Voices of Silence Read online

  I ain’t complaining, mind, but still,

  When later on some newish bloke

  Stops one and laughs, ‘A blighty, Bill’,

  I’ll wonder, ‘Where’s the joke?’

  Same old trenches, same old view,

  Same old rats and just as tame,

  Same old dug-outs, nothing new,

  Same old smell, the very same,

  Same old bodies out in front,

  Same old strafe from 2 till 4,

  Same old scratching, same old ’unt,

  Same old bloody War.

  Ho Lor, it isn’t a dream,

  It’s just as it used to be, every bit;

  Same old whistle and same old bang

  And me out again to be ’it.

  A.A. Milne

  THIRTEEN

  Autumn and Winter 1916–1917

  The end of the Battle of the Somme, winter 1916–1917, the maintenance of morale in the line, Winston Churchill

  The Battle of the Somme went on until 18 November, with steadily mounting casualties and in increasingly impossible conditions of wet, mud and cold. By the time it came to an end there were an estimated 420,000 British casualties, and some of the objectives of 1 July were still in enemy hands. The maximum advance was 7½ miles. It remains one of the most contentious battles of history.

  Most saw the battle as the great watershed of the war. The poet David Jones wrote that after July 1916 ‘things hardened into a more relentless, mechanical affair [and] took on a more sinister aspect’. Many soldiers noted that the earlier optimistic enthusiasm and companionship, where men had volunteered and trained together, was never the same once the price of failure had become apparent and unwilling conscripts had filled the gaps left by the heavy casualties among the New Armies. Yet, despite it all, the spirit of the army remained unbroken.

  The winter that followed was one of the most severe in living memory.

  Before Ginchy

  September, 1916

  Yon poisonous clod,

  (Look! I could touch it with my stick!) that lies

  In the next ulcer of this shell-pock’d land

  To that which holds me now;

  Yon carrion, with its devil-swarm of flies

  That scorn the protest of the limp, cold hand,

  Seeing half-rais’d to shield the matted brow;

  Those festering rags whose colour mocks the sod;

  And, O ye gods, those eyes!

  Those staring, staring eyes.

  How can I gaze unmov’d on sights like these?

  What hideous enervation bids me sit

  Here in the shelter of this neighbour pit,

  Untroubled, unperturbèd, at mine ease,

  And idly, coldly scan

  This fearsome relic of what once was man?

  Alas! what icy spell hath set

  The seal upon warm pity? Whence

  This freezing up of every sense?

  I think not I lack pitifulness; – I know

  That my affections were not ever so;

  My heart is not of stone! – And yet

  There’s something in the feeling of this place,

  There’s something in the breathing of this air,

  Which lets me gaze upon that awful face

  Quite passionless; which lets me meet that stare

  Most quietly. – Nay, I could touch that hair,

  And sicken not to feel it coil and cling

  About my fingers. Did occasion press,

  Lo! I could spurn it with my foot – that thing

  Which lies so nigh! –

  Spurn it light-heartedly and pass it by.

  So cold, so hard, so seeming pitiless

  Am I!

  And yet not I alone; – they know full well,

  These others, that strange blunting of the heart:

  They know the working of that devil’s-art,

  Which drains a man’s soul dry,

  And kills out sensibility!

  They know it too, and they can tell

  That this distemper strange and fell,

  This hideous blotting of the sense

  Creeps on one like a pestilence!

  It is some deadly Power of ill

  Which overbears all human will!

  Some awful influence of the sky,

  Some dreadful power of the place,

  Wherein we live and breathe and move,

  Which withers up the roots of Love

  And dries the very springs of Grace.

  It is the place! – For, lo, we are in hell.

  That is the reason why!

  And things that curse and writhe, and things that die,

  And fearful, festering things that rot,

  – They have their place here. They are not

  Like unfamiliar portents hurl’d

  From out some monstrous, alien world.

  This is their place, their native atmosphere,

  Their home; – they are in keeping here!

  And, being in hell,

  All we, who breathe this tense, fierce air,

  – On us too, lies the spell,

  Something of that soul-deadening blight we share;

  That even the eye is, in a sense, made one

  With what it looks upon;

  That even the brain, in some strange fashion wrought,

  Twists its familiar thought

  To forms and shapes uncouth;

  And even the heart – the heart that once did feel

  The surge of tears and pity’s warm appeal –

  Doth quite forget her ancient ruth,

  Can look on piteous sights unmov’d,

  As though, forsooth, poor fool! she had never lov’d.

  * * *

  They say we change, we men that come out here!

  But do they know how great that change?

  And do they know how darkly strange

  Are those deep tidal waves that roll

  Within the currents of the soul,

  Down in the very founts of life,

  Out here?

  How can they know it? – Mother, sister, wife,

  Friends, comrades, whoso else is dear,

  How can they know? – Yet, haply, half in fear,

  Seeing a long-time absent face once more,

  Something they note which was not there before,

  – Perchance, a certain habit of the eye,

  Perchance, an alter’d accent in the speech –

  Showing he is not what he was of yore.

  Such little, curious signs they note. Yet each

  Doth in its little, nameless way

  Some portion of the truth betray.

  Such tokens do not lie!

  The change is there; the change is true!

  And so, what wonder if the outward view

  Do to the eye of Love unroll

  Some hint of a transformèd soul?

  – Some hint; for even Love dare peep

  No further in that troubled deep;

  And things there be too stern and dark

  To live in any outward mark

  The things that they alone can tell,

  Like Dante, who have walk’d in hell.

  E. Armine Wodehouse

  September 25th, 1916

  I sat upon the fire-step – by my side

  The adjutant – next him an F.O.O.

  The trench was an old German one, reversed.

  The parapet was made of many things

  That should not have been there at all – the time

  Was zero minus twenty: and the noise

  That had been horrible enough before,

  Grew to an unimaginable pitch.

  It seemed as tho’ I had no eyes, no mouth,

  No sense of sight or taste, no power of speech

  But only hearing – hearing multiplied

  To the last limit of a dizzy brain.

  The noise was everywhere about – but mostly

  Above us: and was made of every sortr />
  Of bang, crash, whistle, whine, thump, shriek and thud.

  If every devil from the pit of hell,

  Each with an unmelodious instrument,

  Each vieing with the other in making noise,

  Had flown above me in the tortured air,

  One great infernal pandemonium,

  I do not think they would have made a tenth

  Of the long seismic polyphony that passed

  Over our heads: I saw the adjutant’s

  Mouth open, and his lips move as in speech,

  But no words came that I could hear, because

  My hearing was entirely occupied.

  The trench-wall rocked – then dust and clods of earth

  Fell all about me – and I was aware

  Of fat grey smoke-wreaths and an acrid smell.

  And, dimly, as one hears a metronome,

  In punctuating stabs of sharper sound

  Thro’ a great orchestrated symphony,

  I heard the German counter-barrage burst

  On the high ground about us, saw my watch

  Marking three minutes past the zero-hour,

  Sat for another unremembered space,

  Wondering what would happen if a shell

  Fell in the trench beside me: felt again

  By some sixth sense rather than thro’ my ears,

  That there were fewer shells – that they had ceased.

  Climbed on the parapet – and – north by east

  From the torn hill of Ginchy Telegraph –

  Saw – aye, and seeing cheered exultantly –

  The long well-ordered lines of our advance

  From Bouleaux Wood to distant Gueudecourt

  Sweep from the valley underneath my feet

  Up the long slopes to Morval and Les Bœufs.

  F.W.D. Bendall

  The German Dug-out

  Forty feet down

  A room dug out of the clay,

  Roofed and strutted and tiled complete;

  The floor still bears the mark of feet

  (Feet that never will march again!)

  The doorposts’ edge is rubbed and black

  (Shoulders that never will lift a pack

  Stooping in through the wind and rain!)

  Forty feet from the light of day,

  Forty feet down.

  A week ago

  Sixteen men lived there,

  Lived, and drank, and slept, and swore,

  Smoked, and shivered, and cursed the war,

  Wrote to their people at home maybe,

  While the rafters shook to the thudding guns;

  Husbands, fathers, and only sons,

  Sixteen fellows like you and me

  Lived in that cavern twelve foot square

  A week ago.

  Into the dark

  Did a cry ring out on the air,

  Or died they stiffly and unafraid

  In the crash and flame of the hand-grenade?

  We took the trench and its mounded dead,

  And the tale of their end is buried deep,

  A secret which sixteen corpses keep

  With the sixteen souls which gasped and fled

  Up forty steps of battered stair,

  Into the dark.

  Forty feet down,

  Veiled from the decent sky,

  The clay of them turns to its native clay,

  And the stench is a blot in the face of day.

  Men are a murderous breed, it seems,

  And these, maybe, are quieter so;

  Their spirits have gone where such things go;

  Nor worms nor wars can trouble their dreams;

  And their sixteen twisted bodies lie

  Forty feet down.

  J.L. Crommelin Brown

  Mud

  It’s said that our fight with the Kaiser

  Is the wettest affray since the Flood,

  At least every day makes us wiser

  In the infinite samples of mud.

  We’ve mud on our knees and our faces,

  We’ve mud on our ears and our hair,

  We’ve mud on our tunics and braces,

  On everything else that we wear.

  We’ve mud on our sugar and coffee,

  We’ve mud on our beef and our bread,

  We seem to be tramping through toffee,

  We’ve mud from our toes to our head.

  We’ve mud that is dreadfully sticky

  (Its depth may be more than a foot),

  We’ve mud that is chalky and tricky,

  We’ve mud that is liquefied soot.

  At times we have mud that’s like treacle,

  At times it is thinner than soup,

  At times many men by a squeak’ll

  Just fail to do ‘looping the loop’.

  No matter what else may befall us,

  No matter how smooth be our path,

  When home the authorities call us,

  The first thing we’ll need is a BATH.

  Somewhere in France, November 1916.

  Alfred Miller

  A Song of Winter Weather

  It isn’t the foe that we fear;

  It isn’t the bullets that whine;

  It isn’t the business career

  Of a shell, or the bust of a mine;

  It isn’t the snipers who seek

  To nip our young hopes in the bud:

  No, it isn’t the guns,

  And it isn’t the Huns –

  It’s the MUD,

  MUD,

  MUD.

  It isn’t the mêlée we mind.

  That often is rather good fun.

  It isn’t the shrapnel we find

  Obtrusive when rained by the ton;

  It isn’t the bounce of the bombs

  That gives us a positive pain:

  It’s the strafing we get

  When the weather is wet –

  It’s the RAIN,

  RAIN,

  RAIN.

  It isn’t because we lack grit

  We shrink from the horrors of war.

  We don’t mind the battle a bit;

  In fact that is what we are for;

  It isn’t the rum-jars and things

  Make us wish we were back in the fold:

  It’s the fingers that freeze

  In the boreal breeze –

  It’s the COLD,

  COLD,

  COLD.

  Oh, the rain, the mud, and the cold,

  The cold, the mud, and the rain;

  With weather at zero it’s hard for a hero

  From language that’s rude to refrain.

  With porridgy muck to the knees,

  With sky that’s a-pouring a flood,

  Sure the worst of our foes

  Are the pains and the woes

  Of the RAIN,

  the COLD,

  and the MUD.

  Robert W. Service

  An Appeal

  There are various types of courage, there are many kinds of fear,

  There are many brands of whiskey, there are many makes of beer,

  There is also rum, which sometimes in our need can help us much,

  But ’tis whiskey – whiskey – whiskey! hands the courage which is ‘Dutch’.

  In moments when the front is still – no hustling whizzbangs fly –

  In all the world you could not find a braver man than I!

  Yet on patrol in No-Man’s-Land, when I may have to stalk a

  Benighted Hun, in moments tense I have recourse to ‘Walker’.

  ’Tis Scotland’s best which helps me rest, ’tis Mountain Dew which stays me

  When Minnies rack my wearied soul, or blatant H.E. flays me,

  ’Twas by its aid that I endured Trones Wood and such-like places.

  In times of stress my truest friend accelerates my paces.

  Take what you will save only this – my evening tot of whiskey,

  It gives me warmth, and helps to make a soaking much le
ss risky,

  Oh! G.O.C.s now hear our pleas respectfully presented,

  Lend us your aid in this our plight, and we will be contented.

  They Didn’t Believe Me!

  Don’t know how it happened quite,

  Sure the jar came up all right?

  Just as full as it should be,

  Wouldn’t touch it, no, not me!

  Sergeants very seldom touch

  Rum, at least, not very much,

  Must have been the A.S.C.,

  Anyway, it wasn’t me!

  Yet when I told them that I hadn’t touched the jar,

  They didn’t believe me, they didn’t believe me;

  They seem to know a sergeant’s thirst,

  I fear they all believe the worst.

  It’s the rottenest luck that there could be;

  And when I tell them, and I’m certainly going to tell them

  There’ll be fatigues for them where’er I be,

  They’ll never believe me, they’ll never believe that

  The man who tapped the jar could not be me!

  [The corp’rl and the privit they]

  The corp’rl and the privit they

  Was standing in the road.

  Do you suppose, the corp’rl said,

  That rum is ‘à la mode?’

  I doubt it! said the privit as

  He shouldered up his load.

  ‘Now this ’ere war’, the corp’rl said,

  ‘Has lasted long enuff.’

  ‘Gorblime,’ said the private with

  His voice exceeding gruff,

  ‘Not ’arf it ain’t!’ and drew his nose

  Across his sheepskin cuff.

  The privit to the sergeant said,

  ‘I wants my blooming rum.’

  ‘No poo,’ the sergeant curtly said,

  And sucked his jammy thumb.

  ‘There’s “soup in loo” for you to-night.’

  The privit said, ‘By gum!’

  Cigarettes

  In careless fingers loosely swung,

  Up their curling smokepuffs blow,

  Lightly whirling wreaths are hung,

  Blue and dreaming, circling slow.

  Fire-points kindle, gleaming red,

  Tiny fire-sparks scatter swift,

  Specks of flamelight quickly sped

  E’er the lazy smoke-veils lift.

  Dreams they bring of hearth and home,

  Loves forgotten, – all the things