Voices of Silence Read online

  Prisoners of War

  In the little empty worlds of the camps

  We live through the weary hours;

  Endless monotony, endless strain

  Of silent endurance is ours,

  When before the dead days’ endless march

  The very spirit cowers.

  Home and friends are so far away

  Foes and hate are so near,

  We are back with the primitive things of life,

  Hunger and cold and fear.

  We must keep steady in heart and brain –

  Brethren, pray for us here.

  M.G. Meugens

  Rastatt

  Within these cages day by day we pace

  The bitter shortness of the meted span;

  And this and that way variously we plan

  Our poor excursions over the poor place,

  Cribbed to extinction. Yet remains one grace.

  For neither bars nor tented wire can ban

  Full many a roving glance that dares to scan

  The roomy hill, and wanders into space.

  Yea, and remains for ever unrepealed

  And unimpaired the free impetuous quest

  Of mind’s soaring eye, at length unsealed

  To the full measure of a life possessed

  Awhile, but never counted, now revealed

  Inestimable, wonderful, unguessed.

  A.A. Bowman

  Loneliness

  Oh where’s the use to write?

  What can I tell you, dear?

  Just that I want you so

  Who are not near.

  Just that I miss the lamp whose blessèd light

  Was God’s own moon to shine upon my night,

  And newly mourn each new day’s lost delight:

  Just – oh, it will not ease my pain –

  That I am lonely

  Until I see you once again,

  You – you only.

  F.W. Harvey

  Thoughts of Home

  Day follows night, and night returns to day

  Through all the enchanting stages of the spring;

  And exile lengthens out to months that fling

  Their shadow further, and my life grows gray;

  Grays even with the sun’s increasing ray;

  While forward still the heading heats do wing

  Into the year, that softly rounds his ring

  To midsummer, and June is on the way:

  The perfect season, when the hawthorn blows

  Down cream-white Scottish hedges, and the spent

  Airs of the evening gently swaying close

  Tired eyes upon it, heavy with its scent;

  While on the Downs the beating sunlight glows,

  And sends the wildering roses over Kent.

  A.A. Bowman

  Requiescat

  (W.M. Shot, June 1917, Schwarmstedt Camp)

  Were men but men, and Christians not at all:

  Mere pagans, primitive and quick of sense

  To feel the sun’s great blind beneficence:

  The kind hand of the breeze: – nay but to see

  Only the brotherly blue that’s over all,

  And realise that calm immensity

  So far-enfolding, softly-bright and still,

  Feel only that: – Surely they would not kill!

  Beside a new-digged grave beneath the trees

  I kneel. The brotherly sky is over all.

  It seems to me so strange wars do not cease.

  F.W. Harvey

  EIGHT

  The Royal Navy

  Life at sea, sinking of the Lusitania, the Battle of Jutland

  For a hundred years, since the Battle of Trafalgar, Britain had enjoyed an unchallenged supremacy of the sea. With the pre-war building of Dreadnoughts and the widening of the Kiel Canal, Germany had increasingly threatened this position.

  As an island, it was essential that Britain protect its coasts and trade routes, but its freedom of the seas came increasingly under attack from German U-boat submarines. Heavy loss of merchant shipping had disastrous effects on the supply of food and raw materials. Realising this, the Germans concentrated their U-boat attacks on these supply ships, hoping in this way to bring the British government to its knees. Merchant ships were undefended, and to begin with the Germans gave warning of attack, enabling the sailors to escape. After unrestricted U-boat warfare was launched in February 1917, such niceties were forgotten, and the destruction of British ships became so heavy that the country had food supplies for only a few weeks.

  In May 1915 the passenger liner Lusitania was sunk with the loss of 1,198 lives, including 124 US citizens. The Germans claimed, with justification, that there were arms on board, but it was a disaster that would eventually lead to America coming into the war.

  The most important naval engagement of the war, the Battle of Jutland, took place on 31 May 1916 off the coast of Denmark. After heavy fighting, with the loss of 6,000 British and 2,500 German lives, the German Fleet withdrew, leaving the British in control of the North Sea but without a decisive victory. Winston Churchill, who, until the failure of the Gallipoli campaign, had been First Lord of the Admiralty, criticised the conduct of the battle; this was leapt upon by Punch, which henceforth delighted in poking fun at him.

  Less than a week later, HMS Hampshire was sunk off the Orkneys, and Lord Kitchener, the creator of the New Armies, was drowned.

  The Sailing of the Fleet

  A signal flutters at the Flagship’s fore,

  And a deep pulse

  Stirs in the mighty hulls

  Slow wheeling seaward, where, beyond the Bar,

  Half veiled in gloom,

  Those messengers of doom

  The lean Destroyers are.

  From the thronged piers

  Faintly, the sound of cheers

  Tossed by the winds afar . . .

  With gathering speed

  The grey, grim shapes proceed –

  The Might of England – to uphold the Law

  ’Gainst blackest treachery.

  And the same courage high

  That fired those valiant hearts at Trafalgar,

  Burning from age to age,

  Our proudest heritage,

  Pierces disquieting war-clouds like a star,

  As, burdened with a Nation’s hopes and fears,

  The Battle Fleet of England sweeps to war.

  N.M.F. Corbett

  The Four Sea Lords

  (For the information of an ever-thirsty public.)

  FIRST SEA LORD

  This is the man whose work is War;

  He plans it out in a room on shore –

  He and his Staff (all brainy chaps)

  With miniature flags and monster maps,

  And a crew whose tackle is Hydrographic,

  With charts for steering our ocean traffic.

  But the task that most engrosses him

  Is to keep his Fleet in fighting trim;

  To see that his airmen learn the knack

  Of plomping bombs on a Zeppelin’s back;

  To make his sailors good at gunnery,

  And so to sink each floating hunnery.

  SECOND SEA LORD

  Here is the man who mans the Fleet

  With jolly young tars that can’t be beat;

  He has them trained and taught the rules;

  He looks to their hospitals, barracks, schools;

  He notes what rumorous Osborne’s doing,

  And if it has mumps or measles brewing.

  He fills each officer’s vacant billet

  (Provided the First Lord doesn’t fill it);

  And he casts a fatherly eye, betweens,

  On that fine old corps, the Royal Marines.

  This is the job that once was Jellicoe’s,

  But now he has one a bit more bellicose.

  THIRD SEA LORD

  Ships are the care of the Third Sea Lord,

  And all Material kept on board.
r />   ’Tis he must see that the big guns boom

  And the wheels go round in the engine-room;

  ’Tis he must find, for cloudy forays,

  Aeroplanes and Astra Torres;

  And, long ere anything’s sent to sea,

  Tot up the bill for you and me.

  FOURTH SEA LORD

  The Fourth Sea Lord has a deal to plan,

  For he’s, chief of all, the Transport man.

  He finds the Fleet in coal and victuals

  (Supplying the beer – if not the skittles);

  He sees to the bad’uns that get imprisoned,

  And settles what uniform’s worn (or isn’t) . . .

  Even the stubbornest own the sway

  Of the Lord of Food and the Lord of Pay!

  R.P. Keigwin

  Destroyers

  On this primeval strip of western land,

  With purple bays and tongues of shining sand,

  Time, like an echoing tide,

  Moves drowsily in idle ebb and flow;

  The sunshine slumbers in the tangled grass

  And homely folk with simple greeting pass,

  As to their worship or their work they go.

  Man, earth, and sea

  Seem linked in elemental harmony,

  And my insurgent sorrow finds release

  In dreams of peace.

  But silent, gray,

  Out of the curtained haze,

  Across the bay

  Two fierce destroyers glide with bows afoam

  And predatory gaze,

  Like cormorants that seek a submerged prey.

  An angel of destruction guards the door

  And keeps the peace of our ancestral home;

  Freedom to dream, to work, and to adore,

  These vagrant days, nights of untroubled breath,

  Are bought with death.

  Henry Head

  Mine Sweepers

  (Over three hundred of Grimsby’s fleet of trawlers are engaged in the hazardous task of sweeping the seas for mines sown by the Germans.)

  ‘’Ware mine!’

  ‘Starboard your helm!’ . . . ‘Full speed ahead!’

  The squat craft duly swings: –

  A hand’s breath off, a thing of dread

  The sullen breaker flings.

  Carefully, slowly, patiently,

  The men of Grimsby town

  Grope their way on the rolling sea –

  The storm-swept, treach’rous grey North Sea –

  Keeping the death-rate down.

  Cold is the wind as the Gates of Death,

  Howling a dirge with its biting breath,

  Tearing rude music from rigging taut –

  The tune with deadly omen fraught:

  ‘Look to yourselves, oh, sailors bold –

  I am the one ye know of old!

  I make my sport with such as ye –

  The game that is played on every sea

  With death as the loser’s penalty!’

  Valiantly, stoutly, manfully,

  The trawlers fight the gale;

  Buoyant they ride on the rolling sea –

  The storm-swept, treach’rous grey North Sea –

  Lashed by the North Wind’s flail.

  Cruel the waves of that ocean drear,

  Whelming the heart with a palsying fear,

  Hurling their might on the stagg’ring craft,

  Crashing aboard of her fore and aft,

  Buffeting, pounding, a dreadful force,

  Sweeping her decks as she hugs her course.

  Little they care, come wind or wave,

  The men of Grimsby Town;

  There are mines to destroy and lives to save,

  And they take the risk, these sailormen brave,

  With a laugh and a joke, or a rollicking stave,

  As the gear goes plunging down.

  Honour the trawler’s crew,

  For Fear they never knew!

  Now on their quest they go

  With measured tack and slow –

  Seeking the hidden fate

  Strewn with a devilish hate.

  Death may come in a terrible form,

  Death in a calm or death in a storm,

  Death without warning, stark and grim,

  Death with a tearing of limb from limb,

  Death in a horrible, hideous guise: –

  Such is the minesweepers’ sacrifice!

  Careless of terrors and scornful of ease,

  Stolid and steadfast, they sweep the seas.

  Cheerfully, simply, fearlessly,

  The men of Grimsby Town

  Do their bit on the rolling sea –

  The storm-swept, treach’rous grey North Sea –

  Doing their duty unflinchingly

  Keeping the death-rate down.

  H. Ingamells

  Submarines

  By paths unknown to Nelson’s days,

  Our swift flotillas prowl below,

  We go upon our various ways

  Where Drake and Howard might not go.

  Unheard, intangible as air,

  Unseen, yet seeing all things plain,

  While ships and wild-eyed seamen stare

  We pass and strike and pass again.

  No sun upon our wake is seen,

  No night looks down upon our deeds,

  But broken half-lights, strangely green,

  Gleam tangled in the swaying weeds.

  Dim vistas loom before our eyes,

  Vast shapes across our vision flee,

  And, round about our feet, there lies

  The twilit silence of the sea.

  Beside our tracks, half-guessed at, dim,

  The creatures of the ocean browse,

  Yet none so dreadful, none so grim,

  As those we carry in our bows.

  The navies of forgotten kings

  Lie scattered on the ocean-bed;

  We float among prodigious things,

  We, that are neither quick nor dead.

  There, in their never-ending sleep,

  The sailors of a bygone day

  Dream of the land they died to keep –

  A land more permanent than they.

  And we, who have new ways of war,

  Strange means of death beyond their ken,

  Oh, may we fight as fought before

  Our fathers, who begat us men!

  So, where the tides and tempest rust

  The shattered argosies of Spain,

  We praise the gods that now entrust

  This England to our charge again.

  Then, with thanksgiving, as is meet

  From such as hold their lives in pawn,

  We glimmer upwards, till we greet

  The grey relentless Channel dawn.

  J.L. Crommelin Brown

  You Never Can Tell

  ‘It’s a submarine!’ the lookout cried,

  ‘A porpoise’, said the mate.

  ‘A set of mines hooked to a shark’,

  The boatsmen were not late.

  The skipper threw the safe away,

  The first luff’s feet were cool.

  The navigator cleared the stern

  Lashed to a sliding rule.

  From the engine-room another,

  With a left-hand monkey-wrench,

  And through the starboard mess-hall door

  Flew a sailor on a bench.

  The boatswain piped a phoney call,

  And loudly he did bellow,

  While high and dry on the pilot-house

  Stood Doc with his umbrella.

  Some one hit a jingle,

  For the throttle opened wide,

  The fish-boat quivered fore and aft,

  Went astern, and saved our hide.

  Safety first is a landman’s cry,

  I’m sure you will agree.

  On the poggy trawler do your bit

  And believe just half you see.

  Frank G. Bigelow


  [Sing us a song of the Northern Seas]

  Sing us a song of the Northern Seas –

  (Where the ships patrol and the gunners freeze)

  Of sight and fights and Jack’s delights –

  The pudding and beef and gravy;

  Sing us a song to clearly show

  That the boys in blue are the ones to go

  And they wait like hounds for a skulking foe –

  Sing us a song of the Navy.

  J.M. Ryan

  Low Visibility

  Our gentle pirate ancestors from off the Frisian Isles,

  Kept station where we now patrol so many weary miles:

  There were no International Laws of Hall or Halleck then,

  They only knew the simple rule of ‘Death to beaten men’.

  And what they judged a lawful prize was any sail they saw

  From Scarboro’ to the sandy isles along the Saxon shore.

  We differ from our ancestors’ conception of a prize,

  And we cruise about like Agag ’neath Sir Samuel Evans’ eyes;

  But on one eternal subject we would certainly agree:

  It’s seldom you can see a mile across the Northern sea,

  For as the misty clouds came down and settled wet and cold,

  The sodden halliards creaked and strained as to the swell they rolled.

  Each yellow-bearded pirate knew beyond the veil of white

  The prize of all the prizes must be passing out of sight;

  And drearily they waited while metheglin in a skin

  Was passed along the benches, and the oars came sliding in;

  Then scramasax and battleaxe were polished up anew,

  And they waited for the fog to lift, the same as me and you;

  Though we’re waiting on the bottom at the twenty fathom line,

  We are burnishing torpedoes to a Sunday morning shine.

  The sailor pauses as he quaffs his tot of Navy rum,

  And listens to a noise that drowns the circulator’s hum:

  ‘D’y ’ear those blank propellers, Bill – the blinking female dog –

  That’s Tirpitz in the ’Indenburg gone past us in the fog!’

  John G. Bower

  The Auxiliary Cruiser

  (H.M. Auxiliary Cruiser —— has been lost at sea with all hands. It is presumed that she struck a mine during the gale on the night of the 12th inst. The relatives have been informed. – Admiralty Official.)