

Of my old, silly sweetness I've repented— 

   My ecstasies changed to an ugly cry. 

You are aware that once I sought the Grail, 

   Riding in armour bright, serene and strong; 

And it was told that through my infant wail 

   There rose immortal semblances of song. 

But now I've said good-bye to Galahad, 

   And am no more the knight of dreams and show: 

For lust and senseless hatred make me glad, 

   And my killed friends are with me where I go. 

Wound for red wound I burn to smite their wrongs; 

And there is absolution in my songs.

A Working Party

Three hours ago he blundered up the trench, 
 Sliding and poising, groping with his boots; 
 Sometimes he tripped and lurched against the walls 
 With hands that pawed the sodden bags of chalk. 
 He couldn't see the man who walked in front; 
 Only he heard the drum and rattle of feet 
 Stepping along barred trench boards, often splashing 
 Wretchedly where the sludge was ankle-deep.

 Voices would grunt 'Keep to your right -- make way!'
 When squeezing past some men from the front-line: 
 White faces peered, puffing a point of red; 
 Candles and braziers glinted through the chinks 
 And curtain-flaps of dug-outs; then the gloom 
 Swallowed his sense of sight; he stooped and swore 
 Because a sagging wire had caught his neck. A flare went up; the shining whiteness spread 
 And flickered upward, showing nimble rats 
 And mounds of glimmering sand-bags, bleached with rain; 
 Then the slow silver moment died in dark. 
 The wind came posting by with chilly gusts 
 And buffeting at the corners, piping thin. 
 And dreary through the crannies; rifle-shots 
 Would split and crack and sing along the night, 
 And shells came calmly through the drizzling air 
 To burst with hollow bang below the hill. 

 Three hours ago, he stumbled up the trench; 
 Now he will never walk that road again: 
 He must be carried back, a jolting lump 
 Beyond all needs of tenderness and care. 

 He was a young man with a meagre wife 
 And two small children in a Midland town, 
 He showed their photographs to all his mates, 
 And they considered him a decent chap 
 Who did his work and hadn't much to say, 
 And always laughed at other people's jokes 
 Because he hadn't any of his own. 

 That night when he was busy at his job 
 Of piling bags along the parapet, 
 He thought how slow time went, stamping his feet 
 And blowing on his fingers, pinched with cold. 
 He thought of getting back by half-past twelve, 
 And tot of rum to send him warm to sleep 
 In draughty dug-out frowsty with the fumes 
 Of coke, and full of snoring weary men. 

 He pushed another bag along the top, 
 Craning his body outward; then a flare 
 Gave one white glimpse of  No Man's Land and wire; 
 And as he dropped his head the instant split 
 His startled life with lead, and all went out. 

Dreamers

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land,

Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.   

In the great hour of destiny they stand,

Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.   

Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win   

Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.

Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin

They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,

And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,   

Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,

And mocked by hopeless longing to regain   

Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,

And going to the office in the train.

On Passing the New Menin Gate

Who will remember, passing through this Gate, the unheroic dead who fed the guns? Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,- Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?     Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.     Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;     Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,     The armies who endured that sullen swamp. Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride 'Their name liveth for ever', the Gateway claims. Was ever an immolation so belied as these intolerably nameless names? Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

(The Menin Gate war memorial at Ypres was built and opened in 1927. It commemorates the British soldiers whose bodies were never found. On its huge panels are carved 54,896 names of men with no known grave who died in this area between 1914 and August 1917. The designer thought there would be plenty of room for all the names, but there was not: a further 34,984 names of missing soldiers (from August 1917 to the end of the war) are carved on panels at Tyne Cot cemetery not far away. The Menin Gate is an integral part of Ypres and the Menin Road, along which people and traffic pass daily, runs through it.)

Does It Matter?

Does it matter?-losing your legs?...


For people will always be kind,


And you need not show that you mind


When the others come in after hunting


To gobble their muffins and eggs. Does it matter ?-losing your sight?...


There's such splendid work for the blind;


And people will always be kind,


As you sit on the terrace remembering


And turning your face to the light. Do they matter?-those dreams from the pit?...


You can drink and forget and be glad,


And people won't say that you're mad;


For they'll know you've fought for your country


And no one will worry a bit.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our 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 tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

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.

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.

Mental Cases

Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?

Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,

Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,

Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ teeth wicked?

Stroke on stroke of pain,—but what slow panic,

Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?

Ever from their hair and through their hands’ palms

Misery swelters. Surely we have perished

Sleeping, and walk hell’ but who these hellish?

—These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.

Memory fingers in their hair of murders,

Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.

Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,

Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.

Always they must see these things and hear them,

Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,

Carnage incomparable, and human squander

Rucked too thick for these men’s extrication.

Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented

Back into their brains, because on their sense

Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-balck;

Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.

—Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,

Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.

—Thus their hands are plucking at each other;

Picking at the rope-knots of their scourging;

Snatching after us who smote them, brother,

Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

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?

Nor 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.

Futility

Move him into the sun— 

Gently its touch awoke him once, 

At home, whispering of fields half-sown. 

Always it woke him, even in France, 

Until this morning and this snow. 

If anything might rouse him now 

The kind old sun will know. 

Think how it wakes the seeds— 

Woke once the clays of a cold star.

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides 

Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir? 

Was it for this the clay grew tall? 

—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil 

To break earth's sleep at all?

Strange Meeting

It seemed that out of battle I escaped 

Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped 

Through granites which titanic wars had groined. 

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, 

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. 

Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared 

With piteous recognition in fixed eyes, 

Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless. 

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,— 

By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell. 

With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained; 

Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground, 

And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan. 

“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.” 

“None,” said that other, “save the undone years, 

The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, 

Was my life also; I went hunting wild 

After the wildest beauty in the world, 

Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair, 

But mocks the steady running of the hour, 

And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here. 

For by my glee might many men have laughed, 

And of my weeping something had been left, 

Which must die now. I mean the truth untold, 

The pity of war, the pity war distilled. 

Now men will go content with what we spoiled. 

Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled. 

They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress. 

None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress. 

Courage was mine, and I had mystery; 

Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: 

To miss the march of this retreating world 

Into vain citadels that are not walled. 

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels, 

I would go up and wash them from sweet wells, 

Even with truths that lie too deep for taint. 

I would have poured my spirit without stint 

But not through wounds; not on the cess of war. 

Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were. 

"I am the enemy you killed, my friend. 

I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned 

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. 

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. 

Let us sleep now. . . ."

The Send-Off

Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way

To the siding-shed,

And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

 

Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray

As men's are, dead.

 

Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp

Stood staring hard,

Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.

Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp

Winked to the guard.

 

So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.

They were not ours:

We never heard to which front these were sent.

 

Nor there if they yet mock what women meant

Who gave them flowers.

 

Shall they return to beatings of great bells

In wild trainloads?

A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,

May creep back, silent, to still village wells

Up half-known roads.

Insensibility

                                      I 

Happy are men who yet before they are killed 

Can let their veins run cold. 

Whom no compassion fleers 

Or makes their feet 

Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers. 

The front line withers. 

But they are troops who fade, not flowers, 

For poets’ tearful fooling: 

Men, gaps for filling: 

Losses, who might have fought 

Longer; but no one bothers. 

                                     II 

And some cease feeling 

Even themselves or for themselves. 

Dullness best solves 

The tease and doubt of shelling, 

And Chance’s strange arithmetic 

Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling. 

They keep no check on armies’ decimation. 

                                     III 

Happy are these who lose imagination: 

They have enough to carry with ammunition. 

Their spirit drags no pack. 

Their old wounds, save with cold, can not more ache. 

Having seen all things red, 

Their eyes are rid 

Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever. 

And terror’s first constriction over, 

Their hearts remain small-drawn. 

Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle 

Now long since ironed, 

Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned. 

                                     IV 

Happy the soldier home, with not a notion 

How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack, 

And many sighs are drained. 

Happy the lad whose mind was never trained: 

His days are worth forgetting more than not. 

He sings along the march 

Which we march taciturn, because of dusk, 

The long, forlorn, relentless trend 

From larger day to huger night. 

                                     V 

We wise, who with a thought besmirch 

Blood over all our soul, 

How should we see our task 

But through his blunt and lashless eyes? 

Alive, he is not vital overmuch; 

Dying, not mortal overmuch; 

Nor sad, nor proud, 

Nor curious at all. 

He cannot tell 

Old men’s placidity from his. 

                                     VI 

But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns, 

That they should be as stones. 

Wretched are they, and mean 

With paucity that never was simplicity. 

By choice they made themselves immune 

To pity and whatever moans in man 

Before the last sea and the hapless stars; 

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores; 

Whatever shares 

The eternal reciprocity of tears.

Arms and the Boy

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade 

How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood; 

Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash; 

And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh. 

Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads, 

Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads, 

Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth 

Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death. 

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple. 

There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple; 

And God will grow no talons at his heels, 

Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.

Greater Love

Red lips are not so red

As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

Kindness of wooed and wooer

Seems shame to their love pure.

O Love, your eyes lose lure

When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!

Your slender attitude

Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,

Rolling and rolling there

Where God seems not to care;

Till the fierce love they bear

Cramps them in death's extreme decrepitude.

Your voice sings not so soft,—

Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft,—

Your dear voice is not dear,

Gentle, and evening clear,

As theirs whom none now hear,

Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.

Heart, you were never hot

Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;

And though your hand be pale,

Paler are all which trail

Your cross through flame and hail:

Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.

Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)

Break of Day in the Trenches

The darkness crumbles away.

It is the same old druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat,

As I pull the parapet’s poppy

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder,

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

The torn fields of France.

What do you see in our eyes

At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens?

What quaver—what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins

Drop, and are ever dropping;

But mine in my ear is safe—

Just a little white with the dust.

Returning, We Hear the Larks

Sombre the night is: 

And, though we have our lives, we know 

What sinister threat lurks there. 

 

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know 

This poison-blasted track opens on our camp— 

On a little safe sleep. 

 

But hark! Joy—joy—strange joy. 

Lo! Heights of night ringing with unseen larks: 

Music showering on our upturned listening faces. 

 

Death could drop from the dark 

As easily as song— 

But song only dropped, 

Like a blind man's dreams on the sand 

By dangerous tides;

Like a girl's dark hair, for she dreams no ruin lies there, 

Or her kisses where a serpent hides.

Louse Hunting

Nudes—stark and glistening, 

Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces 

And raging limbs 

Whirl over the floor one fire. 

For a shirt verminously busy 

Yon soldier tore from his throat, with oaths 

Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice. 

And soon the shirt was aflare 

Over the candle he’d lit while we lay. 

Then we all sprang up and stript 

To hunt the verminous brood. 

Soon like a demons’ pantomime 

The place was raging. 

See the silhouettes agape, 

See the gibbering shadows 

Mixed with the battled arms on the wall. 

See gargantuan hooked fingers 

Pluck in supreme flesh 

To smutch supreme littleness. 

See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling 

Because some wizard vermin 

Charmed from the quiet this revel 

When our ears were half lulled 

By the dark music 

Blown from Sleep’s trumpet.

Dead Man's Dump

The plunging limbers over the shattered track

Racketed with their rusty freight,

Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,

And the rusty stakes like sceptres old

To stay the flood of brutish men

Upon our brothers dear.

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead

But pained them not, though their bones crunched,

Their shut mouths made no moan,

They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,

Man born of man, and born of woman,

And shells go crying over them

From night till night and now.

Earth has waited for them

All the time of their growth

Fretting for their decay:

Now she has them at last!

In the strength of their strength

Suspended - stopped and held.

What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit

Earth! have they gone into you?

Somewhere they must have gone,

And flung on your hard back

Is their souls' sack,

Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.

Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass,

Or stood aside for the half used life to pass

Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,

When the swift iron burning bee

Drained the wild honey of their youth.

What of us, who flung on the shrieking pyre,

Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,

Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,

Immortal seeming ever?

Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,

A fear may choke in our veins

And the startled blood may stop.

The air is loud with death,

The dark air spurts with fire

The explosions ceaseless are.

Timelessly now, some minutes past,

These dead strode time with vigorous life,

Till the shrapnel called 'an end!'

But not to all. In bleeding pangs

Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,

Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

A man's brains splattered on

A stretcher-bearer's face;

His shook shoulders slipped their load,

But when they bent to look again

The drowning soul was sunk too deep

For human tenderness.

They left this dead with the older dead,

Stretched at the crossroads.

Burnt black by strange decay,

Their sinister faces lie

The lid over each eye,

The grass and coloured clay

More motion have than they,

Joined to the great sunk silences.

Here is one not long dead;

His dark hearing caught our far wheels,

And the choked soul stretched weak hands

To reach the living word the far wheels said,

The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,

Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels

Swift for the end to break,

Or the wheels to break,

Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight.

Will they come? Will they ever come?

Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,

The quivering-bellied mules,

And the rushing wheels all mixed

With his tortured upturned sight,

So we crashed round the bend,

We heard his weak scream,

We heard his very last sound,

And our wheels grazed his dead face.

Katharine Tynan (1861-1931)

Joining the Colours

There they go marching all in step so gay!

Smooth-cheeked and golden, food for shells and guns.

Blithely they go as to a wedding day,

The mothers' sons.

The drab street stares to see them row on row

On the high tram-tops, singing like the lark.

Too careless-gay for courage, singing they go

Into the dark.

With tin whistles, mouth-organs, any noise,

They pipe the way to glory and the grave;

Foolish and young, the gay and golden boys

Love cannot save.

High heart! High courage! The poor girls they kissed

Run with them : they shall kiss no more, alas!

Out of the mist they stepped-into the mist

Singing they pass.

Jessie Pope (1868-1941)

War Girls

There's the girl who clips your ticket for the train,

  And the girl who speeds the lift from floor to floor,

There's the girl who does a milk-round in the rain,

  And the girl who calls for orders at your door.

      Strong, sensible, and fit,

      They're out to show their grit,

    And tackle jobs with energy and knack.

      No longer caged and penned up,

      They're going to keep their end up

    Till the khaki soldier boys come marching back.

There's the motor girl who drives a heavy van,

  There's the butcher girl who brings your joint of meat,

There's the girl who cries 'All fares, please!' like a man,

  And the girl who whistles taxis up the street.

      Beneath each uniform

      Beats a heart that's soft and warm,

    Though of canny mother-wit they show no lack;

      But a solemn statement this is,

      They've no time for love and kisses

    Till the khaki soldier-boys come marching back.

Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)

For the Fallen

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,

England mourns for her dead across the sea.

Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,

Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal 

Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,

There is music in the midst of desolation

And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,

Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;

They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: 

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again; 

They sit no more at familiar tables of home;

They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;

They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound, 

Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,

To the innermost heart of their own land they are known

As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust, 

Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;

As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness, 

To the end, to the end, they remain.

John McCrae (1872-1918)

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

    That mark our place; and in the sky

    The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

    Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

        In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

    The torch; be yours to hold it high.

    If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

        In Flanders fields.

Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895-1915)

When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead

When you see millions of the mouthless dead

Across your dreams in pale battalions go,

Say not soft things as other men have said,

That you'll remember. For you need not so.

Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know

It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?

Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.

Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.

Say only this, “They are dead.” Then add thereto,

“Yet many a better one has died before.”

Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you

Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,

It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.

Great death has made all his for evermore.

Robert Graves (1895-1985)

Sergeant-Major Money

It wasn't our battalion, but we lay alongside it,

  So the story is as true as the telling is frank.

They hadn't one Line-officer left, after Arras,

  Except a batty major and the Colonel, who drank.

 

'B' Company Commander was fresh from the Depot,

  An expert on gas drill, otherwise a dud;

So Sergeant-Major Money carried on, as instructed,

  And that's where the swaddies began to sweat blood.

 

His Old Army humour was so well-spiced and hearty

  That one poor sod shot himself, and one lost his wits;

But discipline's maintained, and back in rest-billets

  The Colonel congratulates 'B' Company on their kits.

 

The subalterns went easy, as was only natural

  With a terror like Money driving the machine,

Till finally two Welshmen, butties from the Rhondda,

  Bayoneted their bugbear in a field-canteen.

 

Well, we couldn't blame the officers, they relied on Money;

  We couldn't blame the pitboys, their courage was grand;

Or, least of all, blame Money, an old stiff surviving

  In a New (bloody) Army he couldn't understand.

Recalling War

Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean, The track aches only when the rain reminds. The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood, The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm. The blinded man sees with his ears and hands As much or more than once with both his eyes. Their war was fought these 20 years ago And now assumes the nature-look of time, As when the morning traveller turns and views His wild night-stumbling carved into a hill.

What, then, was war? No mere discord of flags But an infection of the common sky That sagged ominously upon the earth Even when the season was the airiest May. Down pressed the sky, and we, oppressed, thrust out Boastful tongue, clenched fist and valiant yard. Natural infirmities were out of mode, For Death was young again; patron alone Of healthy dying, premature fate-spasm.

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Fear made fine bed-fellows. Sick with delight At life's discovered transitoriness, Our youth became all-flesh and waived the mind. Never was such antiqueness of romance, Such tasty honey oozing from the heart. And old importances came swimming back - Wine, meat, log-fires, a roof over the head, A weapon at the thigh, surgeons at call. Even there was a use again for God -  A word of rage in lack of meat, wine, fire, In ache of wounds beyond all surgeoning.

War was return of earth to ugly earth, War was foundering of sublimities, Extinction of each happy art and faith By which the world has still kept head in air, Protesting logic or protesting love, Until the unendurable moment struck - The inward scream, the duty to run mad.

And we recall the merry ways of guns - Nibbling the walls of factory and church Like a child, piecrust; felling groves of trees Like a child, dandelions with a switch. Machine-guns rattle toy-like from a hill, Down in a row the brave tin-soldiers fall: A sight to be recalled in elder days When learnedly the future we devote To yet more boastful visions of despair.

Vera Brittain (1893-1970)

Roundel

(“Died of Wounds”)

Because you died, I shall not rest again, 

    But wander ever through the lone world wide, 

Seeking the shadow of a dream grown vain 

            Because you died. 

 

I shall spend brief and idle hours beside 

    The many lesser loves that still remain, 

But find in none my triumph and my pride; 

 

And Disillusion's slow corroding stain 

    Will creep upon each quest but newly tried, 

For every striving now shall nothing gain 

            Because you died.

Alan Seeger (1888-1916)

I Have a Rendezvous with Death

I have a rendezvous with Death

At some disputed barricade,

When Spring comes back with rustling shade

And apple-blossoms fill the air—

I have a rendezvous with Death

When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand

And lead me into his dark land

And close my eyes and quench my breath—

It may be I shall pass him still.

I have a rendezvous with Death

On some scarred slope of battered hill,

When Spring comes round again this year

And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep

Pillowed in silk and scented down,

Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,

Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,

Where hushed awakenings are dear ...

But I've a rendezvous with Death

At midnight in some flaming town,

When Spring trips north again this year,

And I to my pledged word am true,

I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)

The Little Car

On the 31st day of August in the year 1914 I left Deauville shortly before midnight In Rouveyre's little car Including his chauffeur there were three of us We said goodbye to a whole epoch Furious giants were looming over Europe The eagles were leaving their eyries expecting the sun Voracious fishes were swimming up from the abysses Nations were rushing together to know each other through and through The dead were trembling with fear in their dark dwellings The dogs were barking in the direction of the frontiers As I went I carried within me all the armies that were fighting I felt them rising within me and spreading out over the regions through which their columns      wound With the forests the happy villages of Belgium Francorchamps and Eau Rouge and the pouhons A region through which invasions are always taking place And the railway arteries along which those who were going away to die Saluted one more time a life full of colours The deep oceans where monsters were stirring In old carcasses of wrecks The unimaginable heights where men fight Higher than the eagle soars Man fights there against man And falls suddenly like a shooting star I felt within me new beings full of dexterity Building a new universe and running it as well A merchant of unheard-of-opulence and of prodigious stature Was setting out an extraordinary display of stock And gigantic shepherds were driving forward Great dumb flocks grazing on words as they went And at them barked all the dogs along the road I shall never                   forget this journey by night during which none                                                                                        of us said a word

      O       dark                    O                                                                       u       departure              tender                     O                                    h    r       when our 3            night of                   villages       towards which    d        r       headlights failed     before the war                               e    i       

BLACKSMITHS  RECALLED                                                                                                     

BETWEEN  MIDNIGHT AND ONE IN THE MORNING                            o                                                     V                      ver   to                                          e r s a                    L i s i e u x                  or else              illes the                      the very                                             g o l d                         blue                                                   en                                                                                                 and 3 times we had to stop to change a burst tire And when having passed through Fountainbleau During the afternoon We got to Paris At the moment at which the mobilization posters were going up We understood my comrade and I That the little car had brought us into a New age And that although we were both already fully grown men We had nevertheless just been born                                                                              French; trans. Oliver Bernard