They had clambered down from the sofa, and gathered round the bed with eager, interested eyes.
‘Horses and guns going by – how fine!’ someone whispered.
‘Yes, yes; believe me, that is how the accidents to the children happen. You must know yourself that it is true. One runs out to look—’
‘But I never saw any at all,’ a boy cried sorrowfully. ‘Only one noise I heard. That was when Aunt Emmeline’s house fell down.’
‘But listen to me. I am telling you! One runs out to look, because one is little and cannot see well. So one peeps between the man’s legs, and then – you know how close those big horses and guns turn the corners – then one’s foot slips and one gets run over. That’s how it happens. Several times it had happened, but not many times; certainly not a hundred, perhaps not twenty. So, you see, you must be all. Tell me now that you are all that there are, and Anna shall give you the cakes.’
‘Thousands,’ a boy repeated monotonously. ‘Then we all come here to wait till our people come for us.’
‘But now we will go away from here. The poor lady is tired,’ said the elder girl, plucking his sleeve.
‘Oh, you hurt, you hurt!’ he cried, and burst into tears.
‘What is that for?’ said Frau Ebermann. ‘To cry in a room where a poor lady is sick is very inconsiderate.’
‘Oh, but look, lady!’ said the elder girl.
Frau Ebermann looked and saw.
‘Au revoir, lady.’ They made their little smiling bows and curtseys undisturbed by her loud cries. ‘Au revoir, lady. We will wait till our people come for us.’
When Anna at last ran in, she found her mistress on her knees, busily cleaning the floor with the lace cover from the radiator, because, she explained, it was all spotted with the blood of five children – she was perfectly certain there could not be more than five in the whole world – who had gone away for the moment, but were now waiting round the corner, and Anna was to find them and give them cakes to stop the bleeding, while her mistress swept and garnished that Our dear Lord when He came might find everything as it should be.
Rudyard Kipling
ROGER MCGOUGH – Poet
Poems written at the outbreak of the Great War by the likes of Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell and Charles Sorley set the moral standard to which eager young volunteers strived to aspire: an overwhelming sense of beauty that comes with the premonition of an early death, and a willingness to give one’s life for an idealized England, a country of playing fields and public schools, of decency and cream teas.
By the time Robert Graves had written ‘A Child’s Nightmare’ three years later in 1917, the tone had changed radically. Hundreds of thousands of unwilling conscripts regarded themselves as cannon-fodder being sacrificed in nightmare attacks which had no military justification. Mud, blood and desolation had destroyed those early dreams.
This poem is about a dream, a recurring, horrible one, that a twenty-two-year-old Royal Welch Fusilier wrote in an attempt to give form to the real horror that threatened to engulf him. Despite being wounded, and, in fact, reported dead in 1916, Robert Graves survived the war and enjoyed a long and distinguished life, thus outsmarting the nightmarish Cat with its voice, cruel and flat.
A CHILD’S NIGHTMARE
Through long nursery nights he stood
By my bed unwearying,
Loomed gigantic, formless, queer,
Purring in my haunted ear
That same hideous nightmare thing,
Talking, as he lapped my blood,
In a voice cruel and flat,
Saying for ever, ‘Cat! . . . Cat! . . . Cat! . . .’
That one word was all he said,
That one word through all my sleep,
In monotonous mock despair.
Nonsense may be light as air,
But there’s Nonsense that can keep
Horror bristling round the head,
When a voice cruel and flat
Says for ever, ‘Cat! . . . Cat! . . . Cat! . . .’
He had faded, he was gone
Years ago with Nursery Land,
When he leapt on me again
From the clank of a night train,
Overpowered me foot and hand,
Lapped my blood, while on and on
The old voice cruel and flat
Says for ever, ‘Cat! . . . Cat! . . . Cat! . . .’
Morphia drowsed, again I lay
In a crater by High Wood:
He was there with straddling legs,
Staring eyes as big as eggs,
Purring as he lapped my blood,
His black bulk darkening the day,
With a voice cruel and flat,
‘Cat! . . . Cat! . . . Cat! . . .’ he said,
‘Cat! . . . Cat! . . .’
When I’m shot through heart and head,
And there’s no choice but to die,
The last word I’ll hear, no doubt,
Won’t be ‘Charge!’ or ‘Bomb them out!’
Nor the stretcher-bearer’s cry,
‘Let that body be, he’s dead!’
But a voice cruel and flat
Saying for ever, ‘Cat! . . . Cat! . . . Cat!’
Robert Graves
ANNE FINE – Writer
Years ago, in a library sale, I came across a quite extraordinary book called The Winding Road Unfolds. It was written by Thomas Suthren Hope, who lied to the army about his age and served in the trenches till he was wounded in December 1917. Hope wrote the book in 1936, hoping to warn of the horrors of battle as he, like others, watched the second world war of his lifetime approaching so fast.
The vivid account this man left haunted me. And in The Book of the Banshee, my version of a personal record left by the fictional ‘William Saffery’ equally haunts Will Flowers, who is the very same age and watching the countless grim and explosive scenes in his own family as his tempestuous sister, Estelle, battles through her teenage years.
I wanted to make the book into a comedy – no mean feat for a writer, since the First World War was in no way amusing. But teenage arguments (once they are over) can often seem extremely comical, so I solved the technical problem by following Will’s own moods. Young people are mercurial – one minute happy to have a laugh, the next deadly serious. Will finds himself obsessively reading about the soldier William Saffery every night, and can’t help but compare Saffery’s real wartime battle experiences abroad with those he witnesses at home . . .
FROM THE BOOK OF THE BANSHEE
Mum nodded angrily towards the door. ‘I’ll tell you that young lady’s problem. She doesn’t know who her friends are. Will is enough of a pain. But Estelle! We do our best, and she just treats us like enemies. At least Will’s not like that. At least he’s always known who’s on his side.’
I couldn’t help nodding. But I was not so sure. I don’t know who’s on whose side. This isn’t war. Mind you, sometimes I think it might be a whole lot simpler if we all went round in different coloured uniforms to show where our sympathies lay in each particular battle. ‘Oh, look. She’s one of us today. She’s wearing khaki.’ ‘Watch out for him. He’s just gone up to change back into field grey.’
It probably wouldn’t work. Even William Saffery had problems working out who was the enemy. I thought about the time he was scrambling back from a night raid, and a shell fell so close that it blasted him out of his senses. He crawled off, bleeding steadily, the wrong way through No Man’s Land, but the sweep of a machine gun over the field of mud and wire soon sent him hurtling into the safety of a shell hole. A flare shot up, and fell in an arc of livid green. In its brief light, he watched bullets flying over the lip of the hole. Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat! Then suddenly into his private swamp of mud and blood fell someone else in desperate need of shelter. Whoever it was landed heavy as a sandbag. As William rolled to face this new danger, another flare shot up. The bilious light hung for its few long moments in the sky, and William and the oth
er boy looked gravely at one another. Then, with no words, the two of them came to an understanding. Gently, so as not to startle someone no older than himself into a deadly mistake, the boy lifted his arm and pointed out the true direction of William’s front line.
In return, William drew back his bayonet.
Will got back safely. That night, he says, he hoped aloud to God the other boy did too. ‘I felt no enmity,’ he wrote. ‘Why should I? Without the dying splutter of the flare, how would I even have known that, where mud and blood had failed to cover it, his uniform was not, like mine, khaki, but the dreaded field grey?’
And that’s how I feel about Estelle. Sometimes I even think she has right on her side. Last week, when Gran borrowed me and Estelle to shift some furniture around in her bedroom, we came across an old cardboard box full of photographs at the bottom of the wardrobe. Estelle picked out one of five fancy ladies sitting on a bench at the seaside, dressed up as if they were about to go to church.
In front of them, stabbing the sand with a little wooden spade, was a small child. We couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl.
‘Who’s this?’ Estelle demanded.
Gran peered at the photo. ‘That’s my grandmother.’
‘Yours?’
Gran gave Estelle a warning look. ‘People my age don’t come out of tins,’ she said tartly.
‘And who are all the ladies?’
‘My great-grandmother and her four sisters.’ She pointed one by one along the line. ‘Rose, Elsie, Greta, Matty and Daisy.’
Estelle rooted in the box. A few layers down, she found what was almost the same photo over again. There was the same wide line of white hotels facing the sands, the same tall lampstands curving over the promenade. But this time the child on the beach was old enough to have built a sandcastle with a wide foaming moat and four magnificent turrets.
And this time all the sisters were dressed in black.
‘Everyone was in mourning by then,’ explained Gran. ‘It was such a terrible war.’ She stroked the photo and a memory came back. ‘Do you know, my grandmother once told me that when she ran down to the beach on their first holiday after the war, she couldn’t understand why the sea sounded so different. She asked her mother, “Where’s that other noise?” and Rose glanced at her sisters. “What other noise, dear?” said Aunty Matty. “The waves sound just the same, surely.” But my grandmother persisted. “Yes, the waves sound just the same. But where’s the noise you told me was the huge rocks on the sea bed, rolling and banging against one another?” One by one the aunts looked away uneasily and wouldn’t answer her. And that was when my grandmother realized for the very first time that, during all those endless summer days spent on the beach, what she’d been hearing was the guns in France.’
I felt quite sick. Gran handed me the photograph to put back in the box, and I couldn’t even bear to glance at it again, knowing that, summer after long summer, those aunts had sat in a row and listened to the guns that were killing their husbands and brothers and uncles, and said nothing in front of the children.
‘Didn’t they care?’ Estelle demanded.
‘Of course they cared,’ Gran replied. ‘People with self-control don’t have any fewer feelings. They felt the same as anyone else when they were handed their black-edged telegrams.’
‘But not to say!’
Gran shrugged. ‘Stiff upper lip.’
Estelle went mad. ‘Fools!’ she yelled. ‘Idiots! Couldn’t they see it was a waste? Didn’t they realize that it was self-control like theirs that let that horrible war go on for years?’
Gran didn’t argue with her. Neither did I. Perhaps Estelle’s right, and people should speak up more. There is a bit in William Saffery’s book when he leans back in a ditch and lets himself daydream about what he would say if he had the chance to show the Big Brass round the battlefield. He’d tell them what he thought of their great ‘war to end all wars’. His words burn off the page, and I can hear behind his scorching sarcasms, his bitter wit, the scathing tones of Estelle. Though he probably died of old age before she was born, and she’s not read his book, the two of them have a lot in common. Neither would trade a child’s unruffled summers on the beach for nothing said about the war in France.
In fact, sometimes at night I get confused. I put down the book and lie in the dark, thinking about what I’ve read, and when his withering descriptions of all the horrors he sees around him ring in my head, it’s Estelle’s voice I hear.
That’s not surprising. Some of the things they say sound so alike. But he stayed in the war month after month. Oh, he wrote his doubts down secretly when he could; but he kept shooting at those other boys, no older than himself.
Estelle would never have done that. She would have flung her rifle in a ditch rather than be a part of anything about which she had so many doubts.
Who’s braver? Who cares more?
Anne Fine
RORY STEWART – Member of Parliament
The title of this poem is taken from the Bible. It describes a world war which will destroy whole nations. Will the writer focus on the battlefield: on guns, so loud that they destroy ears with a single explosion; on the night turned into day by flares and flames; on fear, blood, loyalty, or young men dying?
Thomas Hardy instead chooses to respond to the war with only three images. ‘Only a man harrowing clods’, ‘only thin smoke . . . from couch grass’, and a girl and boy whispering (he describes them with the medieval words ‘maid’ and ‘wight’). ‘Harrowing’ is when you drag a sharp object – in this case behind a horse – to break up lumps of earth. It has been done since the beginning of agriculture. The Hebrew word ‘sadad’ or harrowing appears often in the Old Testament. It happens after the harvest of last year’s crop and ploughing, and before the ground is sown with a new crop – usually in late autumn. ‘Couch grass’ is a weed, found right across the world, which is best torn up by its roots, and burned, in the spring. The man, the old horse, the girl and the boy in the poem have neither features nor names.
All we learn about the exact ‘Time’ of this Breaking of Nations is a hint of autumn and spring. Hardy does not reveal the dates or places – the centuries or the countries. Farming and whispering are activities which, he reminds us, happened before the war, happened despite the war, and always will. There is no fighting. Why has he chosen to describe war in this way?
IN TIME OF ‘THE BREAKING OF NATIONS’
I
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
II
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
III
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
Thomas Hardy
BRIAN PATTEN – Poet
Herbert Read fought in the First World War as an infantry officer. He won the Military Cross in 1917, and membership of the Distinguished Service Order in 1918, and that same year wrote,
He returned from that war horrified and disillusioned by the carnage he had witnessed, and became a pacifist. In 1940, during the Second World War, he wrote this poem from the depths of his disillusionment:
A pacifist is someone who believes in peace, and is against all war.
TO A CONSCRIPT OF 1940
A soldier passed me in the freshly fallen snow,
His footsteps muffled, his face unearthly gray;
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 accustom’d ring
And he obeyed it as it was obeyed
In the shrouded days when I too was one
Of an army of young m
en marching
Into the unknown. He turned towards me and I said:
‘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
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 tarnish’d 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.
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.
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