Voices of Silence (21 page)

Oh, chide us not. Not ours the crime.

Oh, praise us not. It is not won,

The fight which we shall make sublime

Beneath an unaccustomed sun.

The simple world of childhood fades

Beyond the Styx that all have passed;

This is a novel land of shades,

Wherein no ancient glories last.

A land of desolation, blurred

By mists of penitence and woe,

Where every hope must be deferred,

And every river backward flow.

Not on this grey and ruined plain

Shall we obedient recall

Your cities to rebuild again

For their inevitable fall.

We kneel at no ancestral shrine.

With admirable blasphemy

We desecrate the old divine,

And dream a new eternity.

Destroy the history of men,

The weary cycle of decay.

We shall not pass that way again,

We tread a new untrodden way.

Though scattered wider yet our youth,

On every sea and continent,

There shall come bitter with the truth

A fraction of the sons you sent.

When slowly with averted head,

Some darkly, some with halting feet,

And bowed with mourning for the dead

We walk the cheering, fluttering street,

A music terrible, austere

Shall rise from our returning ranks,

To change your merriment to fear,

And slay upon your lips your thanks.

And on the brooding weary brows

Of stronger sons, close enemies,

Are writ the ruin of your house,

And swift usurping dynasties.

H.C. Harwood

Because I am young, therefore I must be killed;

Because I am strong, so must my strength be maimed;

Because I love this life (thus it is willed)

The joy of life from me a forfeit’s claimed.

If I were old or weak, if foul disease

Had robbed me of all love of living – then

Life would be mine to use as I might please; –

Such the all-wise arbitraments of men!

Poor mad mankind that like some Herod calls

For one wide holocaust of youth and strength!

Bitter your wakening when the curtain falls

Upon your drunken drama, and at length

With vision uninflamed you then behold

A world of sick and halt and weak and old.

Eliot Crawshay Williams

‘You want to fight if you’ve a chance?

You must be mad! You must be drunk!

Romance!!!

War’s run

By a crew of damned clerks, on a set of damned stools!

War’s won

By a lot of damned fools

In a damned funk!!’

Charles T. Foxcroft

‘Leave me alone; I do not want your war:

War that means fools cutting each others’ throats

While smug sleek diplomats in dulcet notes

Prate on of God (does it not ever jar?).

Yes, you may call me coward if you please,

Bellow that “we” are battling for the Right,

“We!” – you must seek some subtler sophistries,

There’d be no wars if
you
had but to fight.

Oh! that the world were not so darkly blind,

That men would see the poor fooled things they are,

And make that fawning dog Democracy

Turn on its master ’stead of on its kind.

Sirs, I’ve no quarrel – save with Some on High;

Leave me alone; to Hell with you, and War!’

Eliot Crawshay Williams

When memory of Prussian foulness fails,

One thing will keep its fame

Of cruelty and shame –

The strike in Wales.

Waste of Muscle, waste of Brain,

Waste of Patience, waste of Pain,

Waste of Manhood, waste of Health,

Waste of Beauty, waste of Wealth,

Waste of Blood, and waste of Tears,

Waste of Youth’s most precious years,

Waste of ways the Saints have trod,

Waste of Glory, waste of God, –

War!

G.A. Studdert Kennedy

Northcliffe, my Northcliffe,

In days that are dead

The bard was a scoffer

At much that you said,

A fervid opponent

Of ‘Daily Mail’ Bread.

The bard never dreamed

That it mattered a jot

If you trusted in soap

Or put peas in your pot,

Or how many aeroplanes

England had not.

And when you back Blatchford

To bark at the Bosche,

Or when you puffed Willett

As wiser than Josh –

Northcliffe, my Northcliffe,

I own I said ‘Tosh’.

Northcliffe, my Northcliffe,

Now here at thy feet

The poet craves pardon

Tho’ vengeance be sweet

As peas that thou prizest

In Carmelite Street,

Forgive me past trespasses,

Hark to my trope,

To my words that are softer

Than Lever’s Soft Soap,

For only through thee

Has a suppliant hope!

Northcliffe, my Northcliffe,

Ah! greater than Mars

Or double-faced Janus

Whose portal unbars

The flood-tide of battle

Napoleon of ‘Pars’,

Whose words are uncensored,

Whose leader compels

Greys, Asquiths, McKennas,

And eke double L’s,

With contraband cotton

And scandal of shells,

Who rulest the Seas,

And the Earth and the Air

And the manifold medals

‘Base’ Officers wear,

Northcliffe, my Northcliffe,

Now hark to my prayer!

When the ‘Hide-the-Truth Press’

And the ‘Slack 23’

Have yielded sword, money,

And trident to thee

And K.J. and Boosey

And Pemberton B.

Remember, while paying

The Derby man’s rent,

His rates, his insurance,

And more than he spent,

That others
SAID NOTHING
,

GOT NOTHING, BUT WENT
.

They were somewhere in France,

While the Derby man bucked

To his wife, and in sheets

Was connubially tucked . . .

But no one pays them

For the homes that they chucked.

They were crouching to crumps

While he cried at a Zepp,

He was dancing what time

They were taught to ‘Keep step’,

And he gets a hundred

Per an.
PLUS
the Sep-

aration allowance!

By Carmelite House,

If a Man be worth anything

More than a Mouse,

Northcliffe, my Northcliffe,

THESE CHAPS HAVE A GROUSE
.

Gilbert Frankau

Through the slow succeeding ages

Priests and prophets, saints and sages

Have waged a long, incessant strife,

Seeking for the higher life.

Hindus wrapt in contemplation,

Hebrews voicing revelation,

Greeks, Egyptians, and Chinese,

Moslems, Christians, and Parsees,

All have held the ancient quest,

All have sought to find the best;

All of them have gone astray –

None have found the narrow way.

Buddha lived, and preached, and died,

Christ was scourged and crucified,

Socrates and Plato taught,

St Francis prayed, Mahomet fought.

All their labour, all their pain,

All their strivings were in vain;

Vain the work of every master

From Bergson back to Zoroaster,

Vain the toil of every teacher

From Moses down to Friedrich Nietzsche.

No hope for many can ever be

In faith or in Philosophy.

Gloomy is the prospect then

For the stricken sons of men,

Doomed the lower life to live;

None has any help to give.

When, hark! there comes a voice from Devon!

The Dean has found the keys of heaven,

Has found the path that none could find,

Has seen where all the saints were blind.

Marlborough is come to bring salvation

And Higher Life to all the nation.

Sure and simple his prescription:

All mankind needs is – Conscription!

W.N. Ewer

In the midnight, in the rain,

That drenches every sooty roof and licks each window-pane,

The bugles blow for the last rally

Once again.

Through the horror of the night,

Where glimmers yet northwestward one ghostly strip of white,

Squelching with heavy boots through the untrodden plough-lands

The troops set out. Eyes right!

These are the last who go because they must,

Who toiled for years at something levelled now in dust;

Men of thirty, married, settled, who had built up walls of comfort

That crumbled at a thrust.

Now they have naked steel,

And the heavy, sopping rain that the clammy skin can feel,

And the leaden weight of rifle and the pack that grinds the entrails,

Wrestling with a half-cooked meal.

And there are oaths and blows,

The mud that sticks and flows,

The bad and smoky billet, and the aching legs at morning,

And the frost that numbs the toes;

And the senseless, changeless grind,

And the pettifogging mass of orders muddling every mind,

And the dull-red smudge of mutiny half rising up and burning,

Till they choke and stagger blind.

But for them no bugle flares;

No bright flags leap, no gay horizon glares;

They are conscripts, middle-aged, rheumatic, cautious, weary,

With slowly thinning hairs;

Only for one to-night

A woman weeps and moans and tries to smite

Her head against a table, and another rocks a cradle,

And another laughs with flashing eyes, sitting bolt upright.

John Gould Fletcher

What, Asquith,
you
presume to use to
me

This trivial cry of ‘public policy’?

Appeals of that sort are no earthly go

Where I’m concerned; for I, the prophet, know

A lordlier guide, and in the heavens see I

The flaming scroll: ‘Vox Guestii, Vox Dei’.

Yes, when my conscience shows her burning face,

Asquiths and such must take the lower place!

Proudly I answer to her clarion call

(For conscience will make martyrs of us all),

And my vast hunger for ‘opprobrium’

Might strike an envious Von Tirpitz dumb!

But suppose, gallant Captain, that the State

Adopts your view (although a trifle late),

Suppose the sluggish powers-that-be begin

At last by force to rope the shirkers in;

Suppose, I put it, that you get your way

And we attain that glad millennial day

When your stout comrade, Colonel Arthur Lee,

Makes soldiering a sweated industry.

And suppose, then, some libertarian cur,

Some wretched working-man in Manchester,

In spite of all our peril, argues still

He does not think men should be forced to kill.

– What about that? . . . I am not certain, Guest,

But still I’m strongly tempted to suggest,

O Captain, my Captain, Captain Guest,

You’ll find your conscience tells you it were best,

Sometimes, that in the public interest

The conscientious man should be suppressed.