Voices of Silence Read online

  I’ll ask of death no greater boon than this:

  That it shall be as wonderful as life.

  Carroll Carstairs

  Gommecourt

  I

  The wind, which heralded the blackening night,

  Swirled in grey mists the sulphur-laden smoke.

  From sleep, in sparkling intensity of light,

  Crouched batteries like grumbling tigers woke

  And stretched their iron symmetry; they hurled

  Skyward with roar and boom each pregnant shell

  Rumbling on tracks unseen. Such tyrants reign

  The sullen masters of a mangled world,

  Grim-mouthed in a womb of furnaced hell,

  Wrought, forged, and hammered for the work of pain.

  For six long days the common slayers played,

  Till, fitfully, there boomed a heavier king,

  Who, crouched in leaves and branches deftly laid,

  And hid in dappled colour of the spring,

  Vaunted tornadoes. Far from that covered lair,

  Like hidden snares the sinuous trenches lay

  ’Mid fields where nodding poppies show their pride.

  The tall star-pointed streamers leap and flare,

  And turn the night’s immensity to day;

  Or rockets whistle in their upward ride.

  II

  The moment comes when thrice-embittered fire

  Proclaims the prelude to the great attack.

  In ruined heaps, torn saps and tangled wire

  And battered parapets loom gaunt and black:

  The flashes fade, the steady rattle dies,

  A breathless hush brings forth a troubled day,

  And men of sinew, knit to charge and stand,

  Rise up. But he of words and blinded eyes

  Applauds the puppets of his ghastly play,

  With easy rhetoric and ready hand.

  Unlike those men who waited for the word,

  Clean soldiers from a country of the sea;

  These were no thong-lashed band of goaded herd

  Tricked by the easy speech of tyranny.

  All the long week they fought encircling Fate,

  While chaos clutched the throat and shuddered past,

  As phantoms haunt a child, and softly creep

  Round cots, so Death stood sentry at the Gate

  And beckoned waiting terror, till at last

  He vanished at the hurrying touch of sleep.

  The beauty of the Earth seemed doubly sweet

  With the stored sacraments the Summer yields –

  Grass-sunken kine, and softly-hissing wheat,

  Blue-misted flax, and drowsy poppy fields.

  But with the vanished day Remembrance came

  Vivid with dreams, and sweet with magic song,

  Soft haunting echoes of a distant sea

  As from another world. A belt of flame

  Held the swift past, and made each moment long

  With the tense horror of mortality.

  That easy lording of the Universe

  Who plotted days that stain the path of time,

  For him was happy memory a curse,

  And Man a scapegoat for a royal crime.

  In lagging moments dearly sacrificed

  Men sweated blood before eternity:

  In cheerful agony, with jest and mirth,

  They shared the bitter solitude of Christ

  In a new Garden of Gethsemane,

  Gethsemane walled in by crested earth.

  They won the greater battle, when each soul

  Lay naked to the needless wreck of Mars;

  Yet, splendid in perfection, faced the goal

  Beyond the sweeping army of the stars.

  Necessity foretold that they must die

  Mangled and helpless, crippled, maimed and blind,

  And cursed with all the sacrilege of war –

  To force a nation to retract a lie,

  To prove the unchartered honour of Mankind,

  To show how strong the silent passions are.

  III

  The daylight broke and brought the awaited cheer,

  And suddenly the land is live with men.

  In steady waves the infantry surge near;

  The fire, a sweeping curtain, lifts again.

  A battle-plan with humming engines swerves,

  Gleams like a whirring dragon-fly, and dips,

  Plunging cloud-shadowed in a breathless fall

  To climb undaunted in far-reaching curves.

  And, swaying in the clouds like anchored ships,

  Swing grim balloons with eyes that fathom all.

  But as the road-winged battle-planes outsoared

  The shell-rocked skies, blue fields of cotton flowers,

  When bombs like bolts of thunder leapt and roared,

  And mighty moment faded into hours,

  The curtain fire redoubled yet again:

  And grey defence reversed their swift defeat

  And rallied strongly; whilst the attacking waves,

  Snared in a trench and severed from the main,

  Were driven fighting in a forced retreat

  Across the land that gaped with shell-turned graves.

  IV

  The troubled day sped on in weariness,

  Till Night drugged Carnage in a drunken swoon.

  Jet-black, with spangling stars athwart her dress

  And pale in the shafted amber of the moon,

  She moved triumphant as a young-eyed queen

  In silent dignity: her shadowed face

  Scarce veiled by gossamer clouds, that scurrying ran

  Breathless in speed the high star-lanes between.

  She passed unheeding ’neath the dome of space,

  And scorned the petty tragedy of Man.

  And one looked upwards, and in wonder saw

  The vast star-soldiered army of the sky.

  Unheard, the needless blasphemy of War

  Shrank at that primal splendour sweeping by.

  The moon’s gold-shadowed craters bathed the ground –

  (Pale queen, she hunted in her pathless rise

  Lithe blackened raiders that bomb-laden creep)

  But now the earth-walled comfort wrapped him round,

  And soon in lulled forgetfulness he lies

  Where soldiers clasping arms like children sleep.

  Sleep held him as a mother holds her child:

  Sleep, the soft calm that levels hopes and fears,

  Now stilled his brain and scarfed his eyelids wild,

  And sped the transient misery of tears,

  Until the dawn’s sure prophets cleft the night

  With opal shafts, and streamers tinged with flame,

  Swift merging riot of the turbaned East.

  Through rustling gesture loomed the advancing light;

  Through fitfully eddying winds, grey vanguards came

  Rising in billowy mountains silver-fleeced.

  And with the dawn came action, and again

  The spiteful interplay of static war:

  Dogged, with grim persistence Blood and Pain

  Rose venomous to greet the Morning Star.

  But others watched that lonely sentinel

  Chase fleeting fellow-stars before the day;

  Fresh men heard tides of thunder ebb and flow.

  – Stumbling in sleep, scarce heeding shot or shell,

  The men who fought at Gommecourt filed away:

  The poppies nodded as they passed below.

  They left the barren wilderness behind,

  And Gommecourt gnarled and dauntless, till they came

  To fields where trees unshattered took the wind,

  Which tossed the crimson poppy heads to flame.

  But one stood musing at a waking thought

  That spurred his blood and dimmed his searching eyes –

  The primal thought that stirs the seed to birth.

  Here when the bat
tling nations clashed and fought

  The common grass still breathed of Paradise

  And Love with silent lips was Lord of Earth.

  Geoffrey Dearmer

  German Boy

  German boy with cold blue eyes,

  In the cold and blue moonrise,

  I who live and still shall know

  Flowers that smell and winds that blow,

  I who live to walk again,

  Fired the shot that broke your brain.

  By your hair all stiff with blood,

  By your lips befouled with mud,

  By your dreams that shall no more

  Leave the nest and sing and soar,

  By the children never born

  From your body smashed and torn,

  – When I too shall stand at last

  In the deadland vast,

  Shall you heap upon my soul

  Agonies of coal?

  Shall you bind my throat with cords,

  Stab me through with swords?

  Or shall you be gentler far

  Than a bird or than a star?

  Shall you know that I was bound

  In the noose that choked you round?

  Shall you say, ‘The way was hid.

  Lord, he knew not what he did’?

  Shall your eyes that day be mild,

  Like the Sacrifice, the Child?

  . . . German boy with cold blue eyes,

  In the cold and blue moonrise.

  Louis Golding

  The Bullet

  Every bullet has its billet;

  Many bullets more than one:

  God! Perhaps I killed a mother

  When I killed a mother’s son.

  Joseph Lee

  Left Alone

  Left alone among the dying!

  All around are moaning, sighing,

  Or are cursing, sobbing, crying

  In Death’s crushing, hushing hand.

  We are torn upon the wire,

  We are scorched and burnt with fire,

  Or lie choking in the mire

  Of the star-lit ‘No Man’s Land’.

  Hear our prayers, O! gentle Jesus,

  Send Thine angels down to ease us

  From the pains of Hell that seize us,

  From our burning, yearning thirst.

  We are broken, we are battered,

  Bodies twisted, crushed and shattered

  By the shells and bullets scattered

  On this strip of land accurst.

  Round about are shadows creeping,

  Formless Things which wake the sleeping,

  Glaring eyes from shell-holes peeping,

  Mocking always at our pain.

  Cold and wet our limbs are numbing,

  Fevered brows are drumming, drumming –

  Are the stretchers never coming?

  Are we numbered with the slain?

  God in Heaven, canst Thou hear us?

  Mary Mother! Dost Thou fear us?

  Stretcher-bearers, are you near us?

  Give us water or we die!

  But a grisly shadow’s creeping

  With his cruel scythe a-reaping

  Weary souls which fall to sleeping

  In a choking, croaking sigh.

  Dudley H. Harris

  My Pal and I

  I called his name and fear was in my calling.

  I pressed his hand. I saw his tired smile.

  I leaned above him for a quite while

  And wondered at the crimson blood drops falling.

  A wildness o’er my brain was surely stealing,

  I even humm’d a stave of comic tune,

  And yet he never moved. Beneath the moon

  I lay beside him, dead to every feeling.

  And oh! the tired dawn when I was waking

  To find him cold behind me on the grass.

  God heard my moan and watched me rise and pass

  To hide the pity of a heart that’s breaking.

  A.N. Choyce

  R.I.P.

  Lay them together in this muddy shell-hole,

  Cover them over with this muddy sheet.

  Heed not their staring eyes, they gaze to starry skies

  Wrap their red tartans around their poor feet.

  Cover them quickly nor mutter a prayer,

  Pile on the earth quick with never a pang,

  Mark it another grave – haste, ev’ry second save –

  Here on this rifle their tin helmets hang.

  High soar the night flares – hush! swift to your fire-step:

  Leave them to rest there out under the stars,

  Boys of the city bred, men of the tartan dead,

  Laid in the lone waste by sad dead Le Sars.

  So do we leave you, lads, laid in the sheer waste,

  Sleeping till summer shall flit o’er the foam,

  Robed in her gold and blue, to clasp, caressing you

  Close to her bosom, her own gathered home.

  John Peterson

  A Soldiers’ Cemetery

  Behind that long and lonely trenchèd line

  To which men come and go, where brave men die,

  There is a yet unmarked and unknown shrine,

  A broken plot, a soldiers’ cemet’ry.

  There lie the flower of Youth, the men who scorned

  To live (so died) when languished liberty:

  Across their graves, flowerless and unadorned,

  Still scream the shells of each artillery.

  When war shall cease this lonely, unknown spot

  Of many a pilgrimage will be the end,

  And flowers will bloom in this now barren plot

  And fame upon it through the years descend –

  But many a heart upon each simple cross

  Will hang the grief, the memory of its loss.

  John W. Streets

  [Went the day well?]

  Went the day well?

  We died and never knew.

  But well or ill,

  England, we died for you.

  To my Chum

  No more we’ll share the same old barn,

  The same old dug-out, same old yarn,

  No more a tin of bully share,

  Nor split our rum by a star-shell’s flare,

  So long old lad.

  What times we’ve had, both good and bad,

  We’ve shared what shelter could be had,

  The same crump-hole when the whizz-bangs shrieked,

  The same old billet that always leaked,

  And now – you’ve ‘stopped one’.

  We’d weathered the storm two winters long,

  We’d managed to grin when all went wrong,

  Because together we fought and fed,

  Our hearts were light; but now – you’re dead

  And I am Mateless.

  Well, old lad, here’s peace to you,

  And for me, well, there’s my job to do,

  For you and the others who lie at rest,

  Assured may be that we’ll do our best

  In vengeance.

  Just one more cross by a strafed roadside,

  With its G.R.C., and a name for guide,

  But it’s only myself that has lost a friend,

  And though I may fight through to the end,

  No dug-out or billet will be the same,

  All pals can only be pals in name,

  But we’ll carry on till the end of the game

  Because you lie there.

  Travail

  A ghastly something there where feasts a glittering swarm of flies,

  A slow, hot breeze, a curious sickening stench,

  A bloated rat, some nameless filth, charred rags! – behind the trench

  Unending orderlies

  With sun-baked forms on stretchers; – what’s that tiger-tearing crunch?

  Dropped from its rosy whisp of cloud – of which a sunset might be proud –

  Their shrapnel’s ripped right through that bunch
>
  Of mules and motors! – How they pound

  The white road past the lakes!

  That’s shrapnel swish – that’s ‘big stuff’ where the ground

  Swells up in sootlike snakes! –

  Now glance again

  Towards those wrecked tanglements – no bodies now,

  (Gad, there’s a thud,

  Nineteen inch guns) –

  But you can see, where yesterday

  ’Twas much too hard to plough,

  To-day – and not a single drop of rain –

  For half a mile across the grey, parched plan,

  A swamp of red-brown mud!

  * * *

  Yet wan-faced women whisper, while they pray,

  ‘We know this, and yet knowing, send our sons!’

  Charles T. Foxcroft

  From the Somme

  In other days I sang of simple things,

  Of summer dawn, and summer noon and night,

  The dewy grass, the dew-wet fairy rings,

  The lark’s long golden flight.

  Deep in the forest I made melody

  While squirrels cracked their hazel nuts on high,

  Or I would cross the wet sand to the sea

  And sing to sea and sky.

  When came the silvered silence of the night

  I stole to casements over scented lawns,

  And softly sang of love and love’s delight

  To mute white marble fauns.

  Oft in the tavern parlour I would sing

  Of morning sun upon the mountain vine,

  And, calling for a chorus, sweep the string

  In praise of good red wine.

  I played with all the toys the gods provide,

  I sang my songs and made glad holiday.

  Now I have cast my broken toys aside

  And flung my lute away.

  A singer once, I now am fain to weep.

  Within my soul I feel strange music swell,

  Vast chants of tragedy too deep – too deep

  For my poor lips to tell.

  Leslie Coulson

  ELEVEN

  Casualties of the Somme

  The first wounded, the dead and the casualty lists, grief at home

  In the wake of the initial assault of 1 July, medical services were stretched almost to breaking point. Those who could walk made their own way to Regimental Aid Posts, then on to Advanced Dressing Stations further behind the line. Men whose injuries were not serious would be patched up and returned to their units, but the more seriously wounded were transported by road or train to Casualty Clearing Stations and Base Hospitals.