Let’s have a drink, and give the cards a run
And leave dull verse to the dull peaceful time.
Edgell Rickword
The Day’s March
The battery grides and jingles,
Mile succeeds to mile;
Shaking the noonday sunshine
The guns lunge out awhile,
And then are still awhile.
We amble along the highway;
The reeking, powdery dust
Ascends and cakes our faces
With a striped, sweaty crust.
10 Under the still sky’s violet
The heat throbs on the air…
The white road’s dusty radiance
Assumes a dark glare.
With a head hot and heavy,
And eyes that cannot rest,
And a black heart burning
In a stifled breast,
I sit in the saddle,
I feel the road unroll,
20 And keep my senses straightened
Toward to-morrow’s goal.
There, over unknown meadows
Which we must reach at last,
Day and night thunders
A black and chilly blast.
Heads forget heaviness,
Hearts forget spleen,
For by that mighty winnowing
Being is blown clean.
30 Light in the eyes again,
Strength in the hand,
A spirit dares, dies, forgives,
And can understand!
And, best! Love comes back again
After grief and shame,
And along the wind of death
Throws a clean flame.
*
The battery grides and jingles,
Mile succeeds to mile;
40 Suddenly battering the silence
The guns burst out awhile.
*
I lift my head and smile.
Robert Nichols
Battle
Eve of Assault: Infantry Going Down to Trenches
Downwards slopes the wild red sun.
We lie around a waiting gun;
Soon we shall load and fire and load.
But, hark! a sound beats down the road.
‘’Ello! wot’s up?’ ‘Let’s ’ave a look!’
‘Come on, Ginger, drop that book!’
‘Wot an ‘ell of bloody noise!’
‘It’s the Yorks and Lancs, meboys!’
So we crowd: watch them come –
10 One man drubbing on a drum,
A crazy, high mouth-organ blowing,
Tin cans rattling, cat-calls, crowing…
And above their rhythmic feet
A whirl of shrilling loud and sweet,
Round mouths whistling in unison;
Shouts: ‘’O’s goin’ to out the ’Un?’
‘Back us up, mates!’ ‘Gawd, we will!’
‘’Eave them shells at Kaiser Bill!’
‘Art from Lancashire, melad?’
20 ‘Gi’ ’en a cheer, boys; make’en glad.’
‘’Ip ‘urrah!’ ‘Give Fritz the chuck.’
‘Good ol’ bloody Yorks!’ ‘Good-luck!’
‘Cheer!’
I cannot cheer or speak
Lest my voice, my heart must break.
Robert Nichols
Headquarters
A league and a league from the trenches – from the traversed maze of the lines,
Where daylong the sniper watches and daylong the bullet whines,
And the cratered earth is in travail with mines and with countermines –
Here, where haply some woman dreamed, (are those her roses that bloom
In the garden beyond the windows of my littered working room?)
We have decked the map for our masters as a bride is decked for the groom.
Fair, on each lettered numbered square – cross-road and mound and wire,
Loophole, redoubt, and emplacement – lie the targets their mouths desire;
Gay with purples and browns and blues, have we traced them their arcs of fire.
10 And ever the type-keys chatter; and ever our keen wires bring
Word from the watchers a-crouch below, word from the watchers a-wing:
And ever we hear the distant growl of our hid guns thundering.
Hear it hardly, and turn again to our maps, where the trench-lines crawl,
Red on the gray and each with a sign for the ranging shrapnel’s fall –
Snakes that our masters shall scotch at dawn, as is written here on the wall.
For the weeks of our waiting draw to a close…There is scarcely a leaf astir
In the garden beyond my windows, where the twilight shadows blurr
The blaze of some woman’s roses…
‘Bombardment orders, sir.’
Gilbert Frankau
Bombardment
The Town has opened to the sun.
Like a flat red lily with a million petals
She unfolds, she comes undone.
A sharp sky brushes upon
The myriad glittering chimney-tips
As she gently exhales to the sun.
Hurrying creatures run
Down the labyrinth of the sinister flower.
What is it they shun?
10 A dark bird falls from the sun.
It curves in a rush to the heart of the vast
Flower: the day has begun.
D. H. Lawrence
The Shell
Shrieking its message the flying death
Cursed the resisting air,
Then buried its nose by a battered church,
A skeleton gaunt and bare.
The brains of science, the money of fools
Had fashioned an iron slave
Destined to kill, yet the futile end
Was a child’s uprooted grave.
H. Smalley Sarson
Bombardment
Four days the earth was rent and torn
By bursting steel,
The houses fell about us;
Three nights we dared not sleep,
Sweating, and listening for the imminent crash
Which meant our death.
The fourth night every man,
Nerve-tortured, racked to exhaustion,
Slept, muttering and twitching,
10 While the shells crashed overhead.
The fifth day there came a hush;
We left our holes
And looked above the wreckage of the earth
To where the white clouds moved in silent lines
Across the untroubled blue.
Richard Aldington
On Somme
Suddenly into the still air burst thudding
And thudding, and cold fear possessed me all,
On the grey slopes there, where winter in sullen brooding
Hung between height and depth of the ugly fall
Of Heaven to earth; and the thudding was illness’ own.
But still a hope I kept that were we there going over,
I, in the line, I should not fail, but take recover
From others’ courage, and not as coward be known.
No flame we saw, the noise and the dread alone
10 Was battle to us; men were enduring there such
And such things, in wire tangled, to shatters blown.
Courage kept, but ready to vanish at first touch.
Fear, but just held. Poets were luckier once
In the hot fray swallowed and some magnificence.
Ivor Gurney
Before the Charge
The night is still and the air is keen,
Tense with menace the time crawls by,
In front is the town and its homes are seen,
Blurred in outline against the sky.
The dead leaves float in the sighing air,
The darkness moves like a curtain drawn,
A veil which the morning sun will tear
/> From the face of death. – We charge at dawn.
Patrick MacGill
It’s a Queer Time
It’s hard to know if you’re alive or dead
When steel and fire go roaring through your head.
One moment you’ll be crouching at your gun
Traversing, mowing heaps down half in fun:
The next, you choke and clutch at your right breast –
No time to think – leave all – and off you go…
To Treasure Island where the Spice winds blow,
To lovely groves of mango, quince and lime –
Breathe no goodbye, but ho, for the Red West!
10 It’s a queer time.
You’re charging madly at them yelling ‘Fag!’
When somehow something gives and your feet drag.
You fall and strike your head; yet feel no pain
And find…You’re digging tunnels through the hay
In the Big Barn, ‘cause it’s a rainy day.
Oh springy hay, and lovely beams to climb!
You’re back in the old sailor suit again.
It’s a queer time.
Or you’ll be dozing safe in your dug-out –
20 A great roar – the trench shakes and falls about –
You’re struggling, gasping, struggling, then…hullo!
Elsie comes tripping gaily down the trench,
Hanky to nose – that lyddite makes a stench –
Getting her pinafore all over grime.
Funny! because she died ten years ago!
It’s a queer time.
The trouble is, things happen much too quick;
Up jump the Bosches, rifles thump and click,
You stagger, and the whole scene fades away:
30 Even good Christians don’t like passing straight
From Tipperary or their Hymn of Hate
To Alleluiah-chanting, and the chime
Of golden harps…and…I’m not well today…
It’s a queer time.
Robert Graves
The Face
Out of the smoke of men’s wrath,
The red mist of anger,
Suddenly,
As a wraith of sleep,
A boy’s face, white and tense,
Convulsed with terror and hate,
The lips trembling…
Then a red smear, falling…
I thrust aside the cloud, as it were tangible,
10 Blinded with a mist of blood.
The face cometh again
As a wraith of sleep:
A boy’s face delicate and blonde,
The very mask of God,
Broken.
Frederic Manning
Gethsemane
The Garden called Gethsemane
In Picardy it was,
And there the people came to see
The English soldiers pass.
We used to pass – we used to pass
Or halt, as it might be,
And ship our masks in case of gas
Beyond Gethsemane.
The Garden called Gethsemane,
10 It held a pretty lass,
But all the time she talked to me
I prayed my cup might pass.
The officer sat on the chair,
The men lay on the grass,
And all the time we halted there
I prayed my cup might pass –
It didn’t pass – it didn’t pass –
It didn’t pass from me.
I drank it when we met the gas
20 Beyond Gethsemane.
Rudyard Kipling
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 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?
10 Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
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.
Wilfred Owen
The Navigators
I saw the bodies of earth’s men
Like wharves thrust in the stream of time
Whereon cramped navigators climb
And free themselves in the warm sun:
With outflung arms and shouts of joy
Those spirits tramped their human planks;
Then pressing close, reforming ranks,
They pushed off in the stream again:
Cold darkly rotting lay the wharves,
10 Decaying in the stream of time;
Slow winding silver tracks of slime
Showed bright where came back none.
W. J. Turner
Spring Offensive
Halted against the shade of a last hill,
They fed, and, lying easy, were at ease
And, finding comfortable chests and knees
Carelessly slept. But many there stood still
To face the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge,
Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world.
Marvelling they stood, and watched the long grass swirled
By the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge,
For though the summer oozed into their veins
10 Like the injected drug for their bones’ pains,
Sharp on their souls hung the imminent line of grass,
Fearfully flashed the sky’s mysterious glass.
Hour after hour they ponder the warm field –
And the far valley behind, where the buttercups
Had blessed with gold their slow boots coming up,
Where even the little brambles would not yield,
But clutched and clung to them like sorrowing hands;
They breathe like trees unstirred.
Till like a cold gust thrilled the little word
20 At which each body and its soul begird
And tighten them for battle. No alarms
Of bugles, no high flags, no clamorous haste –
Only a lift and flare of eyes that faced
The sun, like a friend with whom their love is done.
O larger shone that smile against the sun, –
Mightier than his whose bounty these have spurned.
So, soon they topped the hill, and raced together
Over an open stretch of herb and heather
Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned
30 With fury against them; and soft sudden cups
Opened in thousands for their blood; and the green slopes
Chasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space.
Of them who running on that last high place
Leapt to swift unseen bullets, or went up
On the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge,
Or plunged and fell away past this world’s verge,
Some say God caught them even before they fell.
But what say such as from existence’ brink
Ventured but drave too swift to sink.
40 The few who rushed in the body to enter hell,
And there out-fiending all its fiends and flames
With superhuman inhumanities,
Long-famous glories, immemorial shames –
And crawling slowly back, have by degrees
Regained cool peaceful air in wonder –
Why speak they not of comrades that went under?
Wilfred Owen
Counter-Attack
We’d gained our first objective hours before
While dawn broke like a fac
e 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 grovelled along the saps;
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
10 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
20 Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell,
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry Page 11