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
To a Conscript of 1940
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
CODA
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 h
ad 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
Notes
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.
tilted stacks: Haystacks.
fallow: A ploughed area of farmland left unsown for a period of time.
loam: Soil consisting of varying proportions of clay, silt, and sand.
Downs: The Berkshire Downs are part of a picturesque area of gently hilly countryside in southern England to the west of London.
byres: Cow sheds.
brae: A hillside especially alongside a river, and also a colloquialism meaning ‘raw or fierce weather’.
Happy is England Now
the destroying Dragon: England’s patron saint is St George, who killed a dragon that was laying waste to the countryside.
This is no case of petty Right or Wrong
The phoenix: A mythical Egyptian bird said to die on a funeral pyre and to rise again from the ashes.
made us from dust: An echo of Genesis 2:7, where God creates Adam from ‘the dust of the ground’.
The Poets are Waiting
fashion-plate: Fashion magazines at this time frequently contained glossy pages or plates illustrating the most up-to-date and stylish clothing.
Plated and mailed: Wearing body armour. Chain mail is constructed from interlocked rings of metal, and plate mail consists of welded plates of metal.
The Dilemma
‘Gott strafe England’: German for ‘God Punish England’, a slogan frequently used in early German wartime propaganda.
‘Who’s for the khaki suit’
The Call
French: Sir John French (1852–1925) was Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force between August 1914 and December 1915.
Recruiting
‘Lads, you’re wanted, go and help’: This slogan appears to be Mackintosh’s own invention, but it echoes many posters of the time encouraging enlistment. They bore slogans such as ‘Is Your Best Boy in Khaki?’ and ‘There’s Room for You! Enlist To-Day’.
Girls with feathers: In the early months of the war, organizations such as The Order of The White Feather gave men not in uniforms white feathers, meant to represent cowardice, but the practice proved highly unpopular and was soon stopped.
Washy: Slang for ‘lacking in strength or character’.
three score and ten: Seventy: ‘The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away’ (Psalms 90:10).
Soldier: Twentieth Century
Titan: In Greek mythology, the Titans were pre-Olympian gods or demi-gods, the children of Uranus and capable of enormous power and strength.
Napoleon: Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) became commander of the French army in 1796 and was emperor of France between 1804 and 1814. He emerged from exile to be defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
Caesar: Julius Caesar (c. 101–44 BC) invaded Britain in 55 BC. He became a dictator in Rome, and founded the Julian dynasty of emperors.
Circe’s swine: In Book 10 of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus’ men are turned into pigs by the sorceress Circe while sleeping on the island of Aeaea.
Youth in Arms I
David: The Jewish Old Testament king famed for his defeat of the Philistine Goliath in his youth: ‘And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth’ (1 Samuel 17:49). His subsequent military victories were envied by his adoptive father, Saul, who subsequently plotted to kill him. ‘And the women answered one another as they played, and said, Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands’ (1 Samuel 18:7).
avatar: Incarnation or manifestation.
Greybeards: Old men.
baize: Green felted wool cloth often used to cover gaming tables.
‘I don’t want to be a soldier’
Sung to the tune of ‘On Sunday I Walk Out With a Soldier’, from the popular revue The Passing Show of 1914.
The Conscript
thorn-crowned head, | The nail-marks: A crown of thorns, a mock symbol of royalty, was forced upon Jesus before his crucifixion, according to Matthew 27:29, Mark 15:17 and John 19:2.
Rondeau of a Conscientious Objector
Rondeau: A medieval French verse form consisting of thirteen octosyllabic lines grouped into stanzas of five, three and five lines. The rondeau uses only two rhymes, and the first word or phrase of the first line recurs twice as a refrain after the second and third stanzas. Technically Lawrence’s poem is not a rondeau.
conscientious objector: A person who, for political, moral or religious reasons, refused to fight during the war.
In Training
The Kiss
Brother Lead: A bullet.
Sister Steel: The bayonet.
Arms and the Boy
Arms and the Boy: The title is probably an allusion either to George Bernard Shaw’s anti-romantic drama about militarism, Arms and the Man (1894), or to Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘Arms and the Man’, first published in The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (1917). Both works derive their title from the opening line of John Dryden’s 1697 translation of the Aeneid, the epic poem by the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BC): ‘Arms, and the man I sing.’
For his teeth…his curls: The creature referred to in the third stanza does not seem to be based on any recognizable mythological animal
or figure, and could be either a generic form of devil or merely a product of Owen’s imagination.
‘All the hills and vales along’
Barabbas: Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor in Jerusalem, set free the thief Barabbas in preference to Jesus at the Feast of the Passover (John 18:38–40).
Hemlock: A white flowering plant known for its poisonous qualities.
Socrates: A Greek philosopher (470–399 BC), who was found guilty of corrupting the young and was forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
‘We are Fred Karno’s army’
Sung to the tune of the hymn ‘The Church’s One Foundation’, by Samuel J. Stone and Samuel Sebastian Wesley.
Fred Karno: The stage name of Fred Wescott (1866–1941), a knockabout music-hall comedian, often used to describe a muddle.
ragtime: A popular form of music-hall entertainment, of African-American origin.
Hoch! Hoch! Mein Gott: German, literally meaning ‘High! High! My God’.
Song of the Dark Ages
down: A gently rolling hill.
barrows: Grave mounds or tumuli.
calcined: Reduced to quicklime, desiccated or burnt to ashes.
ossuary: A depository for the bones of the dead.
sod: A piece of turf.
Sonnets 1917: Servitude
This is the third of a group of five sonnets which Gurney dedicated ‘To the Memory of Rupert Brooke’. He described them in a letter of 14 February 1917 as ‘a sort of counterblast against “Sonnetts 1914” [sic], which were written by an officer…They are the protest of the physical against the exulted spiritual; of the cumulative weighted small facts against the one large. Of informed opinion against uninformed.’
In Barracks
soldiers of the Line: Members of a regular army regiment, as opposed to those regiments which were raised specially from civilian volunteers during the First World War.
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry Page 19