In dead men breath.
Robert Graves
Report on Experience
I have been young, and now am not too old;
And I have seen the righteous forsaken,
His health, his honour and his quality taken.
This is not what we were formerly told.
I have seen a green country, useful to the race,
Knocked silly with guns and mines, its villages vanished,
Even the last rat and last kestrel banished –
God bless us all, this was peculiar grace.
I knew Seraphina; Nature gave her hue,
10 Glance, sympathy, note, like one from Eden.
I saw her smile warp, heard her lyric deaden;
She turned to harlotry; – this I took to be new.
Say what you will, our God sees how they run.
These disillusions are His curious proving
That He loves humanity and will go on loving;
Over there are faith, life, virtue in the sun.
Edmund Blunden
Dead and Buried
I have borne my cross through Flanders,
Through the broken heart of France,
I have borne it through the deserts of the East;
I have wandered, faint and longing,
Through the human hosts that, thronging,
Swarmed to glut their grinning idols with a feast.
I was crucified in Cambrai,
And again outside Bapaume;
I was scourged for miles along the Albert Road,
10 I was driven, pierced and bleeding,
With a million maggots feeding
On the body that I carried as my load.
I have craved a cup of water,
Just a drop to quench my thirst,
As the routed armies ran to keep the pace;
But no soldier made reply
As the maddened hosts swept by,
And a sweating straggler kicked me in the face.
There’s no ecstasy of torture
20 That the devils e’er devised,
That my soul has not endured unto the last;
As I bore my cross of sorrow,
For the glory of to-morrow,
Through the wilderness of battles that is past.
Yet my heart was still unbroken,
And my hope was still unquenched,
Till I bore my cross to Paris through the crowd.
Soldiers pierced me on the Aisne,
But ’twas by the river Seine
30 That the statesmen brake my legs and made my shroud.
There they wrapped my mangled body
In fine linen of fair words,
With the perfume of a sweetly scented lie,
And they laid it in the tomb
Of the golden-mirrored room,
’Mid the many-fountained Gardens of Versailles.
With a thousand scraps of paper
They made fast the open door,
And the wise men of the Council saw it sealed.
40 With the seal of subtle lying,
They made certain of my dying,
Lest the torment of the peoples should be healed.
Then they set a guard of soldiers
Night and day beside the Tomb,
Where the body of the Prince of Peace is laid,
And the captains of the nations
Keep the sentries to their stations,
Lest the statesman’s trust from Satan be betrayed.
For it isn’t steel and iron
50 That men use to kill their God,
But the poison of a smooth and slimy tongue.
Steel and iron tear the body,
But it’s oily sham and shoddy
That have trampled down God’s Spirit in the dung.
G. A. Studdert Kennedy
The Dead and the Living
For the Fallen
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.
Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.
They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
10 Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
20 They sleep beyond England’s foam.
But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.
Laurence Binyon
The Cenotaph
Not yet will those measureless fields be green again
Where only yesterday the wild, sweet, blood of wonderful youth was shed;
There is a grave whose earth must hold too long, too deep a stain,
Though for ever over it we may speak as proudly as we may tread.
But here, where the watchers by lonely hearths from the thrust of an inward sword have more slowly bled,
We shall build the Cenotaph: Victory, winged, with Peace, winged too, at the column’s head.
And over the stairway, at the foot – oh! here, leave desolate, passionate hands to spread
Violets, roses, and laurel, with the small, sweet, twinkling country things
Speaking so wistfully of other Springs,
10 From the little gardens of little places where son or sweetheart was born and bred.
In splendid sleep, with a thousand brothers
To lovers – to mothers
Here, too, lies he:
Under the purple, the green, the red, It is all young life: it must break some women’s hearts to see
Such a brave, gay coverlet to such a bed!
Only, when all is done and said,
God is not mocked and neither are the dead.
For this will stand in our Market-place –
20 Who’ll sell, who’ll buy
(Will you or I
Lie to each with the better grace)?
While looking in every busy whore’s and huckster’s face
As they drive their bargains, is the Face
Of God: and some young, piteous, murdered face.
Charlotte Mew
The Silence
In the bleak twilight, when the roads are hoar
And mists of early morning haunt the down,
His Mother shuts her empty cottage door
Behind her, in the lane beyond the town:
Her slow steps on the highway frosty white
Ring clear across the moor, and echo through
The drowsy town, to where the station’s light
Signals the 7.10 to Waterloo.
Some wintry flowers in her garden grown,
10 And some frail dreams, she bears with her to-day –
Dreams of the lad who once had been her own,
For whose dear sake she goes a weary way
To find in London, after journeying long,
The Altar of Remembrance, set apart<
br />
For such as she, and join the pilgrim throng
There, at that Mecca of the Broken Heart.
Princes and Lords in grave procession come
With wondrous wreaths of glory for the dead;
Then the two minutes smite the City dumb,
20 And memory dims her eyes with tears unshed;
The silence breaks, and music strange and sad
Wails, while the Great Ones bow in homage low;
And still she knows her little homely lad
Troubles no heart but hers in all the Show.
And when beside the blind stone’s crowded base,
’Mid the rich wreaths, she lays her wintry flowers,
She feels that, sleeping in some far-off place
Indifferent to these interludes of ours,
No solace from this marshalled woe he drains,
30 And that the stark Shrine stands more empty here
Than her own cottage, where the silence reigns,
Not for brief minutes, but through all the year.
St John Adcock
Armistice Day, 1921
The hush begins. Nothing is heard
Save the arrested taxis throbbing,
And here and there an ignorant bird
And here a sentimental woman sobbing.
The statesman bares and bows his head
Before the solemn monument:
His lips, paying duty to the dead
In silence, are more than ever eloquent.
But ere the sacred silence breaks
10 And taxis hurry on again,
A faint and distant voice awakes,
Speaking the mind of a million absent men:
‘Mourn not for us. Our better luck
At least has given us peace and rest.
We struggled when our moment struck
But now we understand that death knew best.
Would we be as our brothers are
Whose barrel-organs charm the town?
Ours was a better dodge by far –
20 We got our pensions in a lump sum down.
We, out of all, have had our pay,
There is no poverty where we lie:
The graveyard has no quarter-day,
The space is narrow but the rent not high.
No empty stomach here is found:
Unless some cheated worm complain
You hear no grumbling underground:
Oh never, never wish us back again!
Mourn not for us, but rather we
30 Will meet upon this solemn day
And in our greater liberty
Keep silent for you, a little while, and pray.’
Edward Shanks
‘Out of the Mouths of Babes –’
Two children in my garden playing found
A robin cruelly dead, in Summer hours.
I watched them get a trowel, and heap the mound,
And bury him, and scatter over flowers.
And when their little friend was laid away,
In lack of burial service over the dead
Before those two grave children turned to play: –
‘I hope he’ll have a happy dead life!’ one said.
What more was there to say for bird or beast?
10 What more for any man is there to say?
What can we wish them better, as with priest
And choir we ring the cross on Armistice Day?
F. W. Harvey
Memorial Tablet
(Great War)
Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight,
(Under Lord Derby’s Scheme). I died in hell –
(They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,
And I was hobbling back; and then a shell
Burst slick upon the duck-boards: so I fell
Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.
At sermon-time, while Squire is in his pew,
He gives my gilded name a thoughtful stare;
For, though low down upon the list, I’m there;
10 ‘In proud and glorious memory’…that’s my due.
Two bleeding years I fought in France, for Squire:
I suffered anguish that he’s never guessed.
Once I came home on leave: and then went west…
What greater glory could a man desire?
Siegfried Sassoon
Elegy in a Country Churchyard
The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home:
And bees and birds of England
About the cross can roam.
But they that fought for England,
Following a falling star,
Alas, alas for England
They have their graves afar.
And they that rule in England,
10 In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas for England
They have no graves as yet.
G. K. Chesterton
Epitaphs: Common Form
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
Rudyard Kipling
Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.
Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.
A. E. Housman
On Passing the New Menin Gate
Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate, –
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.
Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride
10 ‘Their name liveth for ever,’ the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.
Siegfried Sassoon
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: V
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilisation,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
Ezra Pound
War and Peace
In sodden trenches I have heard men speak,
Though numb and wretched, wise and witty things;
And loved them for the stubbornness that clings
Longest to laughter when Death’s pulleys creak;
And seeing cool nurses move on tireless feet
To do abominable things with grace,
Deemed them sweet sisters in that haunted place
Where, with child’s voices, strong men howl or bleat.
Yet now those men lay stubborn courage by,
10 Riding dull-eyed and silent in the train
To old men’s stools; or sell gay-coloured socks
And listen fearfully for Death; so I
Love the low-laughing girls, who now again
Go daintily, in thin and flowery frocks.
Edgell Rickword
A Generation (1917)
There was a time that’s gone
And will not come again,
We knew it was a pleasant time,
How good we never dreamed.
When, for a whimsy’s sake,<
br />
We’d even play with pain,
For everything awaited us
And life immortal seemed.
It seemed unending then
10 To forward-looking eyes,
No thought of what postponement meant
Hung dark across our mirth;
We had years and strength enough
For any enterprise,
Our numerous companionship
Were heirs to all the earth.
But now all memory
Is one ironic truth,
We look like strangers at the boys
20 We were so long ago;
For half of us are dead,
And half have lost their youth,
And our hearts are scarred by many griefs,
That only age should know.
J. C. Squire
Disabled
He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry Page 17
