Voices of Silence (28 page)
Authors: Vivien Noakes
But some of those on the ground, particularly junior officers who would be leading the men, saw things differently. They could see that in many places the British wire remained uncut, and reports brought back by patrols told them that the German defenders had retreated deep into dugouts cut into the chalk.
Heavy rain delayed the attack for 48 hours. It was launched at 7.30 a.m. on the morning of 1 July, a beautiful summer’s day. Shortly before zero hour, three huge mines were exploded beneath the German lines, but, though they suffered huge casualties, their defence was largely unbroken. As the British, each man with 66lb of kit and many carrying entrenching tools or ladders or carrier-pigeon boxes, began to move across no man’s land behind an artillery barrage that had now slowly lifted and moved beyond the enemy front line, German machine-gunners came up from their dugouts and manned their parapets. The British were cut down in their thousands. In parts of the line the attackers did reach the German trenches, but the ferocity of the enemy defence meant that no man’s land was sometimes impassable; communications were cut off and the planned support and supplies could not get across. As the day wore on, many British who had survived were forced to withdraw to their jump-off positions. By nightfall 19,240 British soldiers were dead, most of them within the first hour. At Serre, the Accrington Pals were all but wiped out. As well as the dead, 57,470 men were wounded or missing. It was the worst day in the history of the British army.
An unofficial truce that night meant that the British were able go out into no man’s land to bring in some of their wounded, but many more were left where they had fallen, among the dead.
Verdun
‘Verdun is ours!’ the vaunting Teuton cries,
And pours his serried ranks of frenzied hate
Wave upon wave, carnage insatiate,
To make a highway for the Lord of Lies.
‘Verdun is mine!’ unflinching France replies;
‘In vain the tyrant thunders at the gate;
For ruined homes and hearths laid desolate
The hand of Freedom beckons – and I rise.’
Joyous the lark shall soar above the green
That clothes the fallen; glad the corn shall wave;
Old eyes shall glow, recalling what hath been,
And how a new France blossomed from the grave.
Thou livest to all time, Verdun. Thy dead?
One hath them in His charge. Be comforted.
F.W. Platt
Before Action
Over the down the road goes winding,
A ribbon of white in the corn –
The young, green corn. O, the joy of binding
The sheaves some harvest morn!
But we are called to another reaping,
A harvest that will not wait.
The sheaves will be green. O, the world of weeping
Of those without the gate!
For the road we go they may not travel,
Nor share our harvesting;
But watch and weep. O, to unravel
The riddle of this thing!
Yet over the down the white road leading
Calls; and who lags behind?
Stout are our hearts; but O, the bleeding
Of hearts we may not bind!
Somme, July 1916
J.E. Stewart
Life and Death
If Death should come with his cold hasty kiss
Along the trench or in the battle strife,
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 battling 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.