Voices of Silence (5 page)
Authors: Vivien Noakes
There’s a crowd of little children
That march along and shout,
For it’s fine to play at soldiers
Now their fathers are called out.
So it’s beat, drums, beat;
But who’ll find them food to eat?
And it’s blow, trumpets, blow,
Ah! the children little know.
There’s a mother who stands watching
For the last look of her son,
A worn poor widow woman,
And he her only one.
But it’s beat, drums, beat,
Though God knows when we shall meet;
And it’s blow, trumpets, blow,
We must smile and cheer them so.
There’s a young girl who stands laughing,
For she thinks a war is grand,
And it’s fine to see the lads pass,
And it’s fine to hear the band.
So it’s beat, drums, beat,
To the fall of many feet;
And it’s blow, trumpets, blow,
God go with you where you go.
Winifred M. Letts
On Trek
Under a grey dawn, timidly breaking,
Through the little village the men are waking,
Easing their stiff limbs and rubbing their eyes;
From my misted window I watch the sun rise.
In the middle of the village a fountain stands,
Round it the men sit, washing their red hands.
Slowly the light grows, we call the roll over,
Bring the laggards stumbling from their warm cover,
Slowly the company gathers all together
And the men and the officer look shyly at the weather.
By the left, quick march! Off the column goes.
All through the village all the windows unclose:
At every window stands a child, early waking,
To see what road the company is taking.
Edward Shanks
The House by the Highway
All night, from the quiet street
Comes the sound, without pause or break,
Of the marching legions’ feet
To listeners lying awake.
Their faces may none descry;
Night folds them close like a pall;
But the feet of them passing by
Tramp on the hearts of all.
What comforting makes them strong?
What trust and what fears have they
That march without music or song
To death at the end of the way?
What faith in our victory?
What hopes that beguile and bless?
What heaven-sent hilarity?
What mirth and what weariness?
What valour from vanished years
In the heart of youth confined?
What wellsprings of unshed tears
For the loves they leave behind?
No sleep, my soul to befriend;
No voice, neither answering light!
But darkness that knows no end
And feet going by in the night.
Elinor Jenkins
The Last Evening
Round a bright isle, set in a sea of gloom,
We sat together, dining,
And spoke and laughed even as in better times
Though each one knew no other might misdoubt
The doom that marched moment by moment nigher,
Whose couriers knocked on every heart like death,
And changed all things familiar to our sight
Into strange shapes and grieving ghosts that wept.
The crimson-shaded light
Shed in the garden roses of red fire
That burned and bloomed on the decorous limes.
The hungry night that lay in wait without
Made blind, blue eyes against the silver’s shining
And waked the affrighted candles with its breath
Out of their steady sleep, while round the room
The shadows crouched and crept.
Among the legions of beleaguering fears,
Still we sat on and kept them still at bay,
A little while, a little longer yet,
And wooed the hurrying moments to forget
What we remembered well,
– Till the hour struck – then desperately we sought
And found no further respite – only tears
We would not shed, and words we might not say.
We needs must know that now the time was come
Yet still against the strangling foe we fought,
And some of us were brave and some
Borrowed a bubble courage nigh to breaking,
And he that went, perforce went speedily
And stayed not for leave-taking.
But even in going, as he would dispel
The bitterness of incomplete good-byes,
He paused within the circle of dim light,
And turned to us a face, lit seemingly
Less by the lamp than by his shining eyes.
So, in the radiance of his mastered fate,
A moment stood our soldier by the gate
And laughed his long farewell –
Then passed into the silence and the night.
Elinor Jenkins
Early Months
Retreat from Mons, Kaiser’s ‘Scrap of Paper’, spy mania, Kaiser’s ambition to invade Britain, the First Battle of Ypres, the Christmas truce
After landing in France, the British Expeditionary Force (or BEF), under the command of Sir John French, moved north to take up positions beside the French army to halt the German advance through Belgium. On Sunday 23 August they came face to face with the attacking forces in the small mining town of Mons. After a fierce battle down the streets and among the slag heaps, they were forced to withdraw. The Retreat from Mons, covering 250 miles in fierce summer heat, continued until 5 September. As rearguards turned to fight, the main body of troops marched until their feet were bloody and they moved almost in their sleep. They sang as they marched, and there were stories that ghosts of the English killed at Agincourt appeared to support them – ‘The Angels of Mons.’
The German advance seemed unstoppable as they implemented the Schlieffen Plan, a long-planned strategy that would lead to the fall of Paris and would bring France to its knees inside six weeks, before the Russian armies had had time to mobilise effectively. But the plan depended upon a swift, undefended passage through Belgium. Instead, faced with unexpectedly strong resistance, Von Kluck, the German commander, altered the thrust of his attack. Suddenly he found himself threatened with being outflanked, and his armies were forced to withdraw first to the River Marne and then to the Aisne; his plans for a swift victory were gone. Now, his men began to move towards the Channel ports; if these fell, the British Army would be cut off and the British Isles isolated from the Continent.
In what became known as ‘The Race for the Sea’, the BEF moved rapidly north once more. The decisive confrontation came at the end of October near the medieval Flemish wool town of Ypres. The British were heavily outnumbered and the German Crown Prince, certain of victory, arrived to watch the defeat of what the Kaiser had called a ‘contemptible little Army’. The British held on by a whisker, but by the end of the battle on 21 November the BEF had almost ceased to exist. Ypres became a symbol of the invincibility of the British Army that, though a vulnerable salient, was now to be held at all costs. Open warfare was over; with the coming of winter a line of trenches was drawn from the North Sea to the Swiss border – the Western Front. On Christmas Day, exhausted men on both sides of the line called an unofficial truce.
Meanwhile, in a fraught atmosphere at home, the terrible news of the retreat and the near encirclement of the BEF was replaced by reports of the successful defence of Ypres. Spy mania and rumour flourished. Everything German was suspect – from waiters and governesses to dachshunds and hock – and there were stories that Russian soldiers, with snow still on their boots, had been seen in England on their way from Archangel to support the Allies in France.
[There was a strange Man of Coblenz]
There was a strange Man of Coblenz, the length of whose legs was immense;
He went with one prance from Russia to France,
That excitable man of Coblenz.
Retreat
It was a nightmare week of thirst and dust –
With fairly heavy scraps at the beginning –
And disappointment, mixed with a queer trust
That we were winning.
They say one German rush stopped strangely short –
The Boches fell back; their horses couldn’t face
Something! when we were in a tightish place –
Somewhere near Agincourt!
I wasn’t there – and of that whole crammed week
Only two little things stick in my mind;
Our battery – we were rearmost, so to speak –
Had left me miles behind
In a great field of roots – there crouching tight
Across those turnips casting backwards glances –
Less than a mile behind on a low height
I caught a gleam of lances!
(I’d felt that thrill in my small boy existence
When Porsena of Clusium in his pride
Marched upon Rome – and the ‘wan burghers spied’
His vanguard in the distance!)
Behind that hill was hid a host too vast
To count – much too tremendous to alarm me!
These were
their
first – and I the very last
Of French’s little army!
– Oh yes, we’d lots of shelling, heaps of scraps –
They all but had us once – and shot my stallion
From Fez – but funked a dozen Highland chaps
Who tricked a whole Battalion!
One other thing – I’d halted fairly beat
– A baking road – some poplars over-arching –
Men simply tumbling down with thirst and heat,
And crumpled up with marching.
There was a weedy ‘Sub’, who used to shy
At work and drill and such-like useless trifles!
Just then he passed me, limping,
whistling
, by
Hung stiff
with Tommies’ rifles!
* * *
Though of that week I never want to talk –
I’ll think of Mons, whenever I remember
The valse tune that he whistled – or I walk
Through turnips in September!
Charles T. Foxcroft
The Mouth-Organ
When drum and fife are silent,
When the pipes are packed away,
And the soldiers go
Too near the foe
For the bugle’s noisy bray;
When our haversacks are heavy,
And our packs like Christian’s load,
Then Jimmy Morgan
Plays his old mouth-organ,
To cheer us on our road.
‘It’s a long, long way to Tipperary –’
When by the shrunken river
Reclined the great god Pan,
And to his needs,
Cut down the reeds –
And music first began;
Then all mankind did marvel
At a melody so sweet;
But when Jimmy Morgan
Plays his old mouth-organ,
Even Pan takes second seat!
When Orpheus, of old time,
Did strike his magic lute,
He lorded it,
As he thought fit,
O’er boulder, bird and brute;
And great trees were uprooted,
And
root
-marched, so to say,
But when Jimmy Morgan
Plays his old mouth-organ,
You should see us march away.
When the Piper Pied of Hamlin,
In the legend of renown,
His pipe did play,
He charmed away
The children from the town:
But behold our whole Battalion –
To the joy of wife and wench –
Led by Jimmy Morgan,
And his old mouth-organ
March forward to the trench.
‘Here we are, here we are, here we are again!’
O, an overture by Wagner
Strikes sweetly on mine ear,
And the noble three,
Brahms, Bach, and Bee-
thoven, I love to hear;
But when the rains are falling,
And when the roads are long,
Give me Jimmy Morgan
And his old mouth-organ
To lead our little song.
‘A-roving, a-roving; we’ll gang nae mair a-roving!’
