Complete Works of E W Hornung
Page 533
KENYON’S INNINGS
LE PREMIER PAS
MY DOUBLE
NETTLESHIP’S SCORE.
NINE POINTS OF THE LAW
NO SINECURE
ONE POSSESSED
OUT OF PARADISE
SERGEANT SETH.
STRONG-MINDED MISS METHUEN.
THE BLACK HOLE OF GLENRANALD
THE CHEST OF SILVER
THE CRIMINOLOGISTS’ CLUB
THE DOCTOR’S ASSISTANT
THE FATE OF FAUSTINA
THE FIELD OF PHILIPPI
THE GIFT OF THE EMPEROR
THE GOLDEN KEY
THE GOVERNESS AT GREENBUSH
THE HONOR OF THE ROAD
THE IDES OF MARCH
THE JACKEROO ON G-BLOCK
THE KNEES OF THE GODS
THE LADY OF THE LIFT
THE LARRIKIN OF DIAMOND CREEK
THE LAST LAUGH
THE LAST WORD
THE LIFE-PRESERVER
THE LUCKIEST MAN IN THE COLONY.
THE MAGIC CIGAR
THE MAN AT THE WHEEL
THE MOTH AND THE STAR
THE NOTORIOUS MISS ANSTRUTHER.
THE PHYSICIAN WHO HEALED HIMSELF
THE POET OF JUMPING SANDHILLS
THE PURIFICATION OF MULFERA
THE RAFFLES RELICS
THE REST CURE
THE RETURN MATCH
THE SALOON PASSENGER
THE SECOND MURDERER
THE SPOILS OF SACRILEGE
THE STAR OF THE GRASMERE
THE TAKING OF STINGAREE
THE VILLAIN-WORSHIPPER
THE VOICE OF GUNBAR
THE WIDOW OF PIPER’S POINT
THE WRONG HOUSE
TO CATCH A THIEF
TO THE VILE DUST
WILFUL MURDER
The Poetry
Fields near the site of the Second Battle of Ypres, where Hornung’s son Oscar died in action. The author later visited the grave in February 1918.
‘The Second Battle of Ypres’ by Richard Jack
THE YOUNG GUARD
Hornung’s son Oscar left Eton College in 1914, intending to enter King’s College, Cambridge later that year. When Britain entered the war against Germany, he volunteered and was commissioned into the Essex Regiment. He was killed at the Second Battle of Ypres on 6 July 1915, aged 20. Although devastated by the loss, Hornung joined an anti-aircraft unit and then joined the YMCA, undergoing volunteer work in England for soldiers on leave. In March 1917 he visited France, writing a poem about his experience afterwards — something he had been doing more frequently since Oscar’s death — and a collection of his war poetry, Ballad of Ensign Joy, was published later that year.
In July 1917 Hornung’s poem, Wooden Crosses, was published in The Times and in September, Bond and Free appeared. Towards the end of the year, he was accepted as a volunteer in a YMCA canteen and library “a short distance behind the Front Line”. In February 1918, during his service in Arras, he borrowed a staff car from a friend and visited his son’s grave near Ypres, before returning to the library in Arras. The following year Hornung published his third and final volume of poetry, The Young Guard, which also contains his previously published verses.
CONTENTS
THE YOUNG GUARD
CONSECRATION
LORD’S LEAVE
LAST POST
THE OLD BOYS
RUDDY YOUNG GINGER
THE BALLAD OF ENSIGN JOY
BOND AND FREE
SHELL-SHOCK IN ARRAS
THE BIG THING
FORERUNNERS
UPPINGHAM SONG
WOODEN CROSSES
The original title page
THE YOUNG GUARD
Most of these pieces appeared during the war. The usual acknowledgements are tendered to The Spectator in three cases and The Times in two, as well as to Land and Water, The Cologne Post and sundry School Magazines.
CONSECRATION
CHILDREN we deemed you all the days
We vexed you with our care:
But in a Universe ablaze,
What was your childish share?
To rush upon the flames of Hell
To quench them with your blood!
To be of England’s flower that fell
Ere yet it brake the bud!
And we who wither where we grew,
And never shed but tears,
As children now would follow you
Through the remaining years;
Tread in the steps we thought to guide,
As firmly as you trod;
And keep the name you glorified
Clean before man and God.
LORD’S LEAVE
(1915)
No Lord’s this year: no silken lawn on which
A dignified and dainty throng meanders.
The Schools take guard upon a fierier pitch
Somewhere in Flanders.
Bigger the cricket here; yet some who tried
In vain to earn a Colour while at Eton
Have found a place upon an England side
That can’t be beaten!
A demon bowler’s bowling with his head —
His heart’s as black as skins in Carolina!
Either he breaks, or shoots almost as dead
As Anne Regina;
While the deep-field-gun, trained upon your stumps,
From concrete grand-stand far beyond the bound’ry,
Lifts up his ugly mouth and fairly pumps
Shells from Krupp’s foundry.
But like the time the game is out of joint —
No screen, and too much mud for cricket lover;
Both legs go slip, and there’s sufficient point
In extra cover!
Cricket. ’Tis Sanscrit to the super-Hun —
Cheap cross between Caligula and Cassius,
To whom speech, prayer, and warfare are all one —
Equally gaseous!
Playing a game’s beyond him and his hordes;
Theirs but to play the snake or wolf or vulture:
Better one sporting lesson learnt at Lord’s
Than all their Kultur....
Sinks a torpedoed Phoebus from our sight;
Over the field of play see darkness stealing;
Only in this one game, against the light
There’s no appealing.
Now for their flares... and now at last the stars...
Only the stars now, in their heavenly million,
Glisten and blink for pity on our scars
From the Pavilion.
LAST POST
(1915)
LAST summer, centuries ago,
I watched the postman’s lantern glow,
As night by night on leaden feet
He twinkled down our darkened street.
So welcome on his beaten track,
The bent man with the bulging sack!
But dread of every sleepless couch,
A whistling imp with leathern pouch!
And now I meet him in the way,
And earth is Heaven, night is Day,
For oh! there shines before his lamp
An envelope without a stamp!
Address in pencil; overhead,
The Censor’s triangle in red.
Indoors and up the stair I bound:
“One from the boy, still safe, still sound!
“Still merry in a dubious trench
They’ve taken over from the French;
Still making light of duty done;
Still full of Tommy, Fritz, and fun!
“Still finding War of games the cream,
And his platoon a priceless team —
Still running it by sportsman’s rule,
Just as he ran his house at school.
“Still wild about the ‘bombing stunt’
He makes his hobby at the front.
Still trustful of his wondrous luck —
‘Prepared to take on old man Kluck!�
��”
Awed only in the peaceful spells,
And only scornful of their shells,
His beaming eye yet found delight
In ruins lit by flares at night,
In clover field and hedgerow green,
Apart from cover or a screen,
In Nature spurting spick-and-span
For all the devilries of Man.
He said those weeks of blood and tears
Were worth his score of radiant years.
He said he had not lived before —
Our boy who never dreamt of War!
He gave us of his own dear glow,
Last summer, centuries ago.
Bronzed leaves still cling to every bough.
I don’t waylay the postman now.
Doubtless upon his nightly beat
He still comes twinkling down our street.
I am not there with straining eye —
A whistling imp could tell you why.
THE OLD BOYS
(1917)
“WHO is the one with the empty sleeve?”
“Some sport who was in the swim.”
“And the one with the ribbon who’s home on leave?”
“Good Lord! I remember him!
A hulking fool, low down in the school,
And no good at games was he —
All fingers and thumbs — and very few chums.
(I wish he’d shake hands with me!)”
“Who is the one with the heavy stick,
Who seems to walk from the shoulder?”
“Why, many’s the goal you have watched him kick!”
“He’s looking a lifetime older.
Who is the one that’s so full of fun —
I never beheld a blither —
Yet his eyes are fixt as the furrow betwixt?”
“He cannot see out of either.”
“Who are the ones that we cannot see,
Though we feel them as near as near?
In Chapel one felt them bend the knee,
At the match one felt them cheer.
In the deep still shade of the Colonnade,
In the ringing quad’s full light,
They are laughing here, they are chaffing there,
Yet never in sound or sight.”
“Oh, those are the ones who never shall leave,
As they once were afraid they would!
They marched away from the school at eve,
But at dawn came back for good,
With deathless blooms from uncoffin’d tombs
To lay at our Founder’s shrine.
As many are they as ourselves to-day,
And their place is yours and mine.”
“But who are the ones they can help or harm?”
“Each small boy, never so new,
Has an Elder Brother to take his arm,
And show him the thing to do —
And the thing to resist with a doubled fist,
If he’d be nor knave nor fool —
And the Game to play if he’d tread the way
Of the School behind the school.”
RUDDY YOUNG GINGER
(1915)
RUDDY young Ginger was somewhere in camp,
War broke it up in a day,
Packing cadets of the steadier stamp
Home with the smallest delay.
Ginger braves town in his O.T.C. rags —
Beards a Staff Marquis — the limb!
Saying, “Your son, Sir, is one of my fags,”
Gets a Commission through him.
Then to his tailors for khaki complet;
Then to Pall Mall for a sword;
Lastly, a wire to his people to say,
“Left school — joined the Line — are you bored?”
And it was a bit cool
(A term’s fees in the pool
By a rule of the school).
There were those who said “Fool!”
Of young Ginger.
Ruddy young Ginger! Who gave him that name?
Tommies who had his own nerve!
“Into ‘im, Ginger!” was heard in a game
With a neighbouring Special Reserve.
Blushing and grinning and looking fifteen,
Ginger, with howitzer punt,
Bags his man’s wind as succinctly and clean
As he hopes to bag Huns at the front.
Death on recruits who fall out by the way,
Sentries who yawn at their post,
Yet he sang such a song at the Y.M.C.A.
That the C.O. turned green as a ghost!
Less the song than the stance,
And the dissolute dance,
Drew a glance so askance
That... they packed him to France,
Little Ginger.
Next month, to the haunts of fine Ladies and Lords
I ventured, in Grosvenor Square:
The stateliest chambers were hospital wards —
And ruddy young Ginger was there.
In spite of his hurts he looked never so red,
Nor ever less shy or sedate,
Though his hair had been cropped (by machinegun, he said)
And bandages turbaned his pate.
He was mostly in holes — but his cheek was intact!
I could not but notice, with joy,
The loveliest Sisters had most to transact
With ruddy young Ginger — some boy!
Slaying Huns by the tons,
With a smile like a nun’s —
Oh! of all the brave ones,
All the sons of our guns —
Give me Ginger!
THE BALLAD OF ENSIGN JOY
(1917)
Solomon cited wonders three;
One was the way of a ship at sea,
One was the way of a mighty bird,
And the way of a serpent was the third.
But Solomon (since he was in the trade)
Appended the way of a man with a maid:
And Solomon (still in the flesh ) might add
The way of a maid with a soldier lad.
THIS is the story of Ensign Joy
(And the obsolete rank withal
That I love for each gentle English boy
Who jumped to his country’s call.
By their fire and fun, and the deeds they’ve done,
I would gazette them Second to none
Who faces a gun in Gaul!)
It is also the story of Ermyntrude
(A less appropriate name
For an idealistic Academy prude;
But under it, all the same,
The usual consanguineous squad
Had made her an honest child of God,
And cannot be held to blame).
It was just when the grind of the Special Reserves,
Employed upon Coast Defence,
Was getting on every Ensign’s nerves —
Sick-keen to be drafted hence —
That they met and played tennis and danced and sang,
The lad with the laugh and the schoolboy slang,
The girl with the eyes intense.
Yet it wasn’t for him that she languished and sighed,
But for all of our dear doomed youth;
And it wasn’t for her, but her sex, that he cried,
If he could but have probed the truth.
Did she? She would none of his hot young heart;
As khaki escort he’s tall and smart,
As lover a shade uncouth.
He went with his draft. She returned to her craft.
He wrote in his merry vein;
She read him aloud, and the Studio laughed!
(Ermyntrude bore the strain.)
He was full of gay bloodshed and Old Man Fritz
His flippancy sent her friends into fits.
(Ermyntrude frowned with pain.)
His tales of the Sergeant who swore so hard
Left Ermyntrude cold and prim;
; The tactless truth of the picture jarred,
And some of his jokes were grim.
Yet, let him but skate upon tender ice,
And he had to write to her twice or thrice
Before she would answer him.
(Yet once she sent him a fairy’s box,
And her pocket felt the brunt
Of tinned contraptions and books and socks —
Which he hailed as “a sporting stunt!”
She slaved at his muffler none the less,
And still took pleasure in murmuring, “Yes —
For a friend of mine at the Front.”)
One fine morning his name appears —
Looking so pretty in print!
“Wounded!” she warbles in tragedy tears —
And pictures the reddening lint,
The drawn damp face and the draggled hair..
But she found him blooming in Belgrave Square,
With a punctured shin in a splint.
It wasn’t a haunt of Ermyntrude’s,
That grandiose urban pile;
Like starlight in arctic altitudes
Was the stately Sister’s smile.
Tropical sunshine was Ensign Joy —
In his golden greeting no least alloy —
In his beaming eyes no guile.
He showed her the bullet that did the trick —
He showed her the trick, X-ray’d;
He showed her a table timed to a tick,
And a map that an airman made.
He spoke of a shell that caused grievous loss —
But he never mentioned a certain Cross
For his part in the camisade.
She saw it herself in a list next day,
And it brought her back to his bed
With a number of beautiful things to say,
Which were mostly over his head.
Turned pink as his own pyjamas’ stripe,
To her mind he ceased to embody a type —
Sank into her heart instead.
“I wonder that all of you didn’t retire!”
“My blighters were not that kind.”
“But it says you—’ advanced under murderous fire,
Machine-gun and shell combined’—”
“Oh, that’s the regular War Office wheeze!”
“‘Advanced’ — with that leg!—’ on his hands and knees’!”
“I couldn’t leave it behind.”
He was soon trick-driving an invalid chair,
And dancing about on a crutch.
The haute noblesse still in Belgrave Square
Were moved to oblige as such.