The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (23 page)

One made sorrows' praise passing the church where silence

Opened for the long quivering strokes of the bell –

Another wrote all soldiers' praise, and of France and night's stars.

Served his guns, got immortality, and died well.

But Ypres played another trick with its danger on me,

Kept still the needing and loving of action body;

Gave no candles, and nearly killed me twice as well,

And no souvenirs though I risked my life in the stuck tanks,

20 Yet there was praise of Ypres, love came sweet in hospital

And old Flanders went under to long ages of plays thought in my pages.

Ivor Gurney

Aftermath

Have you forgotten yet
?…

For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,

Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:

And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow

Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you're a man reprieved to go,

Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.

But the past is just the same
–
and War's a bloody game
…

Have you forgotten yet?
…

Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.

10             Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz –

The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?

Do you remember the rats; and the stench

Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench –

And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?

Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?'

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack –

And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then

As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?

Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back

20             With dying eyes and lolling heads – those ashen-grey

Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?
…

Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you'll never forget.

Siegfried Sassoon

If ye Forget

Let me forget – Let me forget,

I am weary of remembrance,

And my brow is ever wet,

With the tears of my remembrance,

With the tears and bloody sweat,

     Let me forget.

If ye forget – If ye forget,

Then your children must remember,

And their brow be ever wet,

10             With the tears of their remembrance,

With the tears and bloody sweat,

     If ye forget.

G. A. Studdert Kennedy

The Midnight Skaters

The hop-poles stand in cones,

The icy pond lurks under,

The pole-tops touch the star-gods' thrones

And sound the gulfs of wonder,

But not the tallest there, 'tis said,

Could fathom to this pond's black bed.

Then is not death at watch

Within those secret waters?

What wants he but to catch

10             Earth's heedless sons and daughters?

With but a crystal parapet

Between, he has his engines set.

Then on, blood shouts, on, on,

Twirl, wheel and whip above him,

Dance on this ball-floor thin and wan,

Use him as though you love him;

Court him, elude him, reel and pass,

And let him hate you through the glass.

Edmund Blunden

Ancient History

Adam, a brown old vulture in the rain,

Shivered below his wind-whipped olive-trees;

Huddling sharp chin on scarred and scraggy knees,

He moaned and mumbled to his darkening brain;

‘
He was the grandest of them all
–
was Cain!

A lion laired in the hills, that none could tire;

Swift as a stag; a stallion of the plain,

Hungry and fierce with deeds of huge desire.'

Grimly he thought of Abel, soft and fair
–

10             A lover with disaster in his face,

And scarlet blossom twisted in bright hair.

‘Afraid to fight; was murder more disgrace?…

God always hated Cain.
'…He bowed his head –

The gaunt wild man whose lovely sons were dead.

Siegfried Sassoon

The Next War

The long war had ended.

Its miseries had grown faded.

Deaf men became difficult to talk to.

Heroes became bores.

Those alchemists

Who had converted blood into gold,

Had grown elderly.

But they held a meeting,

Saying,

10             ‘We think perhaps we ought

To put up tombs

Or erect altars

To those brave lads

Who were so willingly burnt,

Or blinded,

Or maimed,

Who lost all likeness to a living thing,

Or were blown to bleeding patches of flesh

For our sakes.

20             It would look well.

Or we might even educate the children.'

But the richest of these wizards

Coughed gently;

And he said,

‘I have always been to the front

– In private enterprise
–

I yield in public spirit

To no man.

I think yours is a very good idea

30             – A capital idea –

And not too costly.

But it seems to me

That the cause for which we fought

Is again endangered.

What more fitting memorial for the fallen

Than that their children

Should fall for the same cause?'

Rushing eagerly into the street,

The kindly old gentlemen cried

40             To the young:

     ‘Will you sacrifice

     Through your lethargy

     What your fathers died to gain?

     Our cause is in peril.

     The world must be made safe for the young!'

And the children Went…

Osbert Sitwell

The War Generation:
Ave

In cities and in hamlets we were born,

     And little towns behind the van of time;

A closing era mocked our guileless dawn

     With jingles of a military rhyme.

But in that song we heard no warning chime,

     Nor visualised in hours benign and sweet

The threatening woe that our adventurous feet

     Would starkly meet.

Thus we began, amid the echoes blown

10                      Across our childhood from an earlier war,

Too dim, too soon forgotten, to dethrone

     Those dreams of happiness we thought secure;

While, imminent and fierce outside the door,

     Watching a generation grow to flower,

The fate that held our youth within its power

     Waited its hour.

Vera Brittain

Qui n'a pas une fois désespéré de l'honneur, ne sera jamais un héros.

Georges Bernanos

A soldier passed me in the freshly fallen snow,

     His footsteps muffled, his face unearthly grey;

And my heart gave a sudden leap

     As I gazed on a ghost of five-and-twenty years ago.

I shouted Halt! and my voice had the old accustomed ring

     And he obeyed it as it was obeyed

In the shrouded days when I too was one

     Of an army of young men marching

Into the unknown. He turned towards me and I said:

10                      ‘I am one of those who went before you

Five-and-twenty years ago: one of the many who never returned,

     Of the many who returned and yet were dead.

We went where you are going, into the rain and the mud;

     We fought as you will fight

With death and darkness and despair;

     We gave what you will give – our brains and our blood.

We think we gave in vain. The world was not renewed.

     There was hope in the homestead and anger in the streets

But the old world was restored and we returned

20                      To the dreary field and workshop, and the immemorial feud

Of rich and poor. Our victory was our defeat.

     Power was retained where power had been misused

And youth was left to sweep away

     The ashes that the fires had strewn beneath our feet.

But one thing we learned: there is no glory in the deed

     Until the soldier wears a badge of tarnished braid;

There are heroes who have heard the rally and have seen

     The glitter of a garland round their head.

Theirs is the hollow victory. They are deceived.

30                      But you, my brother and my ghost, if you can go

Knowing that there is no reward, no certain use

     In all your sacrifice, then honour is reprieved.

To fight without hope is to fight with grace,

     The self reconstructed, the false heart repaired.'

Then I turned with a smile, and he answered my salute

     As he stood against the fretted hedge, which was like white lace.

Herbert Read

Ancre Sunshine

In all his glory the sun was high and glowing

Over the farm world where we found great peace,

And clearest blue the winding river flowing

Seemed to be celebrating a release

From all but speed and music of its own

Which but for some few cows we heard alone.

Here half a century before might I,

Had something chanced, about this point have lain,

Looking with failing sense on such blue sky,

10                     And then become a name with others slain.

But that thought vanished. Claire was wandering free

Miraumont way in the golden tasselled lea.

The railway trains went by, and dreamily

I thought of them as planets in their course,

Though bound perhaps for Arras, how would we

Have wondered once if through the furious force

Murdering our world one of these same had come,

Friendly and sensible – ‘the war's over, chum'.

And now it seemed Claire was afar, and I

20                     Alone, and where she went perhaps the mill

That used to be had risen again, and by

All that had fallen was in its old form still,

For her to witness, with no cold surprise,

In one of those moments when nothing dies.

Edmund Blunden

Military terms, soldiers' slang and place names are explained in the glossary rather than in the notes on individual poems.

Prelude: ‘On the idle hill of summer'

fife:
A wind instrument associated with military music since the early 1500s, when Swiss troops used both fifes and drums for signalling purposes in battle.

files of scarlet:
Line regiments in the British army wore a red jacket until the late 1880s, when khaki became the standard colour.

1 YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU
‘Let the foul Scene proceed'

Channel Firing

This prophetic poem is dated ‘April, 1914'.

chancel:
The part of a church containing the altar and seats for the clergy and choir.

Judgement-day:
The end of the world, when God returns to judge all mankind: ‘Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgement' (Matthew 12:36).

glebe-cow:
A glebe is a plot of land belonging to an English parish church.

Mad as hatters:
A reference to the Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll's
Alice in Wonderland
(1865). The nineteenth-century hat-making
industry used mercury in its processes, and prolonged exposure to this caused hatters to suffer from such symptoms as trembling, slurred speech, memory loss and depression.

Parson Thirdly:
A character in Hardy's novel
Far from the
Madding Crowd
(1874).

Stourton Tower:
This tower was built in Wiltshire in 1772 to commemorate King Alfred's victory over the Saxons in 879.

Camelot:
The legendary site of King Arthur's palace and court has tentatively been located at Cadbury Castle in Somerset.

Stonehenge:
A circle of prehistoric megaliths on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire.

The Eve of War

the Circus:
Probably Piccadilly Circus, a busy junction in central London.

the staring arc:
An illuminated advertising hoarding.

The Marionettes

Marionettes:
Puppets moved from above by the manipulation of wires.

upsweal:
Rise.

August, 1914

stooks:
Cut sheaves of hay, traditionally stacked in pyramid-shaped clusters in fields at the end of summer.

covey:
The collective name for a group of partridges.

fold:
An enclosure for livestock, especially sheep.

wold:
An area of high, open uncultivated land.

rout:
A disorderly or tumultuous crowd.