by Max Egremont
Was thought, of what the look meant with the word
‘Home’ as we walked and watched the sunset blurred.
And then to me the word, only the word,
‘Homesick’, as it were playfully occurred:
No more.
If I should ever more admit
Than the mere word I could not endure it
For a day longer: this captivity
Must somehow come to an end, else I should be
Another man, as often now I seem,
Or this life be only an evil dream.
EDWARD THOMAS
The Kiss
To these I turn, in these I trust –
Brother Lead and Sister Steel.
To his blind power I make appeal,
I guard her beauty clean from rust.
He spins and burns and loves the air,
And splits a skull to win my praise;
But up the nobly marching days
She glitters naked, cold and fair.
Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this:
That in good fury he may feel
The body where he sets his heel
Quail from your downward darting kiss.
SIEGFRIED SASSOON
The Festubert Shrine
A sycamore on either side
In whose lovely leafage cried
Hushingly the little winds –
Thus was Mary’s shrine descried.
‘Sixteen Hundred and Twenty-Four’
Legended above the door,
‘Pray, sweet gracious Lady, pray
For our souls,’ – and nothing more.
Builded of rude gray stones and these
Scarred and marred from base to frieze
With the shrapnel’s pounces – ah,
Fair she braved War’s gaunt disease:
Fair she pondered on the strange
Embitterments of latter change,
Looking fair towards Festubert,
Cloven roof and tortured grange.
Work of carving too there was,
(Once had been her reredos),
In this cool and peaceful cell
That the hoarse guns blared across.
Twisted oaken pillars graced
With oaken amaranths interlaced
In oaken garlandry, had borne
Her holy niche – and now laid waste.
Mary, pray for us? O pray!
In thy dwelling by this way
What poor folks have knelt to thee!
We are no less poor than they.
EDMUND BLUNDEN
As the Team’s Head-Brass
As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed the angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.
The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker’s round hole,
The ploughman said. ‘When will they take it away?’
‘When the war’s over.’ So the talk began –
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
‘Have you been out?’ ‘No.’ ‘And don’t want to, perhaps?’
‘If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm, I shouldn’t want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more … Have many gone
From here?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Many lost?’ ‘Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.’
‘And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.’ ‘Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.’ Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.
EDWARD THOMAS
The Sun Used to Shine
The sun used to shine while we two walked
Slowly together, paused and started
Again, and sometimes mused, sometimes talked
As either pleased, and cheerfully parted
Each night. We never disagreed
Which gate to rest on. The to be
And the late past we gave small heed.
We turned from men or poetry
To rumours of the war remote
Only till both stood disinclined
For aught but the yellow flavorous coat
Of an apple wasps had undermined;
Or a sentry of dark betonies,
The stateliest of small flowers on earth,
At the forest verge; or crocuses
Pale purple as if they had their birth
In sunless Hades fields. The war
Came back to mind with the moonrise
Which soldiers in the east afar
Beheld then. Nevertheless, our eyes
Could as well imagine the Crusades
Or Caesar’s battles. Everything
To faintness like those rumours fades –
Like the brook’s water glittering
Under the moonlight – like those walks
Now – like us two that took them, and
The fallen apples, all the talks
And silences – like memory’s sand
When the tide covers it late or soon,
And other men through other flowers
In those fields under the same moon
Go talking and have easy hours.
EDWARD THOMAS
Break of Day in the Trenches
The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old Druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems, odd thing, you grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver – what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping,
But mine in my ear is safe –
Just a little white with the dust.
ISAAC ROSENBERG
Strange Service
Little did I dream, England, that you bore me
Under the Cotswold Rills beside the water meadows,
To do you dreadful service, here, beyond your borders
And your enfolding seas.
I was a dreamer ever, and bound to your dear service,
<
br /> Meditating deep, I thought on your secret beauty,
As through a child’s face one may see the clear spirit
Miraculously shining.
Your hills not only hills, but friends of mine and kindly,
Your tiny knolls and orchards hidden beside the river
Muddy and strongly flowing, with shy and tiny streamlets
Safe in its bosom.
Now these are memories only, and your skies and rushy sky-pools
Fragile mirrors easily broken by moving airs …
But deep in my heart for ever goes on your daily being,
And uses consecrate.
Think on me too, O Mother, who wrest my soul to serve you
In strange and fearful ways beyond your encircling waters;
None but you can know my heart, its tears and sacrifice;
None, but you, repay.
IVOR GURNEY
The Death Bed
He drowsed and was aware of silence heaped
Round him, unshaken as the steadfast walls;
Aqueous like floating rays of amber light,
Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep.
Silence and safety; and his mortal shore
Lipped by the inward, moonless waves of death.
Someone was holding water to his mouth.
He swallowed, unresisting; moaned and dropped
Through crimson gloom to darkness; and forgot
The opiate throb and ache that was his wound.
Water – calm, sliding green above the weir.
Water – a sky-lit alley for his boat,
Bird-voiced, and bordered with reflected flowers
And shaken hues of summer; drifting down,
He dipped contented oars, and sighed, and slept.
Night, with a gust of wind, was in the ward,
Blowing the curtain to a glimmering curve.
Night. He was blind; he could not see the stars
Glinting among the wraiths of wandering cloud;
Queer blots of colour, purple, scarlet, green,
Flickered and faded in his drowning eyes.
Rain – he could hear it rustling through the dark;
Fragrance and passionless music woven as one;
Warm rain on drooping roses; pattering showers
That soak the woods; not the harsh rain that sweeps
Behind the thunder, but a trickling peace,
Gently and slowly washing life away.
He stirred, shifting his body; then the pain
Leapt like a prowling beast, and gripped and tore
His groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs.
But someone was beside him; soon he lay
Shuddering because that evil thing had passed.
And death, who’d stepped toward him, paused and stared.
Light many lamps and gather round his bed.
Lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live.
Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet.
He’s young; he hated War; how should he die
When cruel old campaigners win safe through?
But death replied: ‘I choose him.’ So he went,
And there was silence in the summer night;
Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep.
Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.
SIEGFRIED SASSOON
The Trumpet
Rise up, rise up,
And, as the trumpet blowing
Chases the dreams of men,
As the dawn glowing
The stars that left unlit
The land and water,
Rise up and scatter
The dew that covers
The print of last night’s lovers –
Scatter it, scatter it!
While you are listening
To the clear horn,
Forget, men, everything
On this earth newborn,
Except that it is lovelier
Than any mysteries.
Open your eyes to the air
That has washed the eyes of the stars
Through all the dewy night:
Up with the light,
To the old wars;
Arise, arise!
EDWARD THOMAS
Lights Out
I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.
Many a road and track
That, since the dawn’s first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink.
Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends,
All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.
There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter and leave alone,
I know not how.
The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.
EDWARD THOMAS
Bach and the Sentry
Watching the dark my spirit rose in flood
On that most dearest Prelude of my delight.
The low-lying mist lifted its hood,
The October stars showed nobly in clear night.
When I return, and to real music-making,
And play that Prelude, how will it happen then?
Shall I feel as I felt, a sentry hardly waking,
With a dull sense of No Man’s Land again?
IVOR GURNEY
1917
TO THE POET David Jones, ‘the wholesale slaughter’ and impersonality of the war’s later years began with the Somme. Previously there’d been a sense of tradition stretching back to the Peninsula, to Marlborough’s campaigns, even to Agincourt. Now the war became more mechanical, harder, more horrifically modern.
The direction of Britain’s war changed in December 1916 when David Lloyd George, the Minister of Munitions and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, succeeded Asquith – never a natural war leader – as Prime Minister. It was a huge leap for the country to be led by a man who’d not been to a public school or university. Having grown up in a cottage in north Wales, where his uncle was a cobbler, Lloyd George had made a virtue out of this, even exaggerating his early poverty, proclaiming his mission to aid the poor, particularly at the expense of inheritors of great wealth. He owed his advancement not only to his own dynamism but also to a deadlocked war.
Gallipoli had failed; the Somme battles had gained only a few miles; the Royal Navy had been brought to a dead heat, arguably a defeat, at Jutland; U-boats were menacing British supply routes; the Russians, effective against the Austrians, couldn’t match the Germans who’d conquered Romania and still occupied Belgium and much of northern France. The cold winter further sapped morale.
The new Prime Minister was not impressed by Douglas Haig and the British High Command, particularly after the Somme. For the planned 1917 spring offensive, Lloyd George infuriated Haig by putting the British army under the temporary control of the persuasive, English-speaking French General Nivelle who’d done well at Verdun.
The British role was to advance on a front stretching from Bapaume in the south up to Arras. The main force would come from a massive French attack on the Chemin des Dames, a surge uphill against well-dug-in German machine guns. The Germans, through captured papers, knew of the plan. There followed, in March 1917, what seemed like a retreat, as the Germans withdrew, wrecking the country that they left behind, ta
king up positions in the well-fortified so-called Hindenburg Line. This was a strategic move, not a flight. It determined the fate of the Allies’ spring offensive that was meant to win the war.
In January 1917, Wilfred Owen was with the 2nd Battalion, the Manchester Regiment in the transit camp at Etaples. Here he was hit, during bombing practice, by a fragment which grazed his thumb, letting him coax out one drop of blood, a glimpse of what it was to be a warrior. ‘There is a fine heroic feeling about being in France,’ Owen told his mother on New Year’s Day, ‘and I am in perfect spirits. A tinge of excitement is about me, but excitement is always necessary to my happiness.’ He wrote again ten days later, ‘Have no anxiety. I cannot do a better thing or be in a righter place…’
He’d been under shellfire in the snow at Bertrancourt by 4 February. The ugliness of the trenches cut into the crimson aestheticism, nurtured by Tailhade and the reading of Wilde. ‘I suppose I can endure cold, and fatigue, and face-to-face death, as well as another; but extra for me there is the universal perversion of Ugliness,’ he told his mother. ‘Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language and nothing but foul, even from one’s own mouth (for all are devilridden), everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth.’ Owen claimed that he’d been too busy surviving to be frightened: ‘I cannot say I felt any fear.’ That day he arrived at Abbeville to take a transport course. Another offensive was only two months away.
Edward Thomas had his last leave in England over the weekend of 6 January. There was snow and mist round the cottage that his family had taken near High Beech Camp in Essex. He read stories to his children, bathed them in a tub in front of the fire and sang folk songs, showing great tenderness to them yet impatient with Helen his wife, talking briskly about life assurance documents, arguing over possible improvements to the house. After a day in London – away from her – he was loving on their last night, carrying Helen to bed in his greatcoat and saying ‘remember that, whatever happens, all is well between us for ever and ever’. As Edward strode away the next morning, soon invisible in the mist, he called out, ‘Coo-ee!’ and she answered, before running up a hill, hoping to see him but, as she wrote later, ‘There was nothing but the mist and the snow and the silence of death.’ He was in France as an artillery officer by the end of January, near the guns and regretting the absence of birdsong.