Wife and Country
Dear, let me thank you for this:
That you made me remember, in fight,
England – all mine at your kiss,
At the touch of your hands in the night:
England – your giving’s delight.
Gilbert Frankau
Girl to Soldier on Leave
I love you – Titan lover,
My own storm-days’ Titan.
Greater than the son of Zeus,
I know whom I would choose.
Titan – my splendid rebel –
The old Prometheus
Wanes like a ghost before your power –
His pangs were joys to yours.
Pallid days arid and wan
10 Tied your soul fast.
Babel-cities’ smoky tops
Pressed upon your growth
Weary gyves. What were you
But a word in the brain’s ways,
Or the sleep of Circe’s swine?
One gyve holds you yet.
It held you hiddenly on the Somme
Tied from my heart at home.
O must it loosen now? I wish
20 You were bound with the old old gyves.
Love! you love me – your eyes
Have looked through death at mine.
You have tempted a grave too much.
I let you – I repine.
Isaac Rosenberg
The Pavement
In bitter London’s heart of stone,
Under the lamplight’s shielded glare
I saw a soldier’s body thrown
Unto the drabs that traffic there
Pacing the pavements with slow feet:
Those old pavements whose blown dust
Throttles the hot air of the street,
And the darkness smells of lust.
The chaste moon, with equal glance,
10 Looked down on the mad world, astare
At those who conquered in sad France
And those who perished in Leicester Square.
And in her light his lips were pale:
Lips that love had moulded well:
Out of the jaws of Passchendaele
They had sent him to this nether hell.
I had no stone of scorn to fling,
For I know not how the wrong began –
But I had seen a hateful thing
20 Masked in the dignity of man:
And hate and sorrow and hopeless anger
Swept my heart, as the winds that sweep
Angrily through the leafless hanger
When winter rises from the deep…
*
I would that war were what men dream:
A crackling fire, a cleansing flame,
That it might leap the space between
And lap up London and its shame.
Francis Brett Young
Not to Keep
They sent him back to her. The letter came
Saying…And she could have him. And before
She could be sure there was no hidden ill
Under the formal writing, he was in her sight,
Living. They gave him back to her alive –
How else? They are not known to send the dead –
And not disfigured visibly. His face?
His hands? She had to look, to ask,
‘What is it, dear?’ And she had given all
10 And still she had all – they had – they the lucky!
Wasn’t she glad now? Everything seemed won,
And all the rest for them permissible ease.
She had to ask, ‘What was it, dear?’
‘ Enough,
Yet not enough. A bullet through and through,
High in the breast. Nothing but what good care
And medicine and rest, and you a week,
Can cure me of to go again.’ The same
Grim giving to do over for them both.
20 She dared no more than ask him with her eyes
How was it with him for a second trial.
And with his eyes he asked her not to ask.
They had given him back to her, but not to keep.
Robert Frost
Going Back
The night turns slowly round,
Swift trains go by in a rush of light;
Slow trains steal past.
This train beats anxiously, outward bound.
But I am not here.
I am away, beyond the scope of this turning;
There, where the pivot is, the axis
Of all this gear.
I, who sit in tears,
10 I, whose heart is torn with parting;
Who cannot bear to think back to the departure platform;
My spirit hears
Voices of men,
Sound of artillery, aeroplanes, presences,
And more than all, the dead-sure silence,
The pivot again.
There, at the axis
Pain, or love, or grief
Sleep on speed; in dead certainty;
20 Pure relief.
There, at the pivot
Time sleeps again.
No has-been, no here-after, only the perfected
Silence of men.
D. H. Lawrence
The Other War
‘I wore a tunic’
I wore a tunic,
A dirty khaki-tunic,
And you wore civilian clothes.
We fought and bled at Loos
While you were on the booze,
The booze that no one here knows.
Oh, you were with the wenches
While we were in the trenches
Facing the German foe.
10 Oh, you were a-slacking
While we were attacking
Down the Menin Road.
Soldiers’ song
‘Blighters’
The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin
And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;
‘We’re sure the Kaiser loves the dear old Tanks!’
I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,
Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ –
And there’d be no more jokes in Music-halls
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.
Siegfried Sassoon
Ragtime
A minx in khaki struts the limelit boards:
With false moustache, set smirk, and ogling eyes
And straddling legs and swinging hips she tries
To swagger it like a soldier, while the chords
Of rampant ragtime jangle, clash and clatter,
And over the brassy blare and drumming din
She strains to squirt her squeaky notes and thin
Spittle of sniggering lascivious patter.
Then out into the jostling Strand I turn,
10 And down a dark lane to the quiet river,
One stream of silver under the full moon,
And think of how cold searchlights flare and burn
Over dank trenches where men crouch and shiver,
Humming, to keep their hearts up, that same tune.
Wilfrid Gibson
Ragtime
The lamps glow here and there, then echo down
The vast deserted vistas of the town –
Each light the echo’d note of some refrain
Repeated in the city’s fevered brain.
Yet all is still, save when there wanders past
– Finding the silence of the night too long –
Some tattered wretch, who, from the night outcast,
Sings, with an aching heart, a comic song.
The vapid parrot-words flaunt through the night –
10 Silly and gay, yet terrible. We know
Men sang these words in many a deadly fight,
And threw them – laughing – to a solemn foe;
S
ang them where tattered houses stand up tall and stark,
And bullets whistle through the ruined street,
Where live men tread on dead men in the dark,
And skulls are sown in fields once sown with wheat
Across the sea, where night is dark with blood
And rockets flash, and guns roar hoarse and deep,
They struggle through entanglements and mud,
20 They suffer wounds – and die –
But here they sleep.
From far away the outcast’s vacuous song
Re-echoes like the singing of a throng;
His dragging footfalls echo down the street,
And turn into a myriad marching feet.
Osbert Sitwell
The Admonition: To Betsey
Remember, on your knees,
The men who guard your slumbers –
And guard a house in a still street
Of drifting leaves and drifting feet,
A deep blue window where below
Lies moonlight on the roofs like snow,
A clock that still the quarters tells
To the dove that roosts beneath the bell’s
Grave canopy of silent brass
10 Round which the little night winds pass
Yet stir it not in the grey steeple;
And guard all small and drowsy people
Whom gentlest dusk doth disattire,
Undressing by the nursery fire
In unperturbed numbers
On this side of the seas –
Remember, on your knees,
The men who guard your slumbers.
Helen Parry Eden
Air-Raid
Night shatters in mid-heaven: the bark of guns,
The roar of planes, the crash of bombs, and all
The unshackled skiey pandemonium stuns
The senses to indifference, when a fall
Of masonry nearby startles awake,
Tingling, wide-eyed, prick-eared, with bristling hair,
Each sense within the body, crouched aware
Like some sore-hunted creature in the brake.
Yet side by side we lie in the little room
10 Just touching hands, with eyes and ears that strain
Keenly, yet dream-bewildered, through tense gloom,
Listening, in helpless stupor of insane
Cracked nightmare panic, fantastically wild,
To the quiet breathing of our sleeping child.
Wilfrid Gibson
Zeppelins
I saw the people climbing up the street
Maddened with war and strength and thought to kill;
And after followed Death, who held with skill
His torn rags royally, and stamped his feet.
The fires flamed up and burnt the serried town,
Most where the sadder, poorer houses were;
Death followed with proud feet and smiling stare,
And the mad crowds ran madly up and down.
And many died and hid in unfound places
10 In the black ruins of the frenzied night;
And Death still followed in his surplice, white
And streaked in imitation of their faces.
*
But in the morning, men began again
To mock Death following in bitter pain.
Nancy Cunard
‘Education’
The rain is slipping, dripping down the street;
The day is grey as ashes on the hearth.
The children play with soldiers made of tin,
While you sew
Row after row.
The tears are slipping, dripping one by one;
Your son has shot and wounded his small brother.
The mimic battle’s ended with a sob,
While you dream
10 Over your seam.
The blood is slipping, dripping drop by drop;
The men are dying in the trenches’ mud.
The bullets search the quick among the dead.
While you drift,
The Gods sift.
The ink is slipping, dripping from the pens,
On papers, White and Orange, Red and Grey, –
History for the children of to-morrow, –
While you prate
20 About Fate.
War is slipping, dripping death on earth.
If the child is father of the man,
Is the toy gun father of the Krupps?
For Christ’s sake think!
While you sew
Row after row.
Pauline Barrington
Socks
Shining pins that dart and click
In the fireside’s sheltered peace
Check the thoughts that cluster thick –
20 plain and then decrease.
He was brave – well, so was I –
Keen and merry, but his lip
Quivered when he said good-bye –
Purl the seam-stitch, purl and slip.
Never used to living rough,
10 Lots of things he’d got to learn;
Wonder if he’s warm enough –
Knit 2, catch 2, knit 1, turn.
Hark! The paper-boys again!
Wish that shout could be suppressed;
Keeps one always on the strain –
Knit off 9, and slip the rest.
Wonder if he’s fighting now,
What he’s done and where he’s been;
He’ll come out on top, somehow –
20 Slip 1, knit 2, purl 14.
Jessie Pope
A War Film
I saw,
With a catch of the breath and the heart’s uplifting,
Sorrow and pride,
The ‘week’s great draw’ –
The Mons Retreat;
The ‘Old Contemptibles’ who fought, and died,
The horror and the anguish and the glory.
As in a dream,
Still hearing machine-guns rattle and shells scream,
10 I came out into the street.
When day was done,
My little son
Wondered at bath-time why I kissed him so,
Naked upon my knee.
How could he know
The sudden terror that assaulted me?…
The body I had borne
Nine moons beneath my heart,
A part of me…
20 If, someday,
It should be taken away
To War. Tortured. Torn.
Slain.
Rotting in No Man’s Land, out in the rain –
My little son…
Yet all those men had mothers, every one.
How should he know
Why I kissed and kissed and kissed him, crooning his name?
He thought that I was daft.
30 He thought it was a game,
And laughed, and laughed.
Theresa Hooley
The War Films
O living pictures of the dead,
O songs without a sound,
O fellowship whose phantom tread
Hallows a phantom ground –
How in a gleam have these revealed
The faith we had not found.
We have sought God in a cloudy Heaven,
We have passed by God on earth:
His seven sins and his sorrows seven,
10 His wayworn mood and mirth,
Like a ragged cloak have hid from us
The secret of his birth.
Brother of men, when now I see
The lads go forth in line,
Thou knowest my heart is hungry in me
As for thy bread and wine:
Thou knowest my heart is bowed in me
To take their death for mine.
Sir Henry Newbolt
The Dancers
(During a Great Battle, 1916)
The floors are slippery with blood:
The world gyrates too. God is
good
That while His wind blows out the light
For those who die hourly for us –
We can still dance, each night.
The music has grown numb with death –
But we will suck their dying breath,
The whispered name they breathed to chance,
To swell our music, make it loud
10 That we may dance, – may dance.
We are the dull blind carrion-fly
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry Page 14