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!
There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
10 Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.
Rupert Brooke
1914: The Dead
These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth.
These had seen movement, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.
There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter
10 And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,
Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance
And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,
A width, a shining peace, under the night.
Rupert Brooke
‘When you see millions of the mouthless dead’
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you’ll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, ‘They are dead.’ Then add thereto,
10 ‘Yet many a better one has died before.’
Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.
Charles Hamilton Sorley
Strange Meeting
It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall;
10 With a thousand fears that vision’s face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
‘Strange, friend,’ I said, ‘Here is no cause to mourn.’
‘None,’ said the other, ‘Save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
20 And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something has been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
30 Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery;
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
40 I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now…’
Wilfred Owen
Prisoners
Comrades of risk and rigour long ago
Who have done battle under honour’s name,
Hoped (living or shot down) some meed of fame,
And wooed bright Danger for a thrilling kiss, –
Laugh, oh laugh well, that we have come to this!
Laugh, oh laugh loud, all ye who long ago
Adventure found in gallant company!
Safe in Stagnation, laugh, laugh bitterly,
While on this filthiest backwater of Time’s flow
10 Drift we and rot, till something sets us free!
Laugh like old men with senses atrophied,
Heeding no Present, to the Future dead,
Nodding quite foolish by the warm fireside
And seeing no flame, but only in the red
And flickering embers, pictures of the past: –
Life like a cinder fading black at last.
F. W. Harvey
His Mate
‘Hi-diddle-diddle
The cat and the fiddle‘…
I raised my head,
And saw him seated on a heap of dead,
Yelling the nursery-tune,
Grimacing at the moon…
‘And the cow jumped over the moon.
The little dog laughed to see such sport
And the dish ran away with the spoon.’
10 And, as he stopt to snigger,
I struggled to my knees and pulled the trigger.
Wilfrid Gibson
Epitaphs: The Coward
I could not look on Death, which being known,
Men led me to him, blindfold and alone.
Rudyard Kipling
The Deserter
‘I’m sorry I done it, Major.’
We bandaged the livid face;
And led him, ere the wan sun rose,
To die his death of disgrace.
The bolt-heads locked to the cartridge;
The rifles steadied to rest,
As cold stock nestled at colder cheek
And foresight lined on the breast.
‘Fire!’ called the Sergeant-Major.
10 The muzzles flamed as he spoke:
And the shameless soul of a nameless man
Went up in the cordite-smoke.
Gilbert Frankau
My Boy Jack
‘Have you news of my boy Jack?’
Not this tide.
‘When d’you think that he’ll come back?’
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
‘Has any one else had word of him?’
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
‘Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?’
10 None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind –
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.
Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!
Rudyard Kipling
Easter Monday
In the last letter that I had from France
You thanked me for the silver Easter egg
Which I had hidden in the box of apples
You liked to munch beyond all other fruit.
You found the egg the Monday before Easter,
And said, ‘I will praise Easter Monday now –
It was such a lovely morning.’ Then you spoke
Of the coming battle and said, ‘This is the eve.
‘Good-bye. And may I have a letter soon’.
10 That Easter Monday was a day for praise,
It was such a lovely morning. In our garden
We sowed our earliest seeds, and in the orchard
The apple-bud was ripe. It was the eve.
There are three letters that you will not get.
Eleanor Farjeon
4 BLIGHTY
Going Back
‘I want to go home’
I want to go home,
I want to go home.
I don’t want to go in the trenches no more,
Where the whizz-bangs and shrapnel they whistle and roar.
Take me over the sea,
Where the Alleyman can’t get at me.
Oh my, I don’t want to die,
I want to go home.
I want to go home,
10 I want to go home.
I don’t want to visit la Belle France no more,
For oh the Jack Johnsons they make such a roar.
Take me over the sea,
Where the snipers they can’t get at me.
Oh my, I don’t want to die, I want to go home.
Soldiers’ song
If We Return
(Rondeau)
If we return, will England be
Just England still to you and me?
The place where we must earn our bread?
We, who have walked among the dead.
And watched the smile of agony,
And seen the price of Liberty,
Which we have taken carelessly
From other hands. Nay, we shall dread,
If we return,
10 Dread lest we hold blood-guiltily
The things that men have died to free.
Oh, English fields shall blossom red
For all the blood that has been shed
By men whose guardians are we,
If we return.
F. W. Harvey
Blighty
It seemed that it were well to kiss first earth
On landing, having traversed the narrow seas,
And grasp so little, tenderly, of this field of birth.
France having trodden and lain on, travelled bending the knees.
And having shed blood, known heart for her and last nerve freeze,
Proved body past heart, and soul past (so we thought) any worth.
For what so dear a thing as the first homecoming,
The seeing smoke pillar aloft from the home dwellings;
Sign of travel ended, lifted awhile the dooming
10 Sentence of exile; homecoming, right of tale-tellings?
But mud is on our fate after so long acquaintance,
We find of England the first gate without Romance;
Blue paved wharfs with dock-policemen and civic decency,
Trains and restrictions, order and politeness and directions,
Motion by black and white, guided ever about-ways
And staleness with petrol-dust distinguishing days.
A grim faced black-garbed mother efficient and busy
Set upon housework, worn-minded and fantasy free –
A work-house matron, forgetting her old birth friend – the sea.
Ivor Gurney
War Girls
There’s the girl who clips your ticket for the train,
And the girl who speeds the lift from floor to floor,
There’s the girl who does a milk-round in the rain,
And the girl who calls for orders at your door.
Strong, sensible, and fit,
They’re out to show their grit,
And tackle jobs with energy and knack.
No longer caged and penned up,
They’re going to keep their end up
10 Till the khaki soldier boys come marching back.
There’s the motor girl who drives a heavy van,
There’s the butcher girl who brings your joint of meat,
There’s the girl who cries ‘All fares, please!’ like a man,
And the girl who whistles taxis up the street.
Beneath each uniform
Beats a heart that’s soft and warm,
Though of canny mother-wit they show no lack;
But a solemn statement this is,
They’ve no time for love and kisses
20 Till the khaki soldier boys come marching back.
Jessie Pope
Home Service
‘At least it wasn’t your fault’ I hear them console
When they come back, the few that will come back.
I feel those handshakes now. ‘Well, on the whole
You didn’t miss much. I wish I had your knack
Of stopping out. You can still call your soul
Your own, at any rate. What a priceless slack
You’ve had, old chap. It must have been top-hole.
How’s poetry? I bet you’ve written a stack.’
What shall I say? That it’s been damnable?
10 That all the time my soul was never my own?
That we’ve slaved hard at endless make-believe?
It isn’t only actual war that’s hell,
I’ll say. It’s spending youth and hope alone
Among pretences that have ceased to deceive.
Geoffrey Faber
The Survivor Comes Home
Despair and doubt in the blood:
Autumn, a smell rotten-sweet:
What stirs in the drenching wood?
What drags at my heart, my feet?
What stirs in the wood?
Nothing stirs, nothing cries.
Run weasel, cry bird for me,
Comfort my ears, soothe my eyes!
Horror on ground, over tree!
10 Nothing calls, nothing flies.
Once in a blasted wood,
A shrieking fevered waste,
We jeered at Death where he stood:
I jeered, I too had a taste
Of Death in the wood.
Am I alive and the rest
Dead, all dead? sweet friends
With the sun they have journeyed west;
For me now night never ends,
20 A night without rest.
>
Death, your revenge is ripe.
Spare me! but can Death spare?
Must I leap, howl to your pipe
Because I denied you there?
Your vengeance is ripe.
Death, ay, terror of Death:
If I laughed at you, scorned you now
You flash in my eyes, choke my breath…
‘Safe home.’ Safe? Twig and bough
30 Drip, drip, drip with Death!
Robert Graves
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;
10 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?’
Siegfried Sassoon
Reserve
Though you desire me I will still feign sleep
And check my eyes from opening to the day,
For as I lie, thrilled by your gold-dark flesh,
I think of how the dead, my dead, once lay.
Richard Aldington
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry Page 13
