The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (15 page)

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling

10             Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime. –

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

20             His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Bitten as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie:
Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori
.

Wilfred Owen

Field Ambulance in Retreat

Via Dolorosa, Via Sacra

I

A straight flagged road, laid on the rough earth,

A causeway of stone from beautiful city to city,

Between the tall trees, the slender, delicate trees,

Through the flat green land, by plots of flowers, by black canals thick with heat.

II

The road-makers made it well

Of fine stone, strong for the feet of the oxen and the great Flemish horses,

And for the high wagons piled with corn from the harvest.

And the labourers are few;

They and their quiet oxen stand aside and wait

10             By the long road loud with the passing of guns, the

    rush of armoured cars, and the tramp of an army on

    the march forward to battle;

And, where the piled corn-wagons went, our dripping

    Ambulance carries home

Its red and white harvest from the fields.

III

The straight flagged road breaks into dust, into a thin white cloud,

About the feet of a regiment driven back league by league,

Rifles at trail, and standards wrapped in black funeral

cloths. Unhasting, proud in retreat,

They smile as the Red Cross Ambulance rushes by.

(You know nothing of beauty and desolation who have not seen

That smile of an army in retreat.)

They go: and our shining, beckoning danger goes with them,

20             And our joy in the harvests that we gathered in at nightfall in the fields;

And like an unloved hand laid on a beating heart

Our safety wears us down.

Safety hard and strange; stranger and yet more hard,

As, league after dying league, the beautiful, desolate Land

Falls back from the intolerable speed of an Ambulance in retreat

On the sacred, dolorous Way.

May Sinclair

A Memory

There was no sound at all, no crying in the village,

     Nothing you would count as sound, that is, after the shells;

Only behind a wall the slow sobbing of women,

     The creaking of a door, a lost dog – nothing else.

Silence which might be felt, no pity in the silence,

     Horrible, soft like blood, down all the blood-stained ways;

In the middle of the street two corpses lie unburied,

     And a bayoneted woman stares in the market-place.

Humble and ruined folk – for these no pride of conquest,

10                  Their only prayer: ‘O! Lord, give us our daily bread!'

Not by the battle fires, the shrapnel are we haunted;

     Who shall deliver us from the memory of these dead?

Margaret Sackville

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.

10             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.

20             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,

30             When the swift iron burning bee

Drained the wild honey of their youth.

What of us who, flung on the shrieking 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,

40             The dark air spurts with fire,

The explosions ceaseless are.

Timelessly now, some minutes past,

These 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;

50             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

60             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,

70             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

Youth in Arms IV: Carrion

It is plain now what you are. Your head has dropped

Into a furrow. And the lovely curve

Of your strong leg has wasted and is propped

Against a ridge of the ploughed land's watery swerve.

You are swayed on waves of the silent ground;

You clutch and claim with passionate grasp of your fingers

The dip of earth in which your body lingers;

If you are not found,

In a little while your limbs will fall apart;

10             The birds will take some, but the earth will take most of your heart.

You are fuel for a coming spring if they leave you here;

The crop that will rise from your bones is healthy bread.

You died – we know you – without a word of fear,

And as they loved you living I love you dead.

No girl would kiss you. But then

No girls would ever kiss the earth

In the manner they hug the lips of men:

You are not known to them in this, your second birth.

No coffin-cover now will cram

20             Your body in a shell of lead;

Earth will not fall on you from the spade with a slam,

But will fold and enclose you slowly, you living dead.

Hush, I hear the guns. Are you still asleep?

Surely I saw you a little heave to reply.

I can hardly think you will not turn over and creep

Along the furrows trenchward as if to die.

Harold Monro

A Dead Boche

To you who'd read my songs of War

And only hear of blood and fame,

I'll say (you've heard it said before)

     ‘War's Hell!' and if you doubt the same,

To-day I found in Mametz Wood

A certain cure for lust of blood:

Where, propped against a shattered trunk,

     In a great mess of things unclean,

Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk

10                  With clothes and face a sodden green,

Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,

Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

Robert Graves

Soliloquy II

I was wrong, quite wrong;

The dead men are not always carrion.

After the advance,

As we went through the shattered trenches

Which the enemy had left,

We found, lying upon the fire-step,

A dead English soldier,

His head bloodily bandaged

And his closed left hand touching the earth,

10             More beautiful than one can tell,

More subtly coloured than a perfect Goya,

And more divine and lovely in repose

Than Angelo's hand could ever carve in stone.

Richard Aldington

Butchers and Tombs

After so much battering of fire and steel

It had seemed well to cover them with Cotswold stone –

And shortly praising their courage and quick skill

Leave them buried, hidden till the slow, inevitable

Change came should make them service of France alone.

But the time's hurry, the commonness of the tale

Made it a thing not fitting ceremonial,

And so the disregarders of blister on heel,

Pack on shoulder, barrage and work at the wires,

10             One wooden cross had for ensign of honour and life gone –

Save when the Gloucesters turning sudden to tell to one

Some joke, would remember and say – ‘That joke is done,'

Since he who would understand was so cold he could not feel,

And clay binds hard, and sandbags get rotten and crumble.

Ivor Gurney

A Private

This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doors

Many a frozen night, and merrily

Answered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores:

‘At Mrs Greenland's Hawthorn Bush,' said he,

‘I slept.' None knew which bush. Above the town,

Beyond ‘The Drover,' a hundred spot the down

In Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleeps

More sound in France – that, too, he secret keeps.

Edward Thomas

The Volunteer

Here lies a clerk who half his life had spent

Toiling at ledgers in a city grey,

Thinking that so his days would drift away

With no lance broken in life's tournament:

Yet ever ‘twixt the books and his bright eyes

The gleaming eagles of the legions came,

And horsemen, charging under phantom skies,

Went thundering past beneath the oriflamme.

And now those waiting dreams are satisfied;

10             From twilight into spacious dawn he went;

His lance is broken; but he lies content

With that high hour, in which he lived and died.

And falling thus he wants no recompense,

Who found his battle in the last resort;

Nor needs he any hearse to bear him hence,

Who goes to join the men of Agincourt.

Herbert Asquith

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

     That mark our place; and in the sky

     The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

     Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

          In Flanders fields.

10             Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

     The torch; be yours to hold it high.

     If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

          In Flanders fields.

John McCrae

1914: The Dead

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!