Counter-Attack

and Other Poems

Siegfried Sassoon

with an Introduction by

Robert Nichols

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Table of Contents

Preface to this edition

Dedication

Introduction

Poems

Colophon

Preface to this edition

Siegfried Sassoon MC was born in 1886, the second of three sons of Alfred Sassoon, a member of a notable family of Jewish merchant traders, and Theresa Thornycroft, a member of an equally notable family of artists and sculptors. His father, who had been cut off by his family for marrying a gentile, left his mother when the children were small, and died not long afterwards.

He did not go to school until he was fourteen, and had a private income which ensured that he did not need to work. He studied law and history at Cambridge, but left without a degree, and spent the next few years hunting foxes, playing cricket, and privately publishing a few volumes of not highly acclaimed poetry including The Daffodil Murderer (1913).

In his Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man he depicted himself as a lonely child: ‘as a consequence of my loneliness, I created in my childish day-dreams an ideal companion who became much more of a reality than such unfriendly boys as I encountered at Christmas parties.’ He realised at Cambridge that he was homosexual and lived briefly with David Thomas, whose death on the western front in March 1916 prompted such poems as ‘The Last Meeting’ and ‘A Letter Home.’

He enlisted just as World War I began. He soon became horrified by the realities of war, and the tone of his writing changed completely. His times on the Western Front were marked by exceptionally brave actions, inlcuding the rescue of a fellow soldier under fire for which he was awarded the Military Cross. During the war he came into into contact with men from less advantaged backgrounds, and he developed Socialist sympathies.

He was wounded in April 1917 and while convalescing in England wrote a violent attack on the conduct of the war (‘I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it’). He had it read out in the House of Commons, but instead of the expected court martial the under-secretary for war declared him to be suffering from shell-shock, and he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital. Eventually he decided to fight again and early in 1918 was posted to Palestine. In May he rejoined his old battalion in France, and in July a head wound ended his military service.

The savagely realistic and compassionate war poems in The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter Attack (1918) established his stature as a fully-fledged poet, and despite all his later prose and verse and his dislike of the label he was regarded as a war poet for the rest of his life.

In 1919 he was briefly involved in Labour politics. In 1920 he read his poems on a lecture tour in the United States. Thereafter he lived in London, hunted for a few seasons, and brought out volumes of poetry – Selected Poems (1925), Satirical Poems (1926), and The Heart’s Journey (1927) – which greatly increased his reputation and represent his full flowering as a poet.

In the late 1920s he turned to prose, drawing on his diaries for his Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, published in 1928. This lightly fictionalized autobiography of his early years in Kent, in which he figures as the narrator George Sherston, was an immediate success, and was quickly accepted as a classic of its kind – an elegy for a way of life which had gone for ever. He continued the story in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston’s Progress (1937).

In 1933 he married Hester Gatty, and they settled at Heytesbury House where he spent the rest of his life. Their son was born in 1936, but the marriage ended in 1944.

Once established in Heytesbury House he began to write his factual autobiography, beginning with The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938), his favourite among his books, and continuing with The Weald of Youth (1942) and Siegfried’s Journey (1945). He continued to write poetry and Collected Poems was published 1947.

In 1957 his quest for an ideal companion ended with his ‘unconditional surrender’ to God. He was received into the Roman Catholic church, and the comfort and joy with which his religion filled his last years was celebrated in a spiritual anthology of his poetry, The Path to Peace (1960). He died at his Heytesbury home in 1967 and was buried in Mells churchyard, Somerset, near his friend Monsignor Ronald Knox.

Loosely based on the entry in the
Dictionary of National Biography

Perhaps his most memorable quotation is contained in the Introduction to this book: ‘Let no one ever… from henceforth say a word in any way countenancing war… For war is hell and those who institute it are criminals.’

To Robert Ross

Dans la trêve desolée de cette matinée, ces hommes qui avaient été tenaillés par la fatigue, fouettés par la pluie, bouleversés par toute une nuit de tonnerre, ces rescapés des volcans et de l’inondation entrevoyaient à quel point la guerre, aussi hideuse au moral qu’au physique, non seulement viole le bon sens, avilit les grandes idées, commande tous les crimes – mais ils se rappelaient combien elle avait développé en eux et autour d’eux tous les mauvais instincts sans en excepter un seul; la méchanceté jusqu’au sadisme, l’égoisme jusqu’à la férocité, le besoin de jouir jusqu’à la folie.[1]

Henri Barbusse. (Le Feu.)

Introduction
by Robert Nichols

Sassoon the Man

In appearance he is tall, big-boned, loosely built. He is clean-shaven, pale or with a flush; has a heavy jaw, wide mouth with the upper lip slightly protruding and the curve of it very pronounced like that of a shrivelled leaf (as I have noticed is common in many poets). His nose is aquiline, the nostrils being wide and heavily arched. This characteristic and the fullness, depth and heat of his dark eyes give him the air of a sullen falcon. He speaks slowly, enunciating the words as if they pained him, in a voice that has something of the troubled thickness apparent in the voices of those who emerge from a deep grief. As he speaks, his large hands, roughened by trench toil and by riding, wander aimlessly until some emotion grips him when the knuckles harden and he clutches at his knees or at the edge of the table. And all the while he will be breathing hard like a man who has swum a distance. When he reads his poems he chants and one would think that he communed with himself save that, at the pauses, he shoots a powerful glance at the listener. Between the poems he is still but moves his lips… He likes best to speak of hunting (he will shout of it!), of open air mornings when the gorse alone flames brighter than the sky, of country quiet, of his mother,[2] of poetry – usually Shelley, Masefield and Thomas Hardy – and last and chiefly – but always with a rapid, tumbling enunciation and a much-irked desperate air filled with pain – of soldiers. For the incubus of war is on him so that his days are shot with anguish and his nights with horror.

He is twenty-eight years old; was educated at Marlborough and Christchurch, Oxford; was a master of fox-hounds and is a captain in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Thrice he has fought in France and once in Palestine. Behind his name are set the letters M.C. since he has won the Military Cross for an act of valour which went near to securing him a higher honour.

Sassoon the Poet

The poetry of Siegfried Sassoon divides itself into two rough classes – the idyllic and the satiric. War has defiled one to produce the other. At heart Siegfried Sassoon is an idealist.

Before the war he had hardly published a line. He spent his summers in the company of books, at the piano, on expeditions, and in playing tennis. During winter he hunted. Hunting was a greater passion with him than poetry. Much of his poetry celebrated the loveliness of the field as seen by the huntsman in the early morning light. But few probably guessed that the youth known to excel in field sports excelled also in poetry. For, in its way, this early poetry does excel. It was characteristic of him that nearly every little book he then wrote was privately printed. Poetry was for him just something for private and particular enjoyment – like a ride alone before breakfast. Among these privately printed books are Twelve Sonnets (1911), Melodies, An Ode for Music, Hyacinth (all 1912). The names are significant. He was occupied with natural beauty and with music. In 1913 he publishes in a limited and obscure edition Apollo in Doelyrium, wherein it seems that he is beginning to find a certain want of body and basis in his poems made of beautiful words about beautiful objects. Later in the same year, with Masefield’s Everlasting Mercy (1911), Widow in the Bye Sheet (1912) and Daffodil Fields (1913) before him, he starts to write a parody of these uncouth intrusions of the sorrows of obscure persons into his paradise but half way through the poem adopts the Masefield manner in earnest[3] and finishes by unsuccessfully endeavouring to rival his master. In 1914 the War breaks out. Home on leave in 1915 he privately prints Discoveries, a little book which contains some of the loveliest of his ‘paradise’ poems. In 1916 the change has come. He can hardly believe it himself. Morning Glory (privately printed) includes four war poems. He has not definitely turned to his later style but he hovers on the brink. The war is beginning to pain him. The poems ‘To Victory’ and ‘The Dragon and the Undying’ show him turning toward his paradise to see if its beauty can save him… The year 1917 witnesses the publication of The Old Huntsman.[4]

This book secured instantaneous success. Siegfried Sassoon, on its publication, became one of the leading young poets of England. The book begins with the long monologue of a retired huntsman, a piece of remarkable characterisation. It continues with all the best of the ‘paradise’ poems, including the loveliest in ‘Discoveries’ and ‘Morning Glory.’ There are also the ‘bridge’ poems between his old manner and his new such as the ‘To Victory’ mentioned above. But interspersed among the paradise poems are the first poems in his final war style. He tells the story of the change in a characteristic manner – ‘Conscripts’ (page 51, The Old Huntsman). For like nearly every one of the young English poets, he is to some extent a humourist. His humour is not, however, even through The Old Huntsman all of such a wise and gentle tenor. He breaks out into lively bitterness in such poems as ‘They,’ ‘The Tombstone Maker’ and ‘Blighters.’

Conscripts

“Fall in, that awkward squad, and strike no more

“Attractive attitudes! Dress by the right!

“The luminous rich colours that you wore

“Have changed to hueless khaki in the night.

“Magic? What’s magic got to do with you?

“There’s no such thing! Blood’s red and skies are blue.”

They gasped and sweated, marching up and down.

I drilled them till they cursed my raucous shout.

Love chucked his lute away and dropped his crown.

Rhyme got sore heels and wanted to fall out.

“Left, right! Press on your butts!” They looked at me

Reproachful; how I longed to set them free!

I gave them lectures on Defence, Attack;

They fidgeted and shuffled, yawned and sighed,

And boggled at my questions. Joy was slack,

And Wisdom gnawed his fingers, gloomy-eyed.

Young Fancy – how I loved him all the while –

Stared at his note-book with a rueful smile.

Their training done, I shipped them all to France.

Where most of those I’d loved too well got killed.

Rapture and pale Enchantment and Romance,

And many a sickly, slender lord who’d filled

My soul long since with litanies of sin.

Went home, because they couldn’t stand the din.

But the kind, common ones that I despised,

(Hardly a man of them I’d count as friend),

What stubborn-hearted virtues they disguised!

They stood and played the hero to the end,

Won gold and silver medals bright with bars,

And marched resplendent home with crowns and stars.

This book (in consequence almost wholly of these bitter poems) enjoyed a remarkable success with the soldiers fighting in France. One met it everywhere. “Hello, you know Siegfried Sassoon then, do you? Well, tell him from me that the more he lays it on thick to those who don’t realize the war the better. That’s the stuff we want. We’re fed up with the old men’s death-or-glory stunt.” In 1918 appeared ‘Countermans’ Attack’: here there is hardly a trace of the ‘paradise’ feeling. You can’t even think of paradise when you’re in hell. For Sassoon was now well along the way of thorns. How many lives had he not seen spilled apparently to no purpose? Did not the fact of war arch him in like a dirty blood-red sky? He breaks out, almost like a mad man, into imprecations, into vehement tirades, into sarcasms, ironies, the hellish laughters that arise from a heart that is not broken once for all but that is newly broken every day while the Monster that devours the lives of the young continues its ravages. Take, for instance, the magnificent ‘To Any Dead Officer’, written just before America entered the war. Many reading this poem would think Great Britain was going to cease fighting. But nothing of the sort. One must always remember that bitter as these imprecations are against those who mismanaged certain episodes in the war, the ultimate foe is not they but the German Junkers who planned this war for forty years, who have given the lovely earth over to hideous defilement and the youths of all nations to carnage…

Sometimes in this book Sassoon fails to express himself properly. This fact is, I think, a tribute to his sincerity. For his earlier work very clearly displays his technical proficiency. But here what can he do? Indignation chokes and strangles him. He claws often enough at unsatisfactory words, dislocates his sentences, tumbles out his images as if he would pulp the makers of war beneath them. Very rarely does he attain to the poignant simplicity of ‘The Hawthorn Tree’ or the detached irony of ‘Does it Matter?’

Can he then see nothing else in war? I remember him once turning to me and saying suddenly apropos of certain exalté poems in my Ardours and Endurances: ‘Yes, I see all that and I agree with you, Robert. War has made me. I think I am a man now as well as a poet. You have said the things well enough. Now let us nevermore say another word of whatever little may be good in war for the individual who has a heart to be steeled.’

I remember I nodded, for further acquaintance with war inclines me to his opinion.

‘Let no one ever,’ he continued, ‘from henceforth say a word in any way countenancing war. It is dangerous even to speak of how here and there the individual may gain some hardship of soul by it. For war is hell and those who institute it are criminals. Were there anything to say for it, it should not be said for its spiritual disasters far outweigh any of its advantages.’

For myself this is the truth. War doesn’t ennoble: it degrades. The words of Barbusse placed at the beginning of this book should be engraved over the doors of every war office of every State in the world.

While war is a possibility man is little better than a savage and civilisation the mere moments of rest between a succession of nightmares. It is to help to end this horror that Siegfried Sassoon and the many others who feel like him have continued to fight as after the publication of this book he fought in Palestine and in France.

You civilized persons who read this book not only as a poet but as a soldier I beg of you not to turn from it. Read it again and again till its words become part of your consciousness. It was written by a man for mankind’s sake, that ‘that which is humane’ might no more be an empty phrase, that the words of Blake might blossom to a new meaning –

Thou art a man, God is no more,
Thine own humanity learn to adore.

New York City,
Nov. 20th-23rd.
Robert Nichols.

List of Poems

Prelude: The Troops

Counter-Attack

The Rear-Guard

Wirers

Attack

Dreamers

How to Die

The Effect

Twelve Months After

The Fathers

Base Details

The General

Lamentations

Does it Matter?

Fight to a Finish

Editorial Impressions

Suicide in the Trenches

Glory of Women

Their Frailty

The Hawthorn Tree

The Investiture

Trench Duty

Break Of Day

To Any Dead Officer

Sick Leave

Banishment

Song-books of the War

Thrushes

Autumn

Invocation

Repression of War Experience

The Triumph

Survivors

Joy-Bells

Remorse

Dead Musicians

The Dream

In Barracks

Together

Prelude: The Troops

Dim, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom

Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals

Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots

And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky

Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down

The stale despair of night, must now renew

Their desolation in the truce of dawn,

Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace.

Yet these, who cling to life with stubborn hands,

Can grin through storms of death and find a gap

In the clawed, cruel tangles of his defence.

They march from safety, and the bird-sung joy

Of grass-green thickets, to the land where all

Is ruin, and nothing blossoms but the sky

That hastens over them where they endure

Sad, smoking, flat horizons, reeking woods,

And foundered trench-lines volleying doom for doom.

O my brave brown companions, when your souls

Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead

Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,

Death will stand grieving in that field of war

Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.

And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass

Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;

The unreturning army that was youth;

The legions who have suffered and are dust.

Return to list

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,

And he remembered his rifle… rapid fire…

And started blazing wildly… then a bang

Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out

To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked

And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,

Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans…

Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,

Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.

Return to list

The Rear-Guard

(Hindenburg Line, April 1917.)

Groping along the tunnel, step by step,

He winked his prying torch with patching glare

From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.

Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know,

A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed;

And he, exploring fifty feet below

The rosy gloom of battle overhead.

Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw some one lie

Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug,

And stooped to give the sleeper’s arm a tug.

‘I’m looking for headquarters.’ No reply.

‘God blast your neck!’ (For days he’d had no sleep.)

‘Get up and guide me through this stinking place.’

Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap,

And flashed his beam across the livid face

Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore

Agony dying hard ten days before;

And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.

Alone he staggered on until he found

Dawn’s ghost that filtered down a shafted stair

To the dazed, muttering creatures underground

Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound.

At last, with sweat of horror in his hair,

He climbed through darkness to the twilight air,

Unloading hell behind him step by step.

Return to list

Wirers

‘Pass it along, the wiring party’s going out’ –

And yawning sentries mumble, ‘Wirers going out,’

Unravelling; twisting; hammering stakes with muffled thud,

They toil with stealthy haste and anger in their blood.

The Boche sends up a flare. Black forms stand rigid there,

Stock-still like posts; then darkness, and the clumsy ghosts

Stride hither and thither, whispering, tripped by clutching snare

Of snags and tangles.

Ghastly dawn with vaporous coasts

Gleams desolate along the sky, night’s misery ended.

Young Hughes was badly hit; I heard him carried away,

Moaning at every lurch; no doubt he’ll die to-day.

But we can say the front-line wire’s been safely mended.

Return to list

Attack

At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun

In the wild purple of the glowering sun,

Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud

The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,

Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.

The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed

With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,

Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.

Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,

They leave their trenches, going over the top,

While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,

And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,

Flounders in mud. O Jesu, make it stop!

Return to list

Dreamers

Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land,

Drawing no dividend from time’s to-morrows.

In the great hour of destiny they stand,

Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.

Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win

Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.

Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin

They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,

And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,

Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,

And mocked by hopeless longing to regain

Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,

And going to the office in the train.

Return to list

How to Die

Dark clouds are smouldering into red

While down the craters morning burns.

The dying soldier shifts his head

To watch the glory that returns:

He lifts his fingers toward the skies

Where holy brightness breaks in flame;

Radiance reflected in his eyes,

And on his lips a whispered name.

You’d think, to hear some people talk,

That lads go West with sobs and curses,

And sullen faces white as chalk,

Hankering for wreaths and tombs and hearses.

But they’ve been taught the way to do it

Like Christian soldiers; not with haste

And shuddering groans; but passing through it

With due regard for decent taste.

Return to list

The Effect

‘The effect of our bombardment was terrific.  One man told me he had never seen so many dead before.’ – War Correspondent.

‘He’d never seen so many dead before.’

They sprawled in yellow daylight while he swore

And gasped and lugged his everlasting load

Of bombs along what once had been a road.

‘How peaceful are the dead.’

Who put that silly gag in some one’s head?

‘He’d never seen so many dead before.’

The lilting words danced up and down his brain,

While corpses jumped and capered in the rain.

No, no; he wouldn’t count them any more…

The dead have done with pain:

They’ve choked; they can’t come back to life again.

When Dick was killed last week he looked like that,

Flapping along the fire-step like a fish,

After the blazing crump had knocked him flat…

‘How many dead? As many as ever you wish.

Don’t count ’em; they’re too many.

Who’ll buy my nice fresh corpses, two a penny?’

Return to list

Twelve Months After

Hullo! here’s my platoon, the lot I had last year.

‘The war’ll be over soon.’

‘What ’opes?’

‘No bloody fear!’

Then, ‘Number Seven, ’shun! All present and correct.’

They’re standing in the sun, impassive and erect.

Young Gibson with his grin; and Morgan, tired and white;

Jordan, who’s out to win a D.C.M. some night;

And Hughes that’s keen on wiring; and Davies (’79),

Who always must be firing at the Boche front line.

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

‘Old soldiers never die; they simply fide a-why!’

That’s what they used to sing along the roads last spring;

That’s what they used to say before the push began;

That’s where they are to-day, knocked over to a man.

Return to list

The Fathers

Snug at the club two fathers sat,

Gross, goggle-eyed, and full of chat.

One of them said: ‘My eldest lad

Writes cheery letters from Bagdad.

But Arthur’s getting all the fun

At Arras with his nine-inch gun.’

‘Yes,’ wheezed the other, ‘that’s the luck!

My boy’s quite broken-hearted, stuck

In England training all this year.

Still, if there’s truth in what we hear,

The Huns intend to ask for more

Before they bolt across the Rhine.’

I watched them toddle through the door –

These impotent old friends of mine.

Return to list

Base Details

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,

I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base,

And speed glum heroes up the line to death.

You’d see me with my puffy petulant face,

Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,

Reading the Roll of Honour. ‘Poor young chap,’

I’d say – ‘I used to know his father well;

Yes, we’ve lost heavily in this last scrap.’

And when the war is done and youth stone dead,

I’d toddle safely home and die – in bed.

Return to list

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.

Return to list

Lamentations

I found him in the guard-room at the Base.

From the blind darkness I had heard his crying

And blundered in. With puzzled, patient face

A sergeant watched him; it was no good trying

To stop it; for he howled and beat his chest.

And, all because his brother had gone West,

Raved at the bleeding war; his rampant grief

Moaned, shouted, sobbed, and choked, while he was kneeling

Half-naked on the floor. In my belief

Such men have lost all patriotic feeling.

Return to list

Does it Matter?

Does it matter? – losing your legs?…

For people will always be kind,

And you need not show that you mind

When the others come in after hunting

To gobble their muffins and eggs.

Does it matter? – losing your sight?…

There’s such splendid work for the blind;

And people will always be kind,

As you sit on the terrace remembering

And turning your face to the light.

Do they matter? – those dreams from the pit? …

You can drink and forget and be glad,

And people won’t say that you’re mad;

For they’ll know that you’ve fought for your country,

And no one will worry a bit.

Return to list

Fight to a Finish

The boys came back. Bands played and flags were flying,

And Yellow-Pressmen thronged the sunlit street

To cheer the soldiers who’d refrained from dying,

And hear the music of returning feet.

‘Of all the thrills and ardours War has brought,

This moment is the finest.’ (So they thought.)

Snapping their bayonets on to charge the mob,

Grim Fusiliers broke ranks with glint of steel.

At last the boys had found a cushy job.

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

I heard the Yellow-Pressmen grunt and squeal;

And with my trusty bombers turned and went

To clear those Junkers out of Parliament.

Return to list

Editorial Impressions

He seemed so certain ‘all was going well,’

As he discussed the glorious time he’d had

While visiting the trenches.

‘One can tell

You’ve gathered big impressions!’ grinned the lad

Who’d been severely wounded in the back

In some wiped-out impossible Attack.

‘Impressions? Yes, most vivid! I am writing

A little book called Europe on the Rack,

Based on notes made while witnessing the fighting.

I hope I’ve caught the feeling of ‘the Line’

And the amazing spirit of the troops.

By Jove, those flying-chaps of ours are fine!

I watched one daring beggar looping loops,

Soaring and diving like some bird of prey.

And through it all I felt that splendour shine

Which makes us win.’

The soldier sipped his wine.

‘Ah, yes, but it’s the Press that leads the way!’

Return to list

Suicide in the Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy,

Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,

And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,

With crumps and lice and lack of rum,

He put a bullet through his brain.

No one spoke of him again.

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you’ll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

Return to list

Glory of Women

You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave,

Or wounded in a mentionable place.

You worship decorations; you believe

That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.

You make us shells. You listen with delight,

By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.

You crown our distant ardours while we fight,

And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.

You can’t believe that British troops ‘retire’

When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,

Trampling the terrible corpses   blind with blood.

O German mother dreaming by the fire,

While you are knitting socks to send your son

His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

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Their Frailty

He’s got a Blighty wound. He’s safe; and then

War’s fine and bold and bright.

She can forget the doomed and prisoned men

Who agonize and fight.

He’s back in France. She loathes the listless strain

And peril of his plight.

Beseeching Heaven to send him home again,

She prays for peace each night.

Husbands and sons and lovers; everywhere

They die; War bleeds us white.

Mothers and wives and sweethearts, – they don’t care

So long as He’s all right.

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The Hawthorn Tree

Not much to me is yonder lane

Where I go every day;

But when there’s been a shower of rain

And hedge-birds whistle gay,

I know my lad that’s out in France

With fearsome things to see

Would give his eyes for just one glance

At our white hawthorn tree.

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

Not much to me is yonder lane

Where he so longs to tread;

But when there’s been a shower of rain

I think I’ll never weep again

Until I’ve heard he’s dead.

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The Investiture

God with a Roll of Honour in His hand

Sits welcoming the heroes who have died,

While sorrowless angels ranked on either side

Stand easy in Elysium’s meadow-land.

Then you come shyly through the garden gate,

Wearing a blood-soaked bandage on your head;

And God says something kind because you’re dead,

And homesick, discontented with your fate.

If I were there we’d snowball Death with skulls;

Or ride away to hunt in Devil’s Wood

With ghosts of puppies that we walked of old.

But you’re alone; and solitude annuls

Our earthly jokes; and strangely wise and good

You roam forlorn along the streets of gold.

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Trench Duty

Shaken from sleep, and numbed and scarce awake,

Out in the trench with three hours’ watch to take,

I blunder through the splashing mirk; and then

Hear the gruff muttering voices of the men

Crouching in cabins candle-chinked with light.

Hark! There’s the big bombardment on our right

Rumbling and bumping; and the dark’s a glare

Of flickering horror in the sectors where

We raid the Boche; men waiting, stiff and chilled,

Or crawling on their bellies through the wire.

‘What? Stretcher-bearers wanted? Some one killed?’

Five minutes ago I heard a sniper fire:

Why did he do it?… Starlight overhead –

Blank stars. I’m wide-awake; and some chap’s dead.

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Break Of Day

There seemed a smell of autumn in the air

At the bleak end of night; he shivered there

In a dank, musty dug-out where he lay,

Legs wrapped in sand-bags, – lumps of chalk and clay

Spattering his face. Dry-mouthed, he thought, ‘To-day

We start the damned attack; and, Lord knows why,

Zero’s at nine; how bloody if I’m done in

Under the freedom of that morning sky!’

And then he coughed and dozed, cursing the din.

Was it the ghost of autumn in that smell

Of underground, or God’s blank heart grown kind,

That sent a happy dream to him in hell? –

Where men are crushed like clods, and crawl to find

Some crater for their wretchedness; who lie

In outcast immolation, doomed to die

Far from clean things or any hope of cheer,

Cowed anger in their eyes, till darkness brims

And roars into their heads, and they can hear

Old childish talk, and tags of foolish hymns.

He sniffs the chilly air; (his dreaming starts).

He’s riding in a dusty Sussex lane

In quiet September; slowly night departs;

And he’s a living soul, absolved from pain.

Beyond the brambled fences where he goes

Are glimmering fields with harvest piled in sheaves,

And tree-tops dark against the stars grown pale;

Then, clear and shrill, a distant farm-cock crows;

And there’s a wall of mist along the vale

Where willows shake their watery-sounding leaves.

He gazes on it all, and scarce believes

That earth is telling its old peaceful tale;

He thanks the blessed world that he was born…

Then, far away, a lonely note of the horn.

They’re drawing the Big Wood! Unlatch the gate,

And set Golumpus going on the grass:

He knows the corner where it’s best to wait

And hear the crashing woodland chorus pass;

The corner where old foxes make their track

To the Long Spinney; that’s the place to be.

The bracken shakes below an ivied tree,

And then a cub looks out; and ‘Tally-o-back!’

He bawls, and swings his thong with volleying crack, –

All the clean thrill of autumn in his blood,

And hunting surging through him like a flood

In joyous welcome from the untroubled past;

While the war drifts away, forgotten at last.

Now a red, sleepy sun above the rim

Of twilight stares along the quiet weald,

And the kind, simple country shines revealed

In solitudes of peace, no longer dim.

The old horse lifts his face and thanks the light,

Then stretches down his head to crop the green.

All things that he has loved are in his sight;

The places where his happiness has been

Are in his eyes, his heart, and they are good.

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

Hark! there’s the horn: they’re drawing the Big Wood.

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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 pain;

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.

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Sick Leave

When I’m asleep, dreaming and lulled and warm, –

They come, the homeless ones, the noiseless dead.

While the dim charging breakers of the storm

Bellow and drone and rumble overhead,

Out of the gloom they gather about my bed.

They whisper to my heart; their thoughts are mine.

‘Why are you here with all your watches ended?

From Ypres to Frise we sought you in the Line.’

In bitter safety I awake, unfriended;

And while the dawn begins with slashing rain

I think of the Battalion in the mud.

‘When are you going out to them again?

Are they not still your brothers through our blood?’

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Banishment

I am banished from the patient men who fight.

They smote my heart to pity, built my pride.

Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side,

They trudged away from life’s broad wealds of light.

Their wrongs were mine; and ever in my sight

They went arrayed in honour. But they died, –

Not one by one: and mutinous I cried

To those who sent them out into the night.

The darkness tells how vainly I have striven

To free them from the pit where they must dwell

In outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and riven

By grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel.

Love drives me back to grope with them through hell;

And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.

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Song-Books of the War

In fifty years, when peace outshines

Remembrance of the battle lines,

Adventurous lads will sigh and cast

Proud looks upon the plundered past.

On summer morn or winter’s night,

Their hearts will kindle for the fight,

Reading a snatch of soldier-song,

Savage and jaunty, fierce and strong;

And through the angry marching rhymes

Of blind regret and haggard mirth,

They’ll envy us the dazzling times

When sacrifice absolved our earth.

Some ancient man with silver locks

Will lift his weary face to say:

‘War was a fiend who stopped our clocks

Although we met him grim and gay.’

And then he’ll speak of Haig’s last drive,

Marvelling that any came alive

Out of the shambles that men built

And smashed, to cleanse the world of guilt.

But the boys, with grin and sidelong glance,

Will think, ‘Poor grandad’s day is done.’

And dream of those who fought in France

And lived in time to share the fun.

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Thrushes

Tossed on the glittering air they soar and skim,

Whose voices make the emptiness of light

A windy palace. Quavering from the brim

Of dawn, and bold with song at edge of night,

They clutch their leafy pinnacles and sing

Scornful of man, and from his toils aloof

Whose heart’s a haunted woodland whispering;

Whose thoughts return on tempest-baffled wing;

Who hears the cry of God in everything,

And storms the gate of nothingness for proof.

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Autumn

October’s bellowing anger breaks and cleaves

The bronzed battalions of the stricken wood

In whose lament I hear a voice that grieves

For battle’s fruitless harvest, and the feud

Of outraged men. Their lives are like the leaves

Scattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blown

Along the westering furnace flaring red.

O martyred youth and manhood overthrown,

The burden of your wrongs is on my head.

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Invocation

Come down from heaven to meet me when my breath

Chokes, and through drumming shafts of stifling death

I stumble toward escape, to find the door

Opening on morn where I may breathe once more

Clear cock-crow airs across some valley dim

With whispering trees. While dawn along the rim

Of night’s horizon flows in lakes of fire,

Come down from heaven’s bright hill, my song’s desire.

Belov’d and faithful, teach my soul to wake

In glades deep-ranked with flowers that gleam and shake

And flock your paths with wonder. In your gaze

Show me the vanquished vigil of my days.

Mute in that golden silence hung with green,

Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyes

Remembrance of all beauty that has been,

And stillness from the pools of Paradise.

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Repression of War Experience

Now light the candles; one; two; there’s a moth;

What silly beggars they are to blunder in

And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame

No, no, not that, – it’s bad to think of war,

When thoughts you’ve gagged all day come back to scare you;

And it’s been proved that soldiers don’t go mad

Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts

That drive them out to jabber among the trees.

Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand,

Draw a deep breath; stop thinking, count fifteen,

And you’re as right as rain…

Why won’t it rain? …

I wish there’d be a thunder-storm to-night,

With bucketsful of water to sluice the dark,

And make the roses hang their dripping heads.

Books; what a jolly company they are,

Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves,

Dressed in dim brown, and black, and white, and green,

And every kind of colour. Which will you read?

Come on; O do read something; they’re so wise.

I tell you all the wisdom of the world

Is waiting for you on those shelves; and yet

You sit and gnaw your nails, and let your pipe out,

And listen to the silence: on the ceiling

There’s one big, dizzy moth that bumps and flutters;

And in the breathless air outside the house

The garden waits for something that delays.

There must be crowds of ghosts among the trees, –

Not people killed in battle, – they’re in France, –

But horrible shapes in shrouds – old men who died

Slow, natural deaths, – old men with ugly souls,

Who wore their bodies out with nasty sins.

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

You’re quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;

You’d never think there was a bloody war on! …

O yes, you would… why, you can hear the guns.

Hark! Thud, thud, thud, – quite soft… they never cease –

Those whispering guns – O Christ, I want to go out

And screech at them to stop – I’m going crazy;

I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns.

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The Triumph

When life was a cobweb of stars for Beauty who came

In the whisper of leaves or a bird’s lone cry in the glen,

On dawn-lit hills and horizons girdled with flame

I sought for the triumph that troubles the faces of men.

With death in the terrible flickering gloom of the fight

I was cruel and fierce with despair; I was naked and bound;

was stricken: and Beauty returned through the shambles of night;

In the faces of men she returned; and their triumph I found.

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Survivors

No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain

Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.

Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again,’ –

These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk,

They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed

Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died, –

Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud

Of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride…

Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;

Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.

Craiglockart,

Oct. 1917.

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Joy-Bells

Ring your sweet bells; but let them be farewells

To the green-vista’d gladness of the past

That changed us into soldiers; swing your bells

To a joyful chime; but let it be the last.

What means this metal in windy belfries hung

When guns are all our need? Dissolve these bells

Whose tones are tuned for peace: with martial tongue

Let them cry doom and storm the sun with shells.

Bells are like fierce-browed prelates who proclaim

That ‘if our Lord returned He’d fight for us.’

So let our bells and bishops do the same,

Shoulder to shoulder with the motor bus.

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Remorse

Lost in the swamp and welter of the pit,

He flounders off the duck-boards; only he knows

Each flash, and spouting crash, – each instant lit

When gloom reveals the streaming rain. He goes

Heavily, blindly on. And, while he blunders,

‘Could anything be worse than this!’ – he wonders,

Remembering how he saw those Germans run,

Screaming for mercy among the stumps of trees:

Green-faced, they dodged and darted: there was one

Livid with terror, clutching at his knees…

Our chaps were sticking ’em like pigs … ‘O hell!’

He thought – ‘there’s things in war one dare not tell

Poor father sitting safe at home, who reads

Of dying heroes and their deathless deeds.’

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Dead Musicians

I

From you, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart,

The substance of my dreams took fire.

You built cathedrals in my heart,

And lit my pinnacled desire.

You were the ardour and the bright

Procession of my thoughts toward prayer.

You were the wrath of storm, the light

On distant citadels aflare.

II

Great names, I cannot find you now

In these loud years of youth that strives

Through doom toward peace: upon my brow

I wear a wreath of banished lives.

You have no part with lads who fought

And laughed and suffered at my side.

Your fugues and symphonies have brought

No memory of my friends who died.

III

For when my brain is on their track,

In slangy speech I call them back.

With fox-trot tunes their ghosts I charm.

‘Another little drink won’t do us any harm.’

I think of rag-time; a bit of rag-time;

And see their faces crowding round

To the sound of the syncopated beat.

They’ve got such jolly things to tell,

Home from hell with a Blighty wound so neat…

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

And so the song breaks off; and I’m alone.

They’re dead… For God’s sake stop that gramophone.

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The Dream

I

Moonlight and dew-drenched blossom, and the scent

Of summer gardens; these can bring you all

Those dreams that in the starlit silence fall:

Sweet songs are full of odours.

While I went

Last night in drizzling dusk along a lane,

I passed a squalid farm; from byre and midden

Came the rank smell that brought me once again

A dream of war that in the past was hidden.

II

Up a disconsolate straggling village street

I saw the tired troops trudge: I heard their feet.

The cheery Q.M.S. was there to meet

And guide our Company in…

I watched them stumble

Into some crazy hovel, too beat to grumble;

Saw them file inward, slipping from their backs

Rifles, equipment, packs.

On filthy straw they sit in the gloom, each face

Bowed to patched, sodden boots they must unlace,

While the wind chills their sweat through chinks and cracks.

III

I’m looking at their blistered feet; young Jones

Stares up at me, mud-splashed and white and jaded;

Out of his eyes the morning light has faded.

Old soldiers with three winters in their bones

Puff their damp Woodbines, whistle, stretch their toes:

They can still grin at me, for each of ’em knows

That I’m as tired as they are…

Can they guess

The secret burden that is always mine? –

Pride in their courage; pity for their distress;

And burning bitterness

That I must take them to the accursèd Line.

IV

I cannot hear their voices, but I see

Dim candles in the barn: they gulp their tea,

And soon they’ll sleep like logs. Ten miles away

The battle winks and thuds in blundering strife.

And I must lead them nearer, day by day,

To the foul beast of war that bludgeons life.

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In Barracks

The barrack-square, washed clean with rain,

Shines wet and wintry-grey and cold.

Young Fusiliers, strong-legged and bold,

March and wheel and march again.

The sun looks over the barrack gate,

Warm and white with glaring shine,

To watch the soldiers of the Line

That life has hired to fight with fate.

Fall out: the long parades are done.

Up comes the dark; down goes the sun.

The square is walled with windowed light.

Sleep well, you lusty Fusiliers;

Shut your brave eyes on sense and sight,

And banish from your dreamless ears

The bugle’s lying notes that say,

‘Another night; another day.’

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Together

Splashing along the boggy woods all day,

And over brambled hedge and holding clay,

I shall not think of him:

But when the watery fields grow brown and dim,

And hounds have lost their fox, and horses tire,

I know that he’ll be with me on my way

Home through the darkness to the evening fire.

He’s jumped each stile along the glistening lanes;

His hand will be upon the mud-soaked reins;

Hearing the saddle creak,

He’ll wonder if the frost will come next week.

I shall forget him in the morning light;

And while we gallop on he will not speak:

But at the stable-door he’ll say good-night.

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End Notes

[1] In this morning’s sorry truce, these men racked by fatigue, lashed by the rain, shattered by a whole night of thunder, these survivors of volcanoes and flood, glimpsed among themselves to what point the war, just as hideous morally as well as physically, violates good sense, makes great ideas vile, commands every crime – and yet they remembered how far it had developed both in them and around them every worst instinct without exception; nastiness to the level of sadism, selfishness leading to savagery, and the need for pleasure – mad pleasure.

Translation by Chris' brother in law

[2] His father was a well-to-do country gentleman of Anglo-Jewish stock, his mother an English woman, a Miss Thornycroft, sister of the sculptor of that name.

[3] I had this from his own mouth.

[4] The Old Huntsman, Dutton & Co., 1917.

Colophon

The text was taken from Project Gutenberg 8930, the cover from Fantastic Fiction, and the author’s image from Google Images.

The text was marked up as XHTML 1.1 documents with an external stylesheet using an HTML editor, and they were validated with the W3C Markup Validation Service.

The ePub file was made by copying the documents and images into a template. The final package was validated with ePubcheck and Flightcrew, and checked on a Sony PRS T2 reader and an iPad2 using iBooks.

Version 1  January 2013

Alex Bell  afjbell@bigpond.net.au