Voices of Silence (18 page)

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 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

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.

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 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.’

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