The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (21 page)

And my hope was still unquenched,

Till I bore my cross to Paris through the crowd.

Soldiers pierced me on the Aisne,

But 'twas by the river Seine

30             That the statesmen brake my legs and made my shroud.

There they wrapped my mangled body

In fine linen of fair words,

With the perfume of a sweetly scented lie,

And they laid it in the tomb

Of the golden-mirrored room,

'Mid the many-fountained Gardens of Versailles.

With a thousand scraps of paper

They made fast the open door,

And the wise men of the Council saw it sealed.

40                 With the seal of subtle lying,

They made certain of my dying,

Lest the torment of the peoples should be healed.

Then they set a guard of soldiers

Night and day beside the Tomb,

Where the body of the Prince of Peace is laid,

And the captains of the nations

Keep the sentries to their stations,

Lest the statesman's trust from Satan be betrayed.

For it isn't steel and iron

50             That men use to kill their God,

But the poison of a smooth and slimy tongue.

Steel and iron tear the body,

But it's oily sham and shoddy

That have trampled down God's
Spirit
in the dung.

G. A. Studdert Kennedy

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,

10             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;

20             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.

Laurence Binyon

The Cenotaph

Not yet will those measureless fields be green again

Where only yesterday the wild, sweet, blood of wonderful youth was shed;

There is a grave whose earth must hold too long, too deep a stain,

Though for ever over it we may speak as proudly as we may tread.

But here, where the watchers by lonely hearths from the thrust of an inward sword have more slowly bled,

We shall build the Cenotaph: Victory, winged, with Peace, winged too, at the column's head.

And over the stairway, at the foot – oh! here, leave desolate, passionate hands to spread

Violets, roses, and laurel, with the small, sweet, twinkling country things

Speaking so wistfully of other Springs,

10             From the little gardens of little places where son or sweetheart was born and bred.

In splendid sleep, with a thousand brothers

       To lovers – to mothers

       Here, too, lies he:

Under the purple, the green, the red, It is all young life: it must break some women's hearts to see

Such a brave, gay coverlet to such a bed!

Only, when all is done and said,

God is not mocked and neither are the dead.

For this will stand in our Market-place –

20                   Who'll sell, who'll buy

       (Will you or I

Lie to each with the better grace)?

While looking in every busy whore's and huckster's face

As they drive their bargains, is the Face

Of God: and some young, piteous, murdered face.

Charlotte Mew

The Silence

In the bleak twilight, when the roads are hoar

And mists of early morning haunt the down,

His Mother shuts her empty cottage door

Behind her, in the lane beyond the town:

Her slow steps on the highway frosty white

Ring clear across the moor, and echo through

The drowsy town, to where the station's light

Signals the 7.10 to Waterloo.

Some wintry flowers in her garden grown,

10             And some frail dreams, she bears with her to-day –

Dreams of the lad who once had been her own,

For whose dear sake she goes a weary way

To find in London, after journeying long,

The Altar of Remembrance, set apart

For such as she, and join the pilgrim throng

There, at that Mecca of the Broken Heart.

Princes and Lords in grave procession come

With wondrous wreaths of glory for the dead;

Then the two minutes smite the City dumb,

20             And memory dims her eyes with tears unshed;

The silence breaks, and music strange and sad

Wails, while the Great Ones bow in homage low;

And still she knows her little homely lad

Troubles no heart but hers in all the Show.

And when beside the blind stone's crowded base,

'Mid the rich wreaths, she lays her wintry flowers,

She feels that, sleeping in some far-off place

Indifferent to these interludes of ours,

No solace from this marshalled woe he drains,

30             And that the stark Shrine stands more empty here

Than her own cottage, where the silence reigns,

Not for brief minutes, but through all the year.

St John Adcock

Armistice Day, 1921

The hush begins. Nothing is heard

Save the arrested taxis throbbing,

And here and there an ignorant bird

And here a sentimental woman sobbing.

The statesman bares and bows his head

Before the solemn monument:

His lips, paying duty to the dead

In silence, are more than ever eloquent.

But ere the sacred silence breaks

10             And taxis hurry on again,

A faint and distant voice awakes,

Speaking the mind of a million absent men:

‘Mourn not for us. Our better luck

At least has given us peace and rest.

We struggled when our moment struck

But now we understand that death knew best.

Would we be as our brothers are

Whose barrel-organs charm the town?

Ours was a better dodge by far –

20             We got
our
pensions in a lump sum down.

We, out of all, have had our pay,

There is no poverty where we lie:

The graveyard has no quarter-day,

The space is narrow but the rent not high.

No empty stomach here is found:

Unless some cheated worm complain

You hear no grumbling underground:

Oh never, never wish us back again!

Mourn not for us, but rather we

30             Will meet upon this solemn day

And in our greater liberty

Keep silent for you, a little while, and pray.'

Edward Shanks

‘
Out of the Mouths of Babes
–'

Two children in my garden playing found

A robin cruelly dead, in Summer hours.

I watched them get a trowel, and heap the mound,

And bury him, and scatter over flowers.

And when their little friend was laid away,

In lack of burial service over the dead

Before those two grave children turned to play: –

‘I hope he'll have a happy
dead
life!' one said.

What more was there to say for bird or beast?

10             What more for any man is there to say?

What can we wish
them
better, as with priest

And choir we ring the cross on Armistice Day?

F. W. Harvey

(Great War)

Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight,

(Under Lord Derby's Scheme). I died in hell –

(They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,

And I was hobbling back; and then a shell

Burst slick upon the duck-boards: so I fell

Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.

At sermon-time, while Squire is in his pew,

He gives my gilded name a thoughtful stare;

For, though low down upon the list, I'm there;

10             ‘
In proud and glorious memory
'…that's my due.

Two bleeding years I fought in France, for Squire:

I suffered anguish that he's never guessed.

Once I came home on leave: and then went west…

What greater glory could a man desire?

Siegfried Sassoon

Elegy in a Country Churchyard

The men that worked for England

They have their graves at home:

And bees and birds of England

About the cross can roam.

But they that fought for England,

Following a falling star,

Alas, alas for England

They have their graves afar.

And they that rule in England,

10             In stately conclave met,

Alas, alas for England

They have no graves as yet.

G. K. Chesterton

Epitaphs: Common Form

If any question why we died,

Tell them, because our fathers lied.

Rudyard Kipling

Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries

These, in the day when heaven was falling,

The hour when earth's foundations fled,

Followed their mercenary calling

And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;

They stood, and earth's foundations stay;

What God abandoned, these defended,

And saved the sum of things for pay.

A. E. Housman

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

10             ‘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.

Siegfried Sassoon

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: V

There died a myriad,

And of the best, among them,

For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

For a botched civilisation,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,

Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,

For two gross of broken statues,

For a few thousand battered books.

Ezra Pound

War and Peace

In sodden trenches I have heard men speak,

Though numb and wretched, wise and witty things;

And loved them for the stubbornness that clings

Longest to laughter when Death's pulleys creak;

And seeing cool nurses move on tireless feet

To do abominable things with grace,

Deemed them sweet sisters in that haunted place

Where, with child's voices, strong men howl or bleat.

Yet now those men lay stubborn courage by,

10             Riding dull-eyed and silent in the train

To old men's stools; or sell gay-coloured socks

And listen fearfully for Death; so I

Love the low-laughing girls, who now again

Go daintily, in thin and flowery frocks.

Edgell Rickword

A Generation
(
1917
)

There was a time that's gone

And will not come again,

We knew it was a pleasant time,

How good we never dreamed.

When, for a whimsy's sake,

We'd even play with pain,

For everything awaited us

And life immortal seemed.

It seemed unending then

10             To forward-looking eyes,

No thought of what postponement meant

Hung dark across our mirth;

We had years and strength enough

For any enterprise,

Our numerous companionship

Were heirs to all the earth.

But now all memory

Is one ironic truth,

We look like strangers at the boys

20             We were so long ago;

For half of us are dead,

And half have lost their youth,

And our hearts are scarred by many griefs,

That only age should know.

J. C. Squire