Voices of Silence Page 13

  The tense, packed faces in the black redoubt.

  Written in fire trench above ‘Glencorse Wood’, Westhoeck, 11 April, 1915.

  W.S.S. Lyon

  Poison

  21st April 1919

  (At Ypres, on April the 21st, 1915, the Huns made their first gas-attack.)*

  Forget, and forgive them – you say:

  War’s bitterness passes;

  Wild rose wreaths the gun-pit to-day,

  Where the trench was, young grass is;

  Forget and forgive;

  Let them live.

  Forgive them – you say – and forget;

  Since struggle is finished,

  Shake hands, be at peace, square the debt,

  Let old hates be diminished;

  Abandon blockade:

  Let them trade.

  Fools! Shall the pard change his skin

  Or cleanse one spot from it?

  As the letcher returns to his sin

  So the cur to its vomit.

  Fools! Hath the Hun

  Earned place in the sun?

  You who accuse that I fan

  War’s spark from hate’s ember,

  Forgive and forget if you can;

  But I, I remember

  Men who faced death,

  Choking for breath,

  Four years back to a day –

  * In fact, the first gas attack was on 22 April 1915.

  Men who fought cleanly.

  Killed, say you? Murdered, I say,

  Murdered most meanly,

  Poisoned! . . . And yet,

  You can forget.

  Gilbert Frankau

  [There was a little Turk, and Baghdad was his home]

  There was a little Turk, and Baghdad was his home,

  There was a little Hun, and he lived in Bapaume,

  Each said to the other, as they shivered with alarm,

  ‘To find another home wouldn’t do us any harm’.

  Y Beach

  Y Beach, the Scottish Borderer cried,

  While panting up the steep hill side,

  Y Beach!

  To call this thing a beach is stiff,

  It’s nothing but a bloody cliff:

  Why Beach?

  Jack Churchill

  For the Gallipoli Peninsula

  History of the Great Fight

  April 25th, 1915

  Halt! Thy tread is on heroes’ graves,

  English lads lie sleeping below,

  Just rough wooden crosses at their heads,

  To let their comrades know.

  They’d sleep no better for marble ones

  Or monuments so grand,

  They sleep in tranquil contentment

  In that far off Turkish land.

  I’ve often passed those little mounds,

  Where the deadly bullets me-ow,

  And the air was full of shrapnel,

  ’Tis called shrapnel gully now.

  Whilst coming from the trenches,

  And glancing over there,

  I’ve often seen many a khaki form

  Kneeling in silent prayer.

  There’s many a loving mother,

  Home in England dear,

  Who is weeping and broken-hearted

  O’er her loved son lonely there.

  There’s many a true English girl

  Stricken with sudden pain,

  Mourning for her fallen sweetheart

  Whom she’ll never see again.

  They know not where he lies,

  Nor how he fell.

  That’s why I’m writing these few lines

  The simple truth to tell.

  Their graves are on Gallipoli,

  Up in the very heights,

  Above the first great landing place,

  Scene of the first great fight.

  Officers and men who fell

  In that first fierce rush of fame,

  They lie there side by side,

  Their rank is now the same;

  The city boy who left the pen,

  The country boy the plough,

  They trained together in England,

  They sleep together now.

  Sleep on! Fallen comrades,

  You’ll ne’er be forgotten by

  The boys who fought with you

  And the boys who saw you die.

  Your graves may be neglected

  But fond memory will remain,

  The story of your gallant charge

  Will ease the grief and pain.

  PS – That we know your kin are feeling,

  Over there across the foam,

  And we’ll tell the story of your fall,

  Should we e’er reach Home Sweet Home.

  J. Stewart

  Fighting Hard

  ‘The Australians are fighting hard in Gallipoli’ – Cable.

  Rolling out to fight for England, singing songs across the sea;

  Rolling North to fight for England, and to fight for you and me;

  Fighting hard for France and England, where the storms of Death are hurled;

  Fighting hard for Australasia and the honour of the World!

  Fighting hard.

  Fighting hard for Sunny Queensland – fighting for Bananaland,

  Fighting hard for West Australia, and the mulga and the sand;

  Fighting hard for Plain and Wool-Track, and the haze of western heat –

  Fighting hard for South Australia and the bronze of Farrar’s Wheat!

  Fighting hard.

  Fighting hard for fair Victoria, and the mountain and the glen;

  (And the Memory of Eureka – there were other tyrants then),

  For the glorious Gippsland forests and the World’s great Singing Star –

  For the irrigation channels where the cabbage gardens are –

  Fighting hard.

  Fighting hard for gale and earthquake, and the wind-swept ports between;

  For the wild flax and manuka and the terraced hills of green.

  Fighting hard for wooden homesteads, where the mighty kauris stand –

  Fighting hard for fern and tussock! – Fighting hard for Maoriland!

  Fighting hard.

  Fighting hard for little Tassy, where the apple orchards grow;

  (And the Northern Territory just to give the place a show),

  Fighting hard for Home and Empire, while the Commonwealth prevails –

  And, in spite of all her blunders, dying hard for New South Wales.

  Dying hard.

  Fighting for the Pride of Old Folk, and the people that you know;

  And the girl you left behind you – (ah! the time is passing slow).

  For the proud tears of a sister! come you back, or never come!

  And the weary Elder Brother, looking after things at home –

  Fighting hard! You Lucky Devils!

  Fighting hard.

  Henry Lawson

  Anzac Cove

  There’s a lonely stretch of hillocks.

  There’s a beach asleep and drear.

  There’s a battered broken fort beside the sea.

  There are sunken trampled graves,

  There’s a little rotting pier,

  And winding paths that wind unceasingly.

  There’s a torn and silent valley.

  There’s a tiny rivulet

  With some blood upon the stones beside its mouth.

  There are lines of buried bones.

  There’s an unpaid waiting debt.

  There’s a sound of gentle sobbing in the south.

  Leon Gellert

  Twitting the Turk

  The Turk, he is an honest man,

  And fights us fair and true,

  But we annoy him all we can

  As we are paid to do;

  It’s very hard to keep him riled;

  We find him strangely reconciled

  And things that once just made him wild

  He takes a liking to.

  The
bully tin no more insults,

  The Libby gives no grief,

  That used to soar from catapults

  And biff the shocked Redif;

  At first it gave him quite a turn,

  The flight of that innocuous urn,

  And then he spoiled the whole concern

  By gobbling up the beef.

  Yet when the cruder kind of wheeze

  No longer irritates,

  There’s one that never fails to tease

  His friends across the Straits,

  Where many a Moslem scans our slopes

  (With now and then some cramp, one hopes,

  From looking long through telescopes)

  And simply hates and hates.

  We go and bathe, in shameless scores,

  Beneath his baleful een,

  Disrobe, unscathed, on sacred shores

  And wallow in between;

  Nor does a soldier there assume

  His university costume,

  And though it makes the Faithful fume

  It makes the Faithless clean.

  Ay, all our arts have some reward,

  But this I think’s the peach,

  For man can bear the invader’s horde,

  That riots in his reach,

  That raids his roost in armèd swarms

  Or swamps his citadels with storms,

  But not their nude insulting forms

  A-bathing off his beach.

  A.P. Herbert

  A Dug-out Lament

  It ain’t the work and it ain’t the Turk

  That causes us to swear,

  But it’s havin’ to fight at dark midnight

  With the things in our underwear.

  To-day there’s a score – to-morrow lots more

  Of these rotters – it ain’t too nice

  To sit skin-bare in keen morning air

  Lookin’ for bloomin’ -——.

  They’re black an’ grey an’ brindle an’ white,

  An’ red an’ big an’ small,

  They steeplechase around our knees –

  We cannot sleep at all! –

  They’re in our tunics, and in our shirts,

  They take a power of beating,

  So for goodness sake, if you’re sending us cake,

  Send also a tin of Keating.

  T.A. Saxon

  The Hospital Ship

  There is a green-lit hospital ship,

  Green, with a crimson cross,

  Lazily swaying there in the bay,

  Lazily bearing my friend away,

  Leaving me dull-sensed loss.

  Green-lit, red-lit hospital ship,

  Numb is my heart, but you carelessly dip

  There in the drift of the bay.

  There is a green-lit hospital ship,

  Dim as the distance grows,

  Speedily steaming out of the bay,

  Speedily bearing my friend away

  Into the orange-rose.

  Green-lit, red-lit hospital ship,

  Dim are my eyes, but you heedlessly slip

  Out of their sight from the bay.

  * * *

  There was a green-lit hospital ship,

  Green, with a blood-red cross,

  Lazily swaying there in the bay,

  But it went out with the light of the day –

  Out where the white seas toss.

  Green-lit, red-lit hospital ship,

  Cold are my hands and trembling my lip:

  Did you make home from the bay?

  W.H. Littlejohn

  The Blizzard

  Suvla, November 27, 1915

  The night was dark as hell-mouth, the wind was bitter cold,

  And there was little comfort in a sodden blanket rolled.

  A foot or more of water, an inch or two of mud

  Was what we had to walk in before came down – the flood.

  It caught the shivering sentries along the parapet,

  The front trench was abrim before they knew that they were wet,

  Full seven feet deep the trenches were, the men were weighted down

  With kit and ammunition, and mostly had to drown.

  Behind was soon no better, a million tons of rain

  Came swirling thro’ the section by dug-out, sap and drain,

  Headquarters, store and cook-house, bomb-shelter, splinter-proof,

  Were all filled up with water, and in fell every roof.

  Scummy and dark and icy, the torrent at a touch

  Sucked in the greasy trench-walls that mocked the drowning clutch.

  And now the land was covered, and now with choking breath

  The wretched victims unawares stepped into hidden death.

  Behind the up-flung parados – half buried in the slime,

  Their fingers numb and useless – their rifles choked with grime.

  Thro’ thirty hours of darkness and twenty hours of day,

  Foodless and drinkless (save the mark), a frozen handful lay.

  My friends at home – at breakfast you saw a casual hint

  Of half a quarter of the truth in seven lines of print.

  But somewhere in the sullen sky that seemed to mock our woes

  God saw my soldiers freeze and drown. It is enough. He knows.

  F.W.D. Bendall

  The Unburied

  Now snowflakes thickly falling in the winter breeze

  Have cloaked alike the hard, unbending ilex

  And the grey, drooping branches of the olive trees,

  Transmuting into silver all their lead;

  And, in between the winding lines, in No-Man’s Land,

  Have softly covered with a glittering shroud

  The unburied dead.

  And in the silences of night, when winds are fair,

  When shot and shard have ceased their wild surprising,

  I hear a sound of music in the upper air,

  Rising and falling till it slowly dies –

  It is the beating of the wings of migrant birds

  Wafting the souls of these unburied heroes

  Into the skies.

  Evacuation of Gallipoli

  Not only muffled is our tread to cheat the foe.

  We fear to rouse our honoured dead to hear us go.

  Sleep sound, old friends – the keenest smart

  Which, more than failure, wounds the heart

  Is thus to leave you – thus to part.

  Comrades, farewell!!

  Alfred Leslie Guppy

  Mudros after the Evacuation

  I laughed to see the gulls that dipped to cling

  To the torn edge of surge and blowing spray,

  Where some gaunt battleship, a rolling king,

  Still dreams of phantom battles in the bay.

  I saw a cloud, a full-blown cotton flower

  Drift vaguely like a wandering butterfly,

  I laughed to think it bore no pregnant shower

  Of blinding shrapnel scattered from the sky.

  Life bore new hope. An army’s great release

  From a closed cage walled in by fire and sea,

  From the hushed pause and swooping plunge of shells,

  Sped in a night. Here children in strange peace,

  Seek solitude to dull the tragedy

  And needless horror of the Dardanelles.

  Geoffrey Dearmer

  The Graves of Gallipoli

  The herdman wandering by the lonely rills

  Marks where they lie on the scarred mountain’s flanks,

  Remembering that wild morning when the hills

  Shook to the roar of guns and those wild ranks

  Surged upward from the sea.

  None tends them. Flowers will come again in spring,

  And the torn hills and those poor mounds be green.

  Some bird that sings in English woods may sing

  To English lads beneath – the wind will keep

  Its ancient lullaby.

  Some flower that blooms
beside the Southern foam

  May blossom where our dead Australians lie,

  And comfort them with whispers of their home;

  And they will dream, beneath the alien sky,

  Of the Pacific Sea.

  ‘Thrice happy they who fell beneath the walls,

  Under their father’s eyes’, the Trojan said,

  ‘Not we who die in exile where who falls

  Must lie in foreign earth.’ Alas! our dead

  Lie buried far away.

  Yet where the brave man lies who fell in fight

  For his dear country, there his country is.

  And we will mourn them proudly as of right –

  For meaner deaths be weeping and loud cries:

  They died pro patria!

  Oh, sweet and seemly so to die, indeed,

  In the high flush of youth and strength and pride.

  These are our martyrs, and their blood the seed

  Of nobler futures. ’Twas for us they died.

  Keep we their memory green.

  This be their epitaph. ‘Traveller, south or west,

  Go, say at home we heard the trumpet call,

  And answered. Now beside the sea we rest.

  Our end was happy if our country thrives:

  Much was demanded. Lo! our store was small –

  That which we had we gave – it was our lives.’

  Gallipoli – In Memoriam

  There is a barren and forbidding shore

  Where blue waves lap a narrow sand-strewn strand,

  Where spirits shall keep guard for evermore

  O’er fifty thousand heroes of our land.

  There winds and waters ever chant the fame

  And matchless valour of that dauntless band,

  And generations yet shall laud their name

  Whose death enriched the glory of our land.

  Steep rocky cliffs that wild goat feared to climb

  These valiant warriors scaled and met their foe,

  Amid those rocks with bravery sublime

  They fought and fell. Now o’er the sands below –

  Those golden sands that saw their life-blood drain –

  The restless ocean rolls at full of tide,

  And sea waves sob and throb their sad refrain

  To Britain’s heroes, lying side by side.

  Will Leslie

  Mesopotamian Alphabet

  was an Apple that grew so they say,

  In the garden of Eden down Kurna way,