Voices of Silence (13 page)

But no victory is there won,

For again reinforcements come,

And in darkness of night again attack;

So on the fight goes – on and on,

They are almost like the Hun:

Their foul deeds are performed behind the back.

J.M. Harkins

Poets from time of yore have sung,

With every rhyme in every tongue

Of beauty and the power of love;

Or earthly things, and things above.

Sonnets to ladies dedicated

(Often, I fear, much overrated);

They raved on this, they raved on that

From dukes to the domestic cat.

On blessed peace and glorious war:

On feats of daring steeped with gore;

And every kind of wondrous deeds

Which hist’ry or tradition breeds.

But I would humbly sing to praise

Something unhonored in these days;

The cure for broken legs and arms,

For sufferers from rheumatic qualms,

From wounds by bullet or the knife

Obtained in peace or deadly strife;

For broken heads or chilblained toes

And twenty thousand other woes;

For that incurable disease

A sup’rabundance of V.C.s;

For nervous breakdown, shrapnelitis,

Toothache, acute malingeritis;

For broken hearts, for busted clo’es;

For every sickness science knows;

All these and every other ill

Are cured by that all-searching P
ILL
,

Choice gift to earth by powers divine –

I sing in praise of N
UMBER
N
INE
!

I’d just crawled into me dug-out,

And pulled me coat over me ’ead,

When the Corpor-al

He begins to bawl,

And these were the words he said:

‘Stand to –

Show a leg! – Get a move on, You! –

Ye’s can’t lie and snore,

Till the end o’ the war –

Stand-to! –
STAND-TO
! STAND-TO!’

I was just a-dreamin’ of ’Ome Sweet ’Ome,

A-top of a fevver bed;

And Sister Nell

Had looked in to tell

Of tea, and toasted bread –

‘Stand-to!’ –

Of a sudden a change of view –

‘Come on – you there –

Take a sniff o’ fresh air –

Stand-to! –
STAND-TO
! STAND-TO!’

Joseph Lee

Night on the plains, and the stars unfold

The cycle of night in splendour old;

The winds are hushed, on the fire-swept hill

All is silent, shadowy, still –

Silent, yet tense as a harp high-strung

By a master hand for deeds unsung.

Slowly across the shadowy night

Tremble the shimmering wings of light,

And men with vigil in their eyes

And a fever light that never dies –

Men from the city, hamlet, town,

Once white faces tanned to brown, –

Stand to the watch of the parapet

And watch, with rifles, bayonets set,

For the great unknown that comes to men

Swift as the light: sudden, then –

Dawn! the light from its shimmering wings

Lights up their faces with strange, strange things:

Strange thoughts of love, of death and life,

Serenity ’mid sanguine strife: –

Dreams of life where the feet of youth

Rush to the pinnacles of Truth;

Where early dreams with pinions fleet

Rush to find a love complete;

Of Love and Youth ’neath rosy bowers

Sensuous, mad with wine-filled hours,

Flushed with hope and joy’s delight,

Weaving rapture from the night: –

Visions of death where the harp is still

And the sun sets swiftly behind youth’s hill;

Where the song is hushed and the light is dead

And the man lies with the rememberèd;

Where Memory weaves a paradise,

A mother’s face, her tender eyes,

Her suffering for the child she gave,

Her love unbroken by the grave;

Where shadows gather o’er the bliss,

The rapture of a bridal kiss: –

Yet dreams where Youth (sublimity!)

Doth thrill to give for Liberty

Its love, its hope, its radiant morn,

Doth thrill to die for the yet unborn,

To die, and pay the utmost price

And save its ideals thro’ the sacrifice.

Thus at dawn do the watchers dream,

Of life and death, of love supreme:

Flushed with the dawn, hope in each breast,

Their faces turn to the starless west:

Thus at dawn do the watchers think

Resolute-hearted upon death’s brink

With a strange, proud look on every face –

The
SCORN
of Death, the
PRIDE
of race.

John W. Streets

Some sing of the glory of war,

Of heroes who die in the fight;

Of the shock of the battle, the roar of the guns,

When the enemies clash by night.

Some mourn the savagery of war,

The shame and the waste of it all;

And they pity the sinfulness of men

Who heard not the Master’s call.

They may be right, and they may be wrong,

But what I’m going to sing

Is not the glory of the war –

But the weariness of the thing.

For most of the time there’s nothing to do

But to sit and think of the past;

And one day comes and slowly dies –

Exactly like the last.

It’s the waiting – seldom talked about –

Oh, it’s rarely ever told –

That most of the bravery at the front –

Is waiting in the cold.

It’s not the dread of the shrapnel’s whine

That sickens a fighting soul;

But the beast in us comes out at times

When we’re waiting in a hole.

In a hole that’s damp and full of rats

The poisoned thoughts will come;

And there are thoughts of long dread days,

Of love, and friends and home.

Just sitting and waiting and thinking

As the dreary days go by

Takes a different kind of courage

From marching out to die.

Don White

He hides behind his sand-bag,

And I stand back o’ mine;

And sometimes he bellows, ‘Hullo, John Bull!’

And I hollers, ‘German swine!’

And sometimes we both lose our bloomin’ rag

And blaze all along the line.

Sometimes he whistles his ’Ymn of ’Ate,

Or opens his mug to sing,

And when he gives us ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’

I give ’im ‘God Save the King’;

And then – we ‘get up the wind’ again,

And the bullets begin to ping –

(If we’re in luck our machine gun nips

A working squad on the wing.)

Sometimes he shouts, ‘Tommy, come over!’

And we fellers bawl out, ‘Fritz,

If yer wants a good warm breakfast,

Walk up and we’ll give you fits!’

And sometimes our great guns begin to growl,

And blows his front line to bits.

And when our shrapnel has tore his wire,

And his parapet shows a rent,

We over and pays him a friendly call

With a bayonet – but no harm meant.

And he – well, when he’s resuscitate,

He returns us the compliment!

I stand behind my sand-bag,

And he hides back o’ his’en;

And, but for our bloomin’ uniforms,

We might both be convicts in pris’n;

And sometimes I loves him a little bit –

And sometimes I ’ate like p’ison.

For sometimes I mutters ‘Belgium’,

Or ‘Lusitani–a’,

And I slackens my bay’net in its sheath,

And stiffens my lower jaw,

And ‘An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth’,

Is all I know of the Law.

But sometimes when things is quiet,

And the old kindly stars come out,

I stand up behind my sand-bag,

And think, ‘What’s it all about?’

And – tho’ I’m a damned sight better nor him,

Yet sometimes I have a doubt,

That if you got under his hide you would see

A bloke with a heart just the same’s you and me!

Joseph Lee

A little, vagrant cur,

He had a noble heart;

He met us on the road,

And chose the better part.

It may be Belgium’s wrongs

Beneath his weskit burned;

Or visions of a home

The Huns had overturned.

And so he sought our camp,

And followed to the trench,

For Englishmen to him

Were much the same as French.

The soldier’s dog, he shared

The soldier’s daily bread,

And howsoever short

The rations, he was fed.

And in return he warred

Against the soldier’s pest,

The vermin great and small

Which rob them of their rest.

Sometimes he would patrol

Along the parapet,

To scent the creeping guile

Of Huns on mischief set.

And had Hunny snake

Through barbed fences crawled,

He would have had his bags,

And bit him till he bawled.

Then why, oh why, when you

Had made your footing sure

Did you mistake the road,

Or fall to alien lure?

I cannot think that you

Did willingly desert,

Still less that to Kultur

You were a base pervert.

I fancy when the fight

Is raging on the plain,

Beside the old platoon

You will be found again.

It is midday: the deep trench glares . . .

A buzz and blaze of flies . . .

The hot wind puffs the giddy airs . . .

The great sun rakes the skies.

No sound in all the stagnant trench

Where forty standing men

Endure the sweat and grit and stench,

Like cattle in a pen.

Sometimes a sniper’s bullet whirs

Or twangs the whining wire;

Sometimes a soldier sighs and stirs

As in hell’s frying fire.

From out a high cool cloud descends

An aeroplane’s far moan . . .

The sun strikes down, the thin cloud rends . . .

The black speck travels on.

And sweating, dizzied, isolate

In the hot trench beneath,

We bide the next shrewd move of fate

Be it of life or death.

Robert Nichols

Green are the trees, and green the summer grass,

Beneath the sun, the tiniest leaf hangs still:

The flowers in languor droop, and tired men pass

All somnolent, while death whines loud and shrill.

O fine, full-throated choir invisible,

Whose sudden burst of rapture fills the ear!

Are ye insensible to mortal fear,

That such a stream of melody ye spill,

While murk of battle drifts on Auber’s hill,

And mankind dreams of slaughter? What wild glee

Has filled your throbbing throats with sound, until

Its strains are poured from every bush and tree,

And sad hearts swell with hope, and fierce eyes fill?

The world is stark with blood and hate – but ye –

Sing on! Sing on! in careless ecstasy.

E.F. Wilkinson

Impressions are like winds; you feel their cool

Swift kiss upon the brow, yet know not where

They sprang to birth: so like a pool

Rippled by winds from out their forest lair

My soul was stir’d to life; its twilight fled;

There passed across its solitude a dream

That wing’d with supreme ecstasy did seem;

That gave the kiss of life to long-lost dead.

A lark trill’d in the blue: and suddenly

Upon the wings of his immortal ode

My soul rushed singing to the ether sky

And found in visions, dreams, its real abode –

I fled with Shelley, with the lark afar,

Unto the realms where the eternal are.

John W. Streets

In the line a soldier’s fancy

Oft may turn to thoughts of love,

But ’tis hard to dream of Nancy

When the whizz-bangs sing above.

In the midst of some sweet picture

Vision of a love-swept mind,

Bang! ‘A whizz-bang almost nicked yer!’

‘Duck, yer blighter, are yer blind?’

Take the case of poor Bill ’Arris

Deep in love with Rosy Greet,

So forgot to grease his tootsies,

Stayed outside and got ‘trench feet’.

Then remember old Tom Stoner,

Ponder of his awful fate.

Always writing to his Donah,

Lost his rum ’cos ’e was late.

Then again there’s ’Arry ’Awkins,

Stopped to dream at Gordon Farm.

Got a ‘blightie’, found his Polly

Walking out on Johnson’s arm.

Plenty more of such examples

I could give, had I but time.

War on tender feelings tramples,

H.E. breaks up thoughts sublime.

‘Don’t dream when you’re near machine guns!’

Is a thing to bear in mind.

Think of love when not between Huns,

A sniper’s quick, and love is blind.

In days gone by some aeons ago

That name my youthful pulses stirred,

I thrilled whene’er she whispered low,

Ran to her when her voice I heard.