As the skies are over men:
I lay and smiled in my cellar bed,
And went to sleep again.
All day they whistled like a lash
That cracked in the trembling town:
I stood and listened for the crash
Of houses thundering down.
In, in they came, three nights and days,
All night and all day long;
It made us learned in their ways
And experts on their song.
Like a noisy clock, or a steamer’s screw,
Their beat debauched the ear,
And left it dead to a deafening few
That burst who cared how near?
We only laughed when the flimsy floor
Heaved on the shuddering sod:
But when some idiot slammed a door —
My God!
THE BIG THING
(1918)
IT was a British Linesman. His face was like a fist,
His sleeve all stripes and chevrons from the elbow to the wrist. —
Said he to an American (with other words of his):
“It’s a big thing you are doing — do you know how big it is?”
“I guess, Sir,” that American inevitably drawled,
“Big Bill’s our proposition an’ we’re goin’ for him bald.
You guys may have him rattled, but I figure it’s for us
To slaughter, quarter, grill or bile, an’ masticate the cuss.”
“I hope your teeth,” the Linesman said, “are equal to your tongue —
But that’s the sort of carrion that’s better when it’s hung.
Yet — the big thing you’re doing I should like to make you see!”
“Our stunt,” said that young Yankee, “is to set the whole world free!”
The Linesman used a venial verb (and other parts of speech):
“That’s just the way the papers talk and politicians preach!
But apart from gastronomical designs upon the Hun —
And the rather taller order — there’s a big thing that you’ve done.”
“Why, say! The biggest thing on earth, to any cute onlooker,
Is Old Man Bull and Uncle Sam aboard the same blamed hooker!
One crew, one port, one speed ahead, steel-true
twin-hearts within her:
One ding-dong English-singin’ race — a race without a winner!”
The boy’s a boyish mixture — half high-brow and half droll:
So brave and naïve and cock-a-hoop — so sure yet pure of soul!
Behold him bright and beaming as the bridegroom after church —
The Linesman looking wistful as a rival in the lurch!
“I’d love to be as young as you—” he doesn’t even swear —
“Love to be joining up anew and spoiling for my share!
But when your blood runs cold and old, and brain and bowels squirm,
The only thing to ease you is some fresh blood in the firm.
“When the war was young, and we were young, we felt the same as you:
A few short months of glory — and we didn’t care how few!
French, British and Dominions, it took us all the same —
Who knows but what the Hun himself enjoyed his dirty game!
“We tumbled out of tradesmen’s carts, we fell off office stools;
Fathers forsook their families, boys ran away from schools;
Mothers untied their apron-strings, lovers unloosed their arms —
All Europe was a wedding and the bells were war’s alarms!
“The chime had changed — You took a pull — the old wild peal rings on
With the clamour and the glamour of a Generation gone.
Their fun — their fire — their hearts’ desire — are born again in You!”
“That the big thing we’re doin’?”
“It’s as big as Man can do!”
FORERUNNERS
(1900)
WHEN I lie dying in my bed,
A grief to wife, and child, and friend, —
How I shall grudge you gallant dead
Your sudden, swift, heroic end!
Dear hands will minister to me,
Dear eyes deplore each shallower breath:
You had your battle-cries, you three,
To cheer and charm you to your death.
You did not wane from worse to worst,
Under coarse drug or futile knife,
But in one grand mad moment burst
From glorious life to glorious Life....
These twenty years ago and more,
‘Mid purple heather and brown crag,
Our whole school numbered scarce a score,
And three have fallen for the Flag.
You two have finished on one side,
You who were friend and foe at play;
Together you have done and died;
But that was where you learnt the way.
And the third face! I see it now,
So delicate and pale and brave.
The clear grey eye, the unruffled brow,
Were ripening for a soldier’s grave.
Ah! gallant three, too young to die!
The pity of it all endures.
Yet, in my own poor passing, I
Shall lie and long for such as yours.
UPPINGHAM SONG
(1913)
AGES ago (as to-day they are reckoned)
I was a lone little, blown little fag:
Panting to heel when Authority beckoned,
Spoiling to write for the Uppingham Mag.!
Thirty years on seemed a terrible time then —
Thirty years back seems a twelvemonth or so.
Little I saw myself spinning this rhyme then —
Less do I feel that it’s ages ago!
Ages ago that was Somebody’s study;
Somebody Else had the study next door.
O their long walks in the fields dry or muddy!
O their long talks in the evenings of yore!
Still, when they meet, the old evergreen fellows
Jaw in the jolly old jargon as though
Both were as slender and sound in the bellows
As they were ages and ages ago!
O but the ghosts at each turn I could show you! —
Ghosts in low collars and little cloth caps —
Each of ‘em now quite an elderly O.U. —
Wiser, no doubt, and as pleasant — perhaps!
That’s where poor Jack lit the slide up with tollies,
Once when the quad was a foot deep in snow —
When a live Bishop was one of the Pollies —
Ages and ages and ages ago!
Things that were Decent and things that were Rotten,
How I remember them year after year!
Some — it may be — that were better forgotten:
Some that — it may be — should still draw a tear...
More, many more, that are good to remember:
Yarns that grow richer, the older they grow:
Deeds that would make a man’s ultimate ember
Glow with the fervour of ages ago!
Did we play footer in funny long flannels?
Had we no Corps to give zest to our drill?
Never a Gym lined throughout with pine panels?
Half of your best buildings were quarry-stone still?
Ah! but it’s not for their looks that you love them,
Not for the craft of the builder below,
But for the spirit behind and above them —
But for the Spirit of Ages Ago!
Eton may rest on her Field and her River.
Harrow has songs that she knows how to sing.
Winchester slang makes the sensitive shiver.
Rugby had Arnold, but never had Thring!
Repton can put up as good an Eleven.
Marlborough men are the fear of the foe.
All th
at I wish to remark is — thank Heaven
I was at Uppingham ages ago!
WOODEN CROSSES
(1917)
“Go live the wide world over — but when you come to die, —
A quiet English churchyard is the only place to lie!
I held it half a lifetime, until through war’s mischance
I saw the wooden crosses that fret the fields of France.
A thrush sings in an oak-tree, and from the old square tower
A chime as sweet and mellow salutes the idle hour:
Stone crosses take no notice — but the little wooden ones
Are thrilling every minute to the music of the guns!
Upstanding at attention they face the cannonade,
In apple-pie alinement like Guardsmen on parade:
But Tombstones are Civilians who loll or sprawl or sway
At every crazy angle and stage of slow decay.
For them the Broken Column — in its plot of unkempt grass;
The tawdry tinsel garland safeguarded under glass;
And the Squire’s emblazoned virtues, that would overweight a Saint,
On the vault empaled in iron — scaling red for want of paint!
The men who die for England don’t need it rubbing in;
An automatic stamper and a narrow strip of tin
Record their date and regiment, their number and their name —
And the Squire who dies for England is treated just the same.
So stand the still battalions: alert, austere, serene;
Each with his just allowance of brown earth shot with green;
None better than his neighbour in pomp or circumstance —
All beads upon the rosary that turned the fate of France!
Who says their war is over? While others carry on,
The little wooden crosses spell but the dead and gone?
Not while they deck a sky-line, not while they crown a view,
Or a living soldier sees them and sets his teeth anew!
The tenants of the churchyard where the singing thrushes build
Were not, perhaps, all paragons of promise well fulfilled:
Some failed — through Love, or Liquor — while the
parish looked askance.
But — you cannot die a Failure if you win a Cross in France!
The brightest gems of Valour in the Army’s diadem
Are the V.C. and the D.S.O., M.C. and D.C.M.
But those who live to wear them will tell you they are dross
Beside the Final Honour of a simple Wooden Cross.
The Non-Fiction
Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a commune in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department of south-western France — in later years Hornung was hampered by poor health. He took a holiday in the south of France to recuperate, but fell ill on the train with a chill that turned into influenza and pneumonia from which he died on 22 March 1921, aged 54. He was buried in Saint-Jean-de-Luz.
NOTES OF A CAMP-FOLLOWER ON THE WESTERN FRONT
Hornung continued to work at the Arras library until the German Spring Offensive in March overran the British positions and he was forced to retreat, firstly to Amiens and then, in April, back to England. He stayed in England until November 1918, when he again took up his YMCA duties, establishing a rest hut and library in Cologne. In 1919 Hornung’s account of his time spent in France, Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front, was published, giving a detailed description of his experiences with the YMCA during the conflict. Arthur Conan Doyle, who had previously fallen out with Hornung, later wrote of the book that “there are parts of it which are brilliant in their vivid portrayal”. Some critics judge Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front as one of the best records of the war as experienced on the front lines.
The original title page
CONTENTS
AN ARK IN THE MUD
UNDER WAY
A HANDFUL OF MEN
SUNDAY ON BOARD
CHRISTMAS UP THE LINE
UNDER FIRE
CASUALTIES
AN INTERRUPTED LUNCH
CHRISTMAS DAY
THE BABES IN THE TRENCHES
DETAILS
ORDERLY MEN
THE JOCKS
GUNNERS
THE GUARDS
A BOY’S GRAVE
THE REST HUT
FRESH GROUND
OPENING DAY
THE HUT IN BEING
WRITERS AND READERS
WAR AND THE MAN
‘WE FALL TO RISE’
BEFORE THE STORM
ANOTHER OPENING DAY
THE END OF A BEGINNING
THE ROAD BACK
IN THE DAY OF BATTLE
OTHER OLD FELLOWS
THE REST CAMP — AND AFTER
Hornung, c. 1904
TO
THE KINDEST MAN
IN THE BOOK
AN ARK IN THE MUD
(December, 1917.)
UNDER WAY
‘There’s our hut!’ said the young hut-leader, pointing through iron palings at a couple of toy Noah’s Arks built large. ‘No — that’s the nth Division’s cinema. The Y.M.C.A. is the one beyond.’
The enclosure behind the palings had been a parade-ground in piping times; and British squads, from the pink French barracks outside the gates, still drilled there between banks of sterilised rubbish and lagoons of unmedicated mud. The place was to become familiar to me under many aspects. I have known it more than presentable in a clean suit of snow, and really picturesque with a sharp moon cocked upon some towering trees, as yet strangely intact. It was at its best, perhaps, as a nocturne pricked out by a swarm of electric torches, going and coming along the duck-boards in a grand chain of sparks and flashes. But its true colours were the wet browns and drabs of that first glimpse in the December dusk, with the Ark hull down in the mud, and the cinema a sister ship across her bows.
The hut-leader ushered me on board with the courtesy of a young commander inducting an elderly new mate; the difference was that I had all the ropes to learn, with the possible exception of one he had already shown me on our way from the local headquarters of the Y.M.C.A. The battered town was full of English soldiers, to whom indeed it owed its continued existence on the right side of the Line. In the gathering twilight, and the deeper shade of beetling ruins, most of them saluted either my leader’s British warm, or my own voluminous trench-coat (with fleece lining), on the supposition of officers within. Left to myself, I should have done the wrong thing every time. It is expressly out of order for a camp-follower to give or take salutes. Yet what is he to do, when he gets a beauty from one whose boots he is unfit to black? My leader had been showing me, with a pleasant nod and a genial civilian gesture, easier to emulate than to acquire.
In the hut he left me to my own investigations while he was seeing to his lamps. The round stove in the centre showed a rosy chimney through the gloom, like a mast in a ship’s saloon; and in the two half-lights the place looked scrupulously swept and garnished for our guests, a number of whom were already waiting outside for us to open. The trestle tables, with nothing on them but a dusky polish, might have been mathematically spaced, each with a pair of forms in perfect parallels, and nothing else but a piano and an under-sized billiard-table on all the tidy floor. The usual display of bunting, cheap but cheerful, hung as banners from the joists, a garish vista from platform to counter. Behind the counter were the shelves of shimmering goods, biscuits and candles in open cases on the floor, and as many exits as a scene in a farce. One door led into our room: an oblong cabin with camp beds for self and leader, tables covered with American cloth, dust, toilet requisites, more dust, candle-grease and tea-things, and a stove of its own in roseate blast like the one down the hut.
The crew of two orderlies lived along a little passage in their kitchen, and were now at their tea on packing-cases by the boiler fire. They were both like Esau hairy men, with very little of the soldier left about them. Their unlovely
beds were the principal pieces of kitchen furniture. In the kitchen, too, for obscure reasons not for me to investigate, were the washing arrangements for all hands, and any face or neck that felt inclined. I had heard a whisper of Officers’ Baths in the vicinity; it came to mind like the tinkle of a brook at these discoveries.
At 4.30 the unkempt couple staggered in with the first urn, and I took my post at the tap. One of them shuffled down the hut to open up; our young skipper stuck a carriage candle in its grease on the edge of the counter, over his till, saying he was as short of paraffin as of change; and into the half-lit gloom marched a horde of determined soldiers, and so upon the counter and my urn in double file. ‘Tea, please, sir!’ ‘Two teas!’ ‘Coop o’ tay, plase!’ The accents were from every district I had ever known, and were those of every class, including the one that has no accent at all. They warmed the blood like a medley of patriotic airs, and I commenced potman as it were to martial music.
It was, perhaps, the least skilled labour to be had in France, but that evening it was none too light. Every single customer began with tea: the mugs flew through my hands as fast as I could fill them, until my end of the counter swam in livid pools, and the tilted urn was down to a gentle dribble. Now was the chance to look twice at the consumers of our innocuous blend. One had a sheaf of wound-stripes on his sleeve; another was fresh trench-mud from leathern jerkin (where my view of him began) to the crown of his shrapnel helmet; many wore the bonnets of a famous Scotch Division, all were in their habit as they fought; and there they were waiting for their tea, a long perspective of patient faces, like school-children at a treat. And here was I, fairly launched upon the career which a facetious density has summed up as ‘pouring out tea and prayer in equal parts,’ and prepared to continue with the first half of the programme till further orders: the other was less in my line — but I could have poured out a fairly fluent thanksgiving for the atmosphere of youth and bravery, and most infectious vitality, which already filled the hut.
In the meantime there was much to be learnt from my seasoned neighbour at the till, and to admire in his happy control of gentlemen on their way up the Line. Should they want more matches than it suited him to sell, then want must be their master; did some sly knave appear at the top of the queue, without having worked his way up past my urn, then it was: ‘I saw you, Jock! Go round and come up in your turn!’ Or was it a man with no change, and was there hardly any in the till?— ‘Take two steps to the rear, my friend, and when I have the change I’ll serve you!’ When he had the change, the sparks might have flown with it through his fingers; he was lightning calculator and conjuror in one, knew the foul franc note of a dubious bank with less than half an eye, and how to refuse it with equal firmness and good-humour. I hardly knew whether to feel hurt or flattered at being perpetually ‘Mr.’ to this natural martinet, my junior it is true by decades, but a leader I was already proud to follow and obey.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 535
