Voices of Silence (20 page)
Authors: Vivien Noakes
Salonika in November
Up above the grey hills the wheeling birds are calling,
Round about the cold grey hills in never-resting flight;
Far along the marshes a drifting mist is falling,
Scattered tents and sandy plain melt into the night.
Round about the grey hills rumbles distant thunder,
Echoes of the mighty guns firing night and day, –
Grey guns, long guns, that smite the hills asunder,
Grumbling and rumbling, and telling of the fray.
Out among the islands twinkling lights are glowing,
Distant little fairy lights, that gleam upon the bay;
All along the broken road grey transport wagons going
Up to where the long grey guns roar and crash away.
Up above the cold grey hills the wheeling birds are crying,
Brother calls to brother, as they pass in restless flight.
Lost souls, dead souls, voices of the dying,
Circle o’er the hills of Greece and wail into the night.
Brian Hill
June in Egypt, 1916
June! – and, here,
Quivering heat,
Shimmering sand,
An aching land
Of sun’s beat
And straggling, sere,
Wizened scrub;
Of mile on mile
Of nothingness
Scorched by the stress
Of some most vile
Beelzebub.
In this hell
Humankind
(You and I)
Live (and die)
Bent in mind
On killing well . . .
Over away
Across the plain
Of baking sand,
In an alien land
Ripe to be slain,
Ready to slay,
Other men
(Like you and me)
Scorch and endure,
Plan and procure,
Incessantly,
To kill again . . .
June, here;
This year.
June! – and there
The grasses stand
Green and tall,
And cuckoos call,
By Overstrand –
By Mundesley, where
The air breathes sweet
Of crisp dry turf
(O! wine-like smell
I love so well)
And salt from the surf;
Where lovers meet,
As I and a maid
(Divine with youth,
In her eyes
The light that cries
A splendid truth –
Unafraid)
Met long ago
(Before this hell)
Met and loved,
Loved, and proved
Love was well,
Long, long ago . . .
June, there;
Yester year.
El Qantara
, 1916
Eliot Crawshay Williams
Conscription, Protest and Prisoners
Loos, Christmas 1915, protests at home and abroad, the Derby Scheme, conscription and conscientious objection, prisoners of war
After the failure of the earlier campaigns in 1915, the British attacked at Loos, south of Ypres, in September. The attack was a failure, partly because of shortage of shells and the poor quality of many of those that were sent; the German wire was largely uncut, and the British advanced into impenetrable defences. The scandal brought an end to the career of the British Commander-in-Chief, Sir John French, and the fall of Asquith’s government. Haig was sent out to replace French, and Lloyd George became Prime Minister. The disaster led to the soldiers’ song: ‘If you want to find the ol’ battalion, they’re hanging on the ol’ barbed wire.’
Failures in leadership meant that questions were now increasingly being asked about the conduct and purpose of the war. There was industrial unrest at home, and, although more than two million men had volunteered, a slowing down of recruitment and mounting casualties meant that more were needed. To begin with, those still eligible were given the opportunity to register voluntarily under the Derby Scheme, where they would then be called upon only if required, but at the end of December 1915 conscription was announced. By the summer of 1916 all men between 18 and 41 could expect to be called up – by April 1918 this would be 17 and 51 – and many previously turned down as medically unsound were re-examined and passed fit. Those who had moral objections to fighting – conscientious objectors, popularly known as ‘COs’ or ‘conshies’ – were allowed to plead their case in special courts, and might then be given work that did not involve fighting but that supported the war effort. Many joined the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. Others believed that any support of the war was morally indefensible, and many of those who refused to participate were sent to prison. Here handwritten magazines were illicitly circulated among the prisoners, like the
Winchester Whisperer
put together by prisoners in Winchester Gaol.
Meanwhile there were other prisoners, as British troops fell into the hands of the Germans and spent the rest of the war in prison camps.
In the Morning
(Loos, 1915)
The firefly haunts were lighted yet,
As we scaled the top of the parapet;
But the East grew pale to another fire,
As our bayonets gleamed by the foeman’s wire;
And the sky was tinged with gold and grey,
And under our feet the dead men lay,
Stiff by the loop-holed barricade;
Food of the bomb and the hand-grenade;
Still in the slushy pool and mud –
Ah! the path we came was a path of blood,
When we went to Loos in the morning.
A little grey church at the foot of a hill,
With powdered glass on the window-sill.
The shell-scarred stone and the broken tile,
Littered the chancel, nave and aisle –
Broken the altar and smashed the pyx,
And the rubble covered the crucifix;
This we saw when the charge was done,
And the gas-clouds paled in the rising sun,
As we entered Loos in the morning.
The dead men lay on the shell-scarred plain,
Where Death and the Autumn held their reign –
Like banded ghosts in the heavens grey
The smoke of the powder paled away;
Where riven and rent the spinney trees
Shivered and shook in the sullen breeze,
And there, where the trench through the graveyard wound,
The dead men’s bones stuck over the ground
By the road to Loos in the morning.
The turret towers that stood in the air,
Sheltered a foeman sniper there –
They found, who fell to the sniper’s aim,
A field of death on the field of fame;
And stiff in khaki the boys were laid
To the sniper’s toll at the barricade,
But the quick went clattering through the town,
Shot at the sniper and brought him down,
As we entered Loos in the morning.
The dead men lay on the cellar stair,
Toll of the bomb that found them there,
In the street men fell as a bullock drops,
Sniped from the fringe of Hulluch copse.
And the choking fumes of the deadly shell
Curtained the place where our comrades fell,
This we saw when the charge was done,
And the East blushed red to the rising sun
In the town of Loos in the morning.
Patrick MacGill
After Loos
(Café Pierre Le Blanc, Nouex-les-Mines, Michaelmas Eve, 1915.)
Was it only yesterday
Lusty comrades marched away?
Now they’re covered up with clay.
Seven glasses used to be
Called for six good mates and me –
Now we only call for three.
Little crosses neat and white,
Looking lonely every night,
Tell of comrades killed in fight.
Hearty fellows they have been,
And no more will they be seen
Drinking wine in Nouex-les-Mines.
Lithe and supple lads were they,
Marching merrily away –
Was it only yesterday?
Patrick MacGill
Christmas Truce
In France, maybe, war-weary men,
Thinking once more of home and peace,
Will bid this daily horror cease,
And call the truce of God again.
Will meet their enemy, and call
Him friend, and take him by the hand,
And, for the moment understand,
The bloody folly of it all.
But while in Flanders foe is friend,
Far from the shell-scarred battle-line
Old men will sit and sip their wine,
And talk about ‘the bitter end’.
And reckon up the tale of dead,
And hate the foe they never saw,
And vow to carry on the war
Till the last drop of bleed be shed.
So they will stop the truce of Christ,
Will bid the battle re-begin;
And for the Elder Statesmen’s sin
More young lives shall be sacrificed.
W.N. Ewer
A Soldier’s Testament
If I come to die
In this inhuman strife,
I grudge it not, if I
By laying down my life
Do aught at all to bring
A day of charity,
When pride of lord or king
Un-powerful shall be
To spend the nations’ store,
To spill the peoples’ blood;
Whereafter evermore
Humanity’s full flood
Untroubled on shall roll
In a rich tide of peace,
And the world’s wondrous soul
Uncrucified increase.
But if my life be given
Merely that lords and kings
May say: ‘We well have striven!
See! where our banner flings
Its folds upon the breeze
(Thanks, noble sirs, to you!).
See! how the lands and seas
Have changed their pristine hue’.
If after I am dead
On goes the same old game,
With monarchs seeing red
And ministers aflame,
And nations drowning deep
In quarrels not their own,
And peoples called to reap
The woes they have not sown . . .
If all we who are slain
Have died, despite our hope,
Only to twist again
The old kaleidoscope –
Why then, by God! we’re sold!
Cheated and wronged! betrayed!
Our youth and lives and gold
Wasted – the homes we’d made
Shattered – in folly blind,
By treachery and spite,
By cowardice of mind
And little men and light! . . .
If there be none to build
Out of this ruined world
The temple we have willed
With our flag there unfurled,
If rainbow none there shine
Across these skies of woe,
If seed of yours and mine
Through this same hell must go,
Then may my soul and those
Of all who died in vain
(Be they of friends or foes)
Rise and come back again
From peace that knows no end,
From faith that knows not doubt,
To haunt and sear and rend
The men that sent us out.
Bir el Mazar, Egypt
Eliot Crawshay Williams
The Cry
‘Give us Peace!’ cry the Peoples as they listen to their lords,
As they read the nimble speeches that are deadlier than swords.
‘Give us Peace, though Peace be bitter with the memory of Woe
And the dead go past in millions, victor, vanquished, friend and foe.’
You have made your maps so proudly with their cruel crimson lines,
Secret schemes of shrieking conquest, treaties shaped of mad designs;
You have made us drunk with anger, you have poisoned us with lies
Till the Earth is desolation and a horror cleaves the skies.
Lo, your maps are madman-fancies! lo, your treaties curl in flame
If they be not drawn by Justice, if they spell a people’s shame!
Lo, your lust of hate has shrivelled in the furnace of our pain!
You, who gave us war and torment, give the Peoples Peace again!
‘Give us Peace! Our hearts are sickened with the terror of the strife;
Give the son back to the mother, and the husband to the wife!’
And the dead, the broken millions – let their supplication cease –
They are crying with living and the dying, ‘Give us Peace!’
To any Diplomatist
Heading nought else, your subtle game you played,
Took tricks and lost them, reckoned up the score,
Balanced defeats with triumphs, less with more,
And plotted how the next point might be made:
How some sly move with counter moves to meet,
How by some crafty stratagem to gain
This empty point of honour, how obtain
That barren symbol of a foe’s defeat.
Engrossed, you never cared to realise
The folly of the things for which you fought,
The hideous peril which your striving brought –
A witless struggle for a worthless prize!
God! Were you fiends or fools, who, in your game,
Heedless, have set the circling earth aflame?
W.N. Ewer
From the Youth of all Nations
Think not, my elders, to rejoice
When from the nations’ wreck we rise,
With a new thunder in our voice,
And a new lightning in our eyes.
You called with patriotic sneers,
And drums and sentimental songs.
We came from out the vernal years
Thus bloodily to right your wrongs.
The sins of many centuries,
Sealed by your indolence and fright,
Have earned us these our agonies:
The thunderous appalling night,
When from the lurid darkness came
The pains of poison and of shell,
The broken heart, the world’s ill-fame,
The lonely arrogance of hell.
Faintly, as from a game afar,
Your wrangles and your patronage
Come drifting to the work of war
Which you have made our heritage.