Some Desperate Glory

by Max Egremont

  ‘Servitude’ – Ivor Gurney

  ‘Louse Hunting’ – Isaac Rosenberg

  ‘Dead Men’s Dump’ – Isaac Rosenberg

  ‘The General’ – Siegfried Sassoon

  ‘Returning, We Hear the Larks’ – Isaac Rosenberg

  ‘Sergeant-Major Money’ – Robert Graves

  ‘To Any Dead Officer’ – Siegfried Sassoon

  ‘Vlamertinghe: Passing the Chateau’ – Edmund Blunden

  ‘Counter-Attack’ – Siegfried Sassoon

  ‘To the Prussians of England’ – Ivor Gurney

  ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ – Wilfred Owen

  ‘To his Love’ – Ivor Gurney

  ‘I Saw his Round Mouth’s Crimson’ – Wilfred Owen

  ‘Photographs (To Two Scots Lads)’ – Ivor Gurney

  After-Glow

  (To F. W. Harvey)

  Out of the smoke and dust of the little room

  With tea-talk loud and laughter of happy boys,

  I passed into the dusk. Suddenly the noise

  Ceased with a shock, left me alone in the gloom,

  To wonder at the miracle hanging high

  Tangled in twigs, the silver crescent clear.

  Time passed from mind. Time died, and then we were

  Once more at home together, you and I.

  The elms with arms of love wrapped us in shade

  Who watched the ecstatic west with one desire,

  One soul uprapt; and still another fire

  Consumed us, and our joy yet greater made:

  That Bach should sing for us, mix us in one

  The joy of firelight and the sunken sun.

  IVOR GURNEY

  Song

  Only the wanderer

  Knows England’s graces,

  Or can anew see clear

  Familiar faces.

  And who loves joy as he

  That dwells in shadows?

  Do not forget me quite,

  O Severn meadows.

  IVOR GURNEY

  Soldier: Twentieth Century

  I love you, great new Titan!

  Am I not you?

  Napoleon or Caesar

  Out of you grew.

  Out of the unthinkable torture,

  Eyes kissed by death,

  Won back to the world again,

  Lost and won in a breath,

  Cruel men are made immortal.

  Out of your pain born.

  They have stolen the sun’s power

  With their feet on your shoulders worn.

  Let them shrink from your girth,

  That has outgrown the pallid days,

  When you slept like Circe’s swine,

  Or a word in the brain’s ways.

  ISAAC ROSENBERG

  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 our 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

  Ballad of the Three Spectres

  As I went up by Ovillers

  In mud and water cold to the knee,

  There went three jeering, fleering spectres,

  That walked abreast and talked of me.

  The first said, ‘Here’s a right brave soldier

  That walks the dark unfearingly;

  Soon he’ll come back on a fine stretcher,

  And laughing for a nice Blighty.’

  The second, ‘Read his face, old comrade,

  No kind of lucky chance I see;

  One day he’ll freeze in mud to the marrow,

  Then look his last on Picardie.’

  Though bitter the word of these first twain

  Curses the third spat venomously;

  ‘He’ll stay untouched till the war’s last dawning

  Then live one hour of agony.’

  Liars the first two were. Behold me

  At sloping arms by one – two – three,

  Waiting the time I shall discover

  Whether the third spake verity.

  IVOR GURNEY

  Servitude

  If it were not for England, who would bear

  This heavy servitude one moment more?

  To keep a brothel, sweep and wash the floor

  Of filthiest hovels were noble to compare

  With this brass-cleaning life. Now here, now there

  Harried in foolishness, scanned curiously o’er

  By fools made brazen by conceit, and store

  Of antique witticisms thin and bare.

  Only the love of comrades sweetens all,

  Whose laughing spirit will not be outdone.

  As night-watching men wait for the sun

  To hearten them, so wait I on such boys

  As neither brass nor Hell-fire may appal,

  Nor guns, nor sergeant-major’s bluster and noise.

  IVOR GURNEY

  Louse Hunting

  Nudes – stark aglisten

  Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces of fiends

  And raging limbs

  Whirl over the floor one fire,

  For a shirt verminously busy

  Yon soldier tore from his throat

  With oaths

  Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice.

  And soon the shirt was aflare

  Over the candle he’d lit while we lay.

  Then we all sprang up and stript

  To hunt the vermin brood.

  Soon like a demons’ pantomime

  The place was raging.

  See the silhouettes agape,

  See the gibbering shadows

  Mixed with the battled arms on the wall.

  See gargantuan hooked fingers

  Dug in supreme flesh

  To smutch the supreme littleness.

  See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling

  Because some wizard vermin

  Charmed from the quiet this revel

  When our ears were half lulled

  By the dark music

  Blown from Sleep’s trumpet.

  ISAAC ROSENBERG

  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,

  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.

  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,

  When the swift iron burning bee

  Drained the wild honey of their youth.

  What of us who, flung on the shriek
ing 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,

  The dark air spurts with fire,

  The explosions ceaseless are.

  Timelessly now, some minutes past,

  Those 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;

  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

  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,

  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

  The General

  ‘Good-morning, good-morning!’ the General said

  When we met him last week on our way to the line.

  Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,

  And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

  ‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack

  As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

  But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

  SIEGFRIED SASSOON

  Returning, We Hear the Larks

  Sombre the night is.

  And though we have our lives, we know

  What sinister threat lurks there.

  Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know

  This poison-blasted track opens on our camp –

  On a little safe sleep.

  But hark! joy – joy – strange joy.

  Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.

  Music showering our upturned list’ning faces.

  Death could drop from the dark

  As easily as song –

  But song only dropped,

  Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand

  By dangerous tides,

  Like a girl’s dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there,

  Or her kisses where a serpent hides.

  ISAAC ROSENBERG

  Sergeant-Major Money

  It wasn’t our battalion, but we lay alongside it,

  So the story is as true as the telling is frank.

  They hadn’t one Line-officer left, after Arras,

  Except a batty major and the Colonel, who drank.

  ‘B’ Company Commander was fresh from the Depot,

  An expert on gas drill, otherwise a dud;

  So Sergeant-Major Money carried on, as instructed,

  And that’s where the swaddies began to sweat blood.

  His Old Army humour was so well-spiced and hearty

  That one poor sod shot himself, and one lost his wits;

  But discipline’s maintained, and back in rest-billets

  The Colonel congratulates ‘B’ Company on their kits.

  The subalterns went easy, as was only natural

  With a terror like Money driving the machine,

  Till finally two Welshmen, butties from the Rhondda,

  Bayoneted their bugbear in a field-canteen.

  Well, we couldn’t blame the officers, they relied on Money;

  We couldn’t blame the pitboys, their courage was grand;

  Or, least of all, blame Money, an old stiff surviving

  In a New (bloody) Army he couldn’t understand.

  ROBERT GRAVES

  To Any Dead Officer

  Well, how are things in Heaven? I wish you’d say,

  Because I’d like to know that you’re all right.

  Tell me, have you found everlasting day,

  Or been sucked in by everlasting night?

  For when I shut my eyes your face shows plain;

  I hear you make some cheery old remark –

  I can rebuild you in my brain,

  Though you’ve gone out patrolling in the dark.

  You hated tours of trenches; you were proud

  Of nothing more than having good years to spend;

  Longed to get home and join the careless crowd

  Of chaps who work in peace with Time for friend.

  That’s all washed out now. You’re beyond the wire:

  No earthly chance can send you crawling back;

  You’ve finished with machine-gun fire –

  Knocked over in a hopeless dud-attack.

  Somehow I always thought you’d get done in,

  Because you were so desperate keen to live:

  You were all out to try and save your skin,

  Well knowing how much the world had got to give.

  You joked at shells and talked the usual ‘shop,’

  Stuck to your dirty job and did it fine:

  With ‘Jesus Christ! when will it stop?

  Three years … It’s hell unless we break their line.’

  So when they told me you’d been left for dead

  I wouldn’t believe them, feeling it must be true.

  Next week the bloody Roll of Honour said

  ‘Wounded and missing’ – (That’s the thing to do

  When lads are left in shell-holes dying slow,

  With nothing but blank sky and wounds that ache,

  Moaning for water till they know

  It’s night, and then it’s not worth while to wake!)

  Good-bye, old lad! Remember me to God,

  And tell Him that our Politicians swear

  They won’t give in till Prussian Rule’s been trod

  Under the Heel of England … Are you there?…

  Yes … and the War won’t end for at least two years;

  But we’ve got stacks of men … I’m blind with tears,

  Staring into the dark. Cheero!

  I wish they’d killed you in a decent show.

  SIEGFRIED SASSOON

  Vlamertinghe: Passing the Chateau

  (July 1917)

  ‘And all her silken flanks with garlands drest’ –

  But we are coming to the sacrifice.

  Must those have flowers who are not yet gone West?

  May those have flowers who live with death and lice?

  This must be the floweriest place

  That earth allows; the queenly face

  Of the proud mansion borrows grace for grace

  Spite of those brute guns lowing at the skies.

  Bold great daisies, golden lights,

  Bubbling roses’ pinks and whites –

  Such a gay carpet! poppies b
y the million;

  Such damask! such vermilion!

  But if you ask me, mate, the choice of colour

  Is scarcely right; this red should have been much duller.

  EDMUND BLUNDEN

  Counter-Attack

  We’d gained our first objective hours before

  While dawn broke like a face 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,

  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

  Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell,

  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;

  And stumbling figures looming out in front.

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