The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (22 page)

Disabled

He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,

And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,

Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park

Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,

Voices of play and pleasure after day,

Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.

About this time Town used to swing so gay

When glow-lamps budded in the light-blue trees

And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim,

10             – In the old times, before he threw away his knees.

Now he will never feel again how slim

Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands,

All of them touch him like some queer disease.

There was an artist silly for his face,

For it was younger than his youth, last year.

Now he is old; his back will never brace;

He's lost his colour very far from here,

Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry,

And half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race,

20             And leap of purple spurted from his thigh.

One time he liked a bloodsmear down his leg,

After the matches carried shoulder-high.

It was after football, when he'd drunk a peg,

He thought he'd better join. He wonders why…

Someone had said he'd look a god in kilts.

That's why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg,

Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts,

He asked to join. He didn't have to beg;

Smiling they wrote his lie; aged nineteen years.

30             Germans he scarcely thought of; and no fears

Of Fear came yet. He thought of jewelled hilts

For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes;

And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears;

Esprit de corps; and hints for young recruits.

And soon, he was drafted out with drums and cheers.

Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal.

Only a solemn man who brought him fruits

Thanked him; and then inquired about his soul.

Now, he will spend a few sick years in Institutes,

40             And do what things the rules consider wise,

And take whatever pity they may dole.

To-night he noticed how the women's eyes

Passed from him to the strong men that were whole.

How cold and late it is! Why don't they come

And put him into bed? Why don't they come?

Wilfred Owen

Strange Hells

There are strange Hells within the minds War made

Not so often, not so humiliatingly afraid

As one would have expected – the racket and fear guns made.

One Hell the Gloucester soldiers they quite put out;

Their first bombardment, when in combined black shout

Of fury, guns aligned, they ducked lower their heads

And sang with diaphragms fixed beyond all dreads,

That tin and stretched-wire tinkle, that blither of tune;

‘Après la guerre fini' till Hell all had come down,

Twelve-inch, six-inch, and eighteen-pounders

10             hammering Hell's thunders.

Where are they now on State-doles, or showing shop-patterns

Or walking town to town sore in borrowed tatterns

Or begged. Some civic routine one never learns.

The heart burns – but has to keep out of face how heart burns.

Ivor Gurney

The Superfluous Woman

Ghosts crying down the vistas of the years,

Recalling words

Whose echoes long have died;

And kind moss grown

Over the sharp and blood-bespattered stones

Which cut our feet upon the ancient ways.

*

But who will look for my coming?

Long busy days where many meet and part;

Crowded aside

10             Remembered hours of hope;

And city streets

Grown dark and hot with eager multitudes

Hurrying homeward whither respite waits.

*

But who will seek me at nightfall?

Light fading where the chimneys cut the sky;

Footsteps that pass,

Nor tarry at my door.

And far away,

Behind the row of crosses, shadows black

20             Stretch out long arms before the smouldering sun.

*

But who will give me my children?

Vera Brittain

Men Fade Like Rocks

Rock-like the souls of men

Fade, fade in time. Falls on worn surfaces,

Slow chime on chime,

Sense, like a murmuring dew,

Soft sculpturing rain,

Or the wind that blows hollowing

In every lane.

Smooth as the stones that lie

10             Dimmed, water-worn,

Worn of the night and day,

In sense forlorn,

Rock-like the souls of men

Fade, fade in time;

Smoother than river-rain

Falls chime on chime.

W. J. Turner

High Wood

Ladies and gentlemen, this is High Wood,

Called by the French, Bois des Fourneaux,

The famous spot which in Nineteen-Sixteen,

July, August and September was the scene

Of long and bitterly contested strife,

By reason of its High commanding site.

Observe the effects of shell-fire in the trees

Standing and fallen; here is wire; this trench

For months inhabited, twelve times changed hands;

10             (They soon fall in), used later as a grave.

It has been said on good authority

That in the fighting for this patch of wood

Were killed somewhere above eight thousand men,

Of whom the greater part were buried here,

This mound on which you stand being…

Madam, please,

You are requested kindly not to touch

Or take away the Company's property

As souvenirs; you'll find we have on sale

20             A large variety, all guaranteed.

As I was saying, all is as it was,

This is an unknown British officer,

The tunic having lately rotted off. Please follow me – this way…

the
path
, sir,
please
,

The ground which was secured at great expense

The Company keeps absolutely untouched,

And in that dug-out (genuine) we provide

Refreshments at a reasonable rate.

30             You are requested not to leave about

Paper, or ginger-beer bottles, or orange peel,

There are waste-paper-baskets at the gate.

Philip Johnstone

Picture-Show

And still they come and go: and this is all I know –

That from the gloom I watch an endless picture-show,

Where wild or listless faces flicker on their way,

With glad or grievous hearts I'll never understand

Because Time spins so fast, and they've no time to stay

Beyond the moment's gesture of a lifted hand.

And still, between the shadow and the blinding flame,

The brave despair of men flings onward, ever the same

As in those doom-lit years that wait them, and have been…

And life is just the picture dancing on a screen. 10

Siegfried Sassoon

Festubert, 1916

Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day,

I sit in solitude and only hear

Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay,

The lost intensities of hope and fear;

In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,

On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,

The very books I read are there – and I

Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags

Its wounded length from those sad streets of war

10             Into green places here, that were my own;

But now what once was mine is mine no more,

I seek such neighbours here and I find none.

With such strong gentleness and tireless will

Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,

Passionate I look for their dumb story still,

And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.

I rise up at the singing of a bird

And scarcely knowing slink along the lane,

I dare not give a soul a look or word

20             Where all have homes and none's at home in vain:

Deep red the rose burned in the grim redoubt,

The self-sown wheat around was like a flood,

In the hot path the lizard lolled time out,

The saints in broken shrines were bright as blood.

Sweet Mary's shrine between the sycamores!

There we would go, my friend of friends and I,

And snatch long moments from the grudging wars;

Whose dark made light intense to see them by…

Shrewd bit the morning fog, the whining shots

30             Spun from the wrangling wire; then in warm swoon

The sun hushed all but the cool orchard plots,

We crept in the tall grass and slept till noon.

Edmund Blunden

Lamplight

We planned to shake the world together, you and I

Being young, and very wise;

Now in the light of the green shaded lamp

Almost I see your eyes

Light with the old gay laughter; you and I

Dreamed greatly of an Empire in those days,

Setting our feet upon laborious ways,

And all you asked of fame

Was crossed swords in the Army List,

10             My Dear, against your name.

We planned a great Empire together, you and I,

Bound only by the sea;

Now in the quiet of a chill Winter's night

Your voice comes hushed to me

Full of forgotten memories: you and I

Dreamed great dreams of our future in those days,

Setting our feet on undiscovered ways,

And all I asked of fame

A scarlet cross on my breast, my Dear,

20             For the swords by your name.

We shall never shake the world together, you and I,

For you gave your life away;

And I think my heart was broken by the war,

Since on a summer day

You took the road we never spoke of: you and I

Dreamed greatly of an Empire in those days;

You set your feet upon the Western ways

And have no need of fame –

There's a scarlet cross on my breast, my Dear,

30             And a torn cross with your name.

May Wedderburn Cannan

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 twenty years ago

And now assumes the nature-look of time,

As when the morning traveller turns and views

10             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.

20             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,

30             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 had 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

40             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.

Robert Graves

War Books

What did they expect of our toil and extreme

Hunger – the perfect drawing of a heart's dream?

Did they look for a book of wrought art's perfection,

Who promised no reading, nor praise, nor publication?

Out of the heart's sickness the spirit wrote

For delight, or to escape hunger, or of war's worst anger,

When the guns died to silence, and men would gather sense

Somehow together, and find this was life indeed,

And praise another's nobleness, or to Cotswold get hence.

10             There we wrote – Corbie Ridge – or in Gonnehem at rest.

Or Fauquissart or world's death songs, ever the best.