The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry

by Various Contributors

  While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke.

  He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear,

  Sick for escape, – loathing the strangled horror

  And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.

  An officer came blundering down the trench:

  ‘Stand-to and man the fire-step!’ On he went…

  Gasping and bawling, ‘Fire-step…counter-attack!’

  Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right

  Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left;

  30 And stumbling figures looming out in front.

  ‘O Christ, they’re coming at us!’ Bullets spat,

  And he remembered his rifle…rapid fire…

  And started blazing wildly…then a bang

  Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out

  To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked

  And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,

  Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans…

  Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,

  Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.

  Siegfried Sassoon

  Youth in Arms III: Retreat

  That is not war – oh it hurts! I am lame.

  A thorn is burning me.

  We are going back to the place from which we came.

  I remember the old song now: –

  Soldier, soldier, going to war,

  When will you come back?

  Mind that rut. It is very deep.

  All these ways are parched and raw.

  Where are we going? How we creep!

  10 Are you there? I never saw –

  Damn this jingle in my brain.

  I’m full of old songs – Have you ever heard this?

  All the roads to victory

  Are flooded as we go.

  There’s so much blood to paddle through,

  That’s why we’re marching slow.

  Yes sir; I’m here. Are you an officer?

  I can’t see. Are we running away?

  How long have we done it? One whole year,

  20 A month, a week, or since yesterday?

  Damn the jingle! My brain

  Is scragged and banged –

  Fellows, these are happy times;

  Tramp and tramp with open eyes.

  Yet, try however much you will,

  You cannot see a tree, a hill,

  Moon, stars or even skies.

  I won’t be quiet. Sing too, you fool.

  I had a dog I used to beat.

  30 Don’t try it on me. Say that again.

  Who said it? Halt! Why? Who can halt?

  We’re marching now. Who fired? Well. Well.

  I’ll lie down too. I’m tired enough.

  Harold Monro

  Aftermath

  Back to Rest

  A leaping wind from England,

  The skies without a stain,

  Clean cut against the morning

  Slim poplars after rain,

  The foolish noise of sparrows

  And starlings in a wood –

  After the grime of battle

  We know that these are good.

  Death whining down from Heaven,

  10 Death roaring from the ground,

  Death stinking in the nostril,

  Death shrill in every sound,

  Doubting we charged and conquered –

  Hopeless we struck and stood.

  Now when the fight is ended

  We know that it was good.

  We that have seen the strongest

  Cry like a beaten child,

  The sanest eyes unholy,

  20 The cleanest hands defiled,

  We that have known the heart blood

  Less than the lees of wine,

  We that have seen men broken,

  We know man is divine.

  W. N. Hodgson

  Dulce et Decorum est

  Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

  Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

  Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

  And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

  Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

  But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;

  Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

  Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

  Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling

  10 Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

  But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

  And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. –

  Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

  As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

  In all my dreams before my helpless sight

  He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

  If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

  Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

  And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

  20 His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,

  If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

  Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

  Bitten as the cud

  Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –

  My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

  To children ardent for some desperate glory,

  The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

  Pro patria mori.

  Wilfred Owen

  Field Ambulance in Retreat

  Via Dolorosa, Via Sacra

  I

  A straight flagged road, laid on the rough earth,

  A causeway of stone from beautiful city to city,

  Between the tall trees, the slender, delicate trees,

  Through the flat green land, by plots of flowers, by black canals thick with heat.

  II

  The road-makers made it well

  Of fine stone, strong for the feet of the oxen and the great Flemish horses,

  And for the high wagons piled with corn from the harvest.

  And the labourers are few;

  They and their quiet oxen stand aside and wait

  10 By the long road loud with the passing of guns, the

  rush of armoured cars, and the tramp of an army on

  the march forward to battle;

  And, where the piled corn-wagons went, our dripping

  Ambulance carries home

  Its red and white harvest from the fields.

  III

  The straight flagged road breaks into dust, into a thin white cloud,

  About the feet of a regiment driven back league by league,

  Rifles at trail, and standards wrapped in black funeral

  cloths. Unhasting, proud in retreat,

  They smile as the Red Cross Ambulance rushes by.

  (You know nothing of beauty and desolation who have not seen

  That smile of an army in retreat.)

  They go: and our shining, beckoning danger goes with them,

  20 And our joy in the harvests that we gathered in at nightfall in the fields;

  And like an unloved hand laid on a beating heart

  Our safety wears us down.

  Safety hard and strange; stranger and yet more hard,

  As, league after dying league, the beautiful, desolate Land

  Falls back from the intolerable speed of an Ambulance in retreat

  On the sacred, dolorous Way.

  May Sinclair

  A Memory

  There was no sound at all, no crying in the village,

  Nothing you would count as sound, that is, after the shells;

  Only behind a wall the slow sobbing of women,

  The creaking of a door, a lost dog – nothing else.

  Silence which might be felt, no pity in the silence,

  Horrible, soft like blood, down all the blood-st
ained ways;

  In the middle of the street two corpses lie unburied,

  And a bayoneted woman stares in the market-place.

  Humble and ruined folk – for these no pride of conquest,

  10 Their only prayer: ‘O! Lord, give us our daily bread!’

  Not by the battle fires, the shrapnel are we haunted;

  Who shall deliver us from the memory of these dead?

  Margaret Sackville

  Dead Man’s Dump

  The plunging limbers over the shattered track

  Racketed with their rusty freight,

  Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,

  And the rusty stakes like sceptres old

  To stay the flood of brutish men

  Upon our brothers dear.

  The wheels lurched over sprawled dead

  But pained them not, though their bones crunched;

  Their shut mouths made no moan.

  10 They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,

  Man born of man, and born of woman;

  And shells go crying over them

  From night till night and now.

  Earth has waited for them,

  All the time of their growth

  Fretting for their decay:

  Now she has them at last!

  In the strength of their strength

  Suspended – stopped and held.

  20 What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?

  Earth! Have they gone into you?

  Somewhere they must have gone,

  And flung on your hard back

  Is their soul’s sack,

  Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.

  Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

  None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass,

  Or stood aside for the half used life to pass

  Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,

  30 When the swift iron burning bee

  Drained the wild honey of their youth.

  What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre,

  Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,

  Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,

  Immortal seeming ever?

  Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,

  A fear may choke in our veins

  And the startled blood may stop.

  The air is loud with death,

  40 The dark air spurts with fire,

  The explosions ceaseless are.

  Timelessly now, some minutes past,

  These dead strode time with vigorous life,

  Till the shrapnel called ‘An end!’

  But not to all. In bleeding pangs

  Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,

  Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

  A man’s brains splattered on

  A stretcher-bearer’s face;

  50 His shook shoulders slipped their load,

  But when they bent to look again

  The drowning soul was sunk too deep

  For human tenderness.

  They left this dead with the older dead,

  Stretched at the cross roads.

  Burnt black by strange decay

  Their sinister faces lie,

  The lid over each eye;

  The grass and coloured clay

  60 More motion have than they,

  Joined to the great sunk silences.

  Here is one not long dead.

  His dark hearing caught our far wheels,

  And the choked soul stretched weak hands

  To reach the living word the far wheels said;

  The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,

  Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels

  Swift for the end to break

  Or the wheels to break,

  70 Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight,

  ‘Will they come? Will they ever come?’

  Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,

  The quivering-bellied mules,

  And the rushing wheels all mixed

  With his tortured upturned sight.

  So we crashed round the bend,

  We heard his weak scream,

  We heard his very last sound,

  And our wheels grazed his dead face.

  Isaac Rosenberg

  Youth in Arms IV: Carrion

  It is plain now what you are. Your head has dropped

  Into a furrow. And the lovely curve

  Of your strong leg has wasted and is propped

  Against a ridge of the ploughed land’s watery swerve.

  You are swayed on waves of the silent ground;

  You clutch and claim with passionate grasp of your fingers

  The dip of earth in which your body lingers;

  If you are not found,

  In a little while your limbs will fall apart;

  10 The birds will take some, but the earth will take most of your heart.

  You are fuel for a coming spring if they leave you here;

  The crop that will rise from your bones is healthy bread.

  You died – we know you – without a word of fear,

  And as they loved you living I love you dead.

  No girl would kiss you. But then

  No girls would ever kiss the earth

  In the manner they hug the lips of men:

  You are not known to them in this, your second birth.

  No coffin-cover now will cram

  20 Your body in a shell of lead;

  Earth will not fall on you from the spade with a slam,

  But will fold and enclose you slowly, you living dead.

  Hush, I hear the guns. Are you still asleep?

  Surely I saw you a little heave to reply.

  I can hardly think you will not turn over and creep

  Along the furrows trenchward as if to die.

  Harold Monro

  A Dead Boche

  To you who’d read my songs of War

  And only hear of blood and fame,

  I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)

  ‘War’s Hell!’ and if you doubt the same,

  To-day I found in Mametz Wood

  A certain cure for lust of blood:

  Where, propped against a shattered trunk,

  In a great mess of things unclean,

  Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk

  10 With clothes and face a sodden green,

  Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,

  Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

  Robert Graves

  Soliloquy II

  I was wrong, quite wrong;

  The dead men are not always carrion.

  After the advance,

  As we went through the shattered trenches

  Which the enemy had left,

  We found, lying upon the fire-step,

  A dead English soldier,

  His head bloodily bandaged

  And his closed left hand touching the earth,

  10 More beautiful than one can tell,

  More subtly coloured than a perfect Goya,

  And more divine and lovely in repose

  Than Angelo’s hand could ever carve in stone.

  Richard Aldington

  Butchers and Tombs

  After so much battering of fire and steel

  It had seemed well to cover them with Cotswold stone –

  And shortly praising their courage and quick skill

  Leave them buried, hidden till the slow, inevitable

  Change came should make them service of France alone.

  But the time’s hurry, the commonness of the tale

  Made it a thing not fitting ceremonial,

  And so the disregarders of blister on heel,

  Pack on shoulder, barrage and work at the wires,

  10 One wooden cross had for ensign of honour and life gone –

  Save when the Gloucesters turning sudden to tell to one

  Some joke, would remember and
say – ‘That joke is done,’

  Since he who would understand was so cold he could not feel,

  And clay binds hard, and sandbags get rotten and crumble.

  Ivor Gurney

  A Private

  This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doors

  Many a frozen night, and merrily

  Answered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores:

  ‘At Mrs Greenland’s Hawthorn Bush,’ said he,

  ‘I slept.’ None knew which bush. Above the town,

  Beyond ‘The Drover,’ a hundred spot the down

  In Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleeps

  More sound in France – that, too, he secret keeps.

  Edward Thomas

  The Volunteer

  Here lies a clerk who half his life had spent

  Toiling at ledgers in a city grey,

  Thinking that so his days would drift away

  With no lance broken in life’s tournament:

  Yet ever ‘twixt the books and his bright eyes

  The gleaming eagles of the legions came,

  And horsemen, charging under phantom skies,

  Went thundering past beneath the oriflamme.

  And now those waiting dreams are satisfied;

  10 From twilight into spacious dawn he went;

  His lance is broken; but he lies content

  With that high hour, in which he lived and died.

  And falling thus he wants no recompense,

  Who found his battle in the last resort;