The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (11 page)

10             Forded that up to the thighs in chill mud

Gone for five days then any sign of life glow,

As the notched stumps or the gray clouds then we stood;

Dead past death from first hour and the needed mood

Of level pain shifting continually to and fro,

Saskatchewan, Ontario, Jack London ran in

My own mind; what in others? these men who finely

Perhaps had chosen danger for reckless and fine chance,

Fate had sent for suffering and dwelling obscenely

Vermin eaten, fed beastly, in vile ditches meanly.

Ivor Gurney

Banishment

I am banished from the patient men who fight

They smote my heart to pity, built my pride.

Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side,

They trudged away from life's broad wealds of light.

Their wrongs were mine; and ever in my sight

They went arrayed in honour. But they died, –

Not one by one: and mutinous I cried

To those who sent them out into the night.

The darkness tells how vainly I have striven

10             To free them from the pit where they must dwell

In outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and riven

By grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel.

Love drives me back to grope with them through hell;

And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.

Siegfried Sassoon

Woodbine Willie

They gave me this name like their nature,

     Compacted of laughter and tears,

A sweet that was born of the bitter,

     A joke that was torn from the years.

Of their travail and torture, Christ's fools,

     Atoning my sins with their blood,

Who grinned in their agony sharing

     The glorious madness of God.

Their name! Let me hear it – the symbol

10                  Of unpaid-unpayable debt,

For the men to whom I owed God's peace,

     I put off with a cigarette.

G. A. Studdert Kennedy

Apologia pro Poemate Meo

I, too, saw God through mud –

        The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.

        War brought more glory to their eyes than blood,

        And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.

Merry it was to laugh there –

        Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.

        For power was on us as we slashed bones bare

        Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

I, too, have dropped off fear –

10                     Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon,

        And sailed my spirit surging, light and clear

        Past the entanglement where hopes lay strewn;

And witnessed exultation –

        Faces that used to curse me, scowl for scowl,

        Shine and lift up with passion of oblation,

        Seraphic for an hour; though they were foul.

I have made fellowships –

        Untold of happy lovers in old song.

        For love is not the binding of fair lips

20                     With the soft silk of eyes that look and long,

By Joy, whose ribbon slips, –

        But wound with war's hard wire whose stakes are strong;

        Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;

        Knit in the welding of the rifle-thong.

I have perceived much beauty

        In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight;

        Heard music in the silentness of duty;

        Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.

Nevertheless, except you share

30                     With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell,

        Whose world is but the trembling of a flare,

        And heaven but as the highway for a shell,

You shall not hear their mirth:

        You shall not come to think them well content

        By any jest of mine. These men are worth

        Your tears: You are not worth their merriment.

Wilfred Owen

My Company

Foule! Ton âme entière est debout dans mon corps.
Jules Romains

I

You became

In many acts and quiet observances

A body and a soul, entire…

I cannot tell

What time your life became mine:

Perhaps when one summer night

We halted on the roadside

In the starlight only,

And you sang your sad home-songs,

10             Dirges which I standing outside your soul

Coldly condemned.

Perhaps, one night, descending cold,

When rum was mighty acceptable,

And my doling gave birth to sensual gratitude.

And then our fights: we've fought together

Compact, unanimous;

And I have felt the pride of leadership.

In many acts and quiet observances

You absorbed me:

20                 Until one day I stood eminent

And I saw you gathered round me,

Uplooking,

And about you a radiance that seemed to beat

With variant glow and to give

Grace to our unity.

But, God! I know that I'll stand

Someday in the loneliest wilderness,

Someday my heart will cry

For the soul that has been, but that now

30             Is scattered with the winds,

Deceased and devoid.

I know that I'll wander with a cry:

‘O beautiful men, O men I loved,

O whither are you gone, my company?'

This is a hell

Immortal while I live.

II

My men go wearily

With their monstrous burdens.

They bear wooden planks

40             And iron sheeting

Through the area of death.

When flare curves through the sky

They rest immobile.

Then on again,

Sweating and blaspheming –

‘Oh, bloody Christ!'

My men, my modern Christs,

Your bloody agony confronts the world.

III

50             A man of mine lies on the wire.

It is death to fetch his soulless corpse.

A man of mine lies on the wire;

And he will rot

And first his lips

The worms will eat.

It is not thus I would have him kissed

But with the warm passionate lips

Of his comrade here.

IV – 1

60             Kenneth Farrar is typical of many:

He smokes his pipe with a glad heart

And makes his days serene; He fights hard,

And in his speech he hates the Boche: –

But really he doesn't care a damn.

His sexual experience is wide and various

And his curses are rather original.

But I've seen him kiss a dying man;

And if he comes thro' all right

70             (So he says)

He'll settle down and marry.

IV – 2

But Malyon says this:

‘Old Ken's a wandering fool;

If we come thro‘

Our souls will never settle in suburban hearths;

We'll linger our remaining days

Unsettled, haunted by the wrong that's done us;

The best among us will ferment

A better world;

80             The rest will gradually subside,

Unknown,

In unknown lands.'

And Ken will jeer:

‘The natives of Samoa

Are suitably naïve.‘

V

I can assume

A giant attitude and godlike mood,

And then detachedly regard

All riots, conflicts and collisions.

90             The men I've lived with

Lurch suddenly into a far perspective;

They distantly gather like a dark cloud of birds

In the autumn sky.

Urged by some unanimous

Volition or fate,

Clouds clash in opposition;

The sky quivers, the dead descend;

Earth yawns.

They are all of one species.

100           From my giant attitude,

In godlike mood,

I laugh till space is filled

with hellish merriment.

Then again I assume

My human docility,

Bow my head,

And share their doom.

Herbert Read

Before the Battle

Here on the blind verge of infinity

We live and move like moles. Our crumbling trench

Gapes like a long wound in the sodden clay.

The land is dead. No voice, no living thing,

No happy green of leaves tells that the spring

Wakes in the world behind us. Empty gloom

Fills the cold interspace of earth and sky.

The sky is waterlogged and the drenched earth

Rots, and the whining sorrow of slow shells

10             Flies overhead. But memory like the rose

Wakes and puts forth her bright and odorous blooms

And builds green hanging gardens in the heart.

Once, in another life in other places,

Where a slow river coiled through broad green spaces

And sunlight filled the long grass of the meadows

And moving water flashed from shine to shadows

Of old green-feathered willows, bent in ranks

       Along sun-speckled banks, –

Lovely remembered things now gone forever;

20             I saw young men run naked by the river,

Thirty young soliders. Where the field-path goes,

Their boots and shirts and khaki lay in rows.

With feet among the long warm grass stood one

     Like ivory in the sun,

And in the water, white upon the shade

     That hung beneath the shore,

His long reflection like a slow flag swayed

And at a trembling of the water frayed

Into a hundred shreds, then joined once more.

30             One, where the river, when the willows end,

Breaks from its calm to swirl about a bend,

Strong swimmer he, wrestled against the race

Of the full stream. I saw his laughing face

Framed by his upcurved arm. Another, slim,

Hands above head, stood braced upon the brim,

Then dived, a brother of the curved new moon,

     And came up streaming soon

Ten feet beyond, brown shoulders shining wet

And comic face and hair washed sleet as jet.

40             Out on the further bank another fellow

Climbed stealthily into a leaning willow,

And perched leaf-shrouded, crooning like a dove,

Till from the pool below a voice was heard:

‘‘Ere, Bert! Where's Bert?' And Bert sang out above:

‘Up ‘ere, old son, changed to a bloody bird!‘

And dived through leaves and shattered through the cool

Clear watery mirror; and all across the pool

Slow winking circles opened wide, till he

Rose and in rising broke their symmetry.

50             Laughter and shouting filled the sparkling air.

Bright flakes of scattered water everywhere

Leapt from their diving. Hosts of little billows

Beat the shores, and hanging boughs of willows

Glittered with glassy drops. Then, bright as fire,

A bugle sounded, and their happy din

Stopped, and the boys, with that swift discipline

By which keen life answers the soul's desire,

Rushed for the bank. And soon the bank was bright

With bodies swarming up out of the stream.

60             From the water and the boughs they came in sight:

Across the leaves I saw their quick limbs gleam.

Then brandished towels flashed whitely here and there.

They dried their ears and scrubbed their towzled hair.

One, stepping to the water, carefully

Stretched a bare leg to rinse a muddy foot:

       One sat with updrawn knee,

Bent head, and both hands tugging on a boot.

And gradually the bright and flashing crowd

Dimmed into sober khaki. Then the loud

70             Laughter and shouts and songs died at a word.

The ranks fell in: No sound, no movement stirred.

The willow-boughs were still: the blue sky burned:

The party numbered down, formed fours, right turned,

Marched. And their shadows faded from the stream

And the dark pool swayed back into its dream:

Only the trodden meadow-grass reported

Where all that gay humanity had sported.

So the dream fades. I wake, remembering how

Many of those smart boys no longer now

80             Cast running shadows on the grass or make

     White tents with laughter shake,

But lie in narrow chambers underground,

Eyes void of sunlight, ears unthrilled by sound

Of laughter. Round my post on every hand

Stretches this grim, charred skeleton of land

Where ruined homes and shell-ploughed fields are lost

In one great sea of clay, clay seared by fire,

Battered by rainstorms, jagged and scarred and crossed

By gaping trench-lines hedged with rusted wire.

90             The rainy evening fades. A rainy night

Sags down upon us. Wastes of sodden clay

Fade into mist, and fade all sound and sight,