Voices of Silence (29 page)

Round about are shadows creeping,

Formless Things which wake the sleeping,

Glaring eyes from shell-holes peeping,

Mocking always at our pain.

Cold and wet our limbs are numbing,

Fevered brows are drumming, drumming –

Are the stretchers
never
coming?

Are we numbered with the slain?

God in Heaven, canst Thou hear us?

Mary Mother! Dost Thou fear us?

Stretcher-bearers, are you near us?

Give us water or we die!

But a grisly shadow’s creeping

With his cruel scythe a-reaping

Weary souls which fall to sleeping

In a choking, croaking sigh.

Dudley H. Harris

I called his name and fear was in my calling.

I pressed his hand. I saw his tired smile.

I leaned above him for a quite while

And wondered at the crimson blood drops falling.

A wildness o’er my brain was surely stealing,

I even humm’d a stave of comic tune,

And yet he never moved. Beneath the moon

I lay beside him, dead to every feeling.

And oh! the tired dawn when I was waking

To find him cold behind me on the grass.

God heard my moan and watched me rise and pass

To hide the pity of a heart that’s breaking.

A.N. Choyce

Lay them together in this muddy shell-hole,

Cover them over with this muddy sheet.

Heed not their staring eyes, they gaze to starry skies

Wrap their red tartans around their poor feet.

Cover them quickly nor mutter a prayer,

Pile on the earth quick with never a pang,

Mark it another grave – haste, ev’ry second save –

Here on this rifle their tin helmets hang.

High soar the night flares – hush! swift to your fire-step:

Leave them to rest there out under the stars,

Boys of the city bred, men of the tartan dead,

Laid in the lone waste by sad dead Le Sars.

So do we leave you, lads, laid in the sheer waste,

Sleeping till summer shall flit o’er the foam,

Robed in her gold and blue, to clasp, caressing you

Close to her bosom, her own gathered home.

John Peterson

Behind that long and lonely trenchèd line

To which men come and go, where brave men die,

There is a yet unmarked and unknown shrine,

A broken plot, a soldiers’ cemet’ry.

There lie the flower of Youth, the men who scorned

To live (so died) when languished liberty:

Across their graves, flowerless and unadorned,

Still scream the shells of each artillery.

When war shall cease this lonely, unknown spot

Of many a pilgrimage will be the end,

And flowers will bloom in this now barren plot

And fame upon it through the years descend –

But many a heart upon each simple cross

Will hang the grief, the memory of its loss.

John W. Streets

Went the day well?

We died and never knew.

But well or ill,

England, we died for you.

No more we’ll share the same old barn,

The same old dug-out, same old yarn,

No more a tin of bully share,

Nor split our rum by a star-shell’s flare,

So long old lad.

What times we’ve had, both good and bad,

We’ve shared what shelter could be had,

The same crump-hole when the whizz-bangs shrieked,

The same old billet that always leaked,

And now – you’ve ‘stopped one’.

We’d weathered the storm two winters long,

We’d managed to grin when all went wrong,

Because together we fought and fed,

Our hearts were light; but now – you’re dead

And I am Mateless.

Well, old lad, here’s peace to you,

And for me, well, there’s my job to do,

For you and the others who lie at rest,

Assured may be that we’ll do our best

In vengeance.

Just one more cross by a strafed roadside,

With its G.R.C., and a name for guide,

But it’s only myself that has lost a friend,

And though I may fight through to the end,

No dug-out or billet will be the same,

All pals can only be pals in name,

But we’ll carry on till the end of the game

Because you lie there.

A ghastly something there where feasts a glittering swarm of flies,

A slow, hot breeze, a curious sickening stench,

A bloated rat, some nameless filth, charred rags! – behind the trench

Unending orderlies

With sun-baked forms on stretchers; – what’s that tiger-tearing crunch?

Dropped from its rosy whisp of cloud – of which a sunset might be proud –

Their shrapnel’s ripped right through that bunch

Of mules and motors! – How they pound

The white road past the lakes!

That’s shrapnel swish – that’s ‘big stuff’ where the ground

Swells up in sootlike snakes! –

Now glance again

Towards those wrecked tanglements – no bodies now,

(Gad, there’s a thud,

Nineteen inch guns) –

But you can see, where yesterday

’Twas much too hard to plough,

To-day – and not a single drop of rain –

For half a mile across the grey, parched plan,

A swamp of red-brown mud!

Yet wan-faced women whisper, while they pray,

‘We know this, and yet knowing, send our sons!’

Charles T. Foxcroft

In other days I sang of simple things,

Of summer dawn, and summer noon and night,

The dewy grass, the dew-wet fairy rings,

The lark’s long golden flight.

Deep in the forest I made melody

While squirrels cracked their hazel nuts on high,

Or I would cross the wet sand to the sea

And sing to sea and sky.

When came the silvered silence of the night

I stole to casements over scented lawns,

And softly sang of love and love’s delight

To mute white marble fauns.

Oft in the tavern parlour I would sing

Of morning sun upon the mountain vine,

And, calling for a chorus, sweep the string

In praise of good red wine.

I played with all the toys the gods provide,

I sang my songs and made glad holiday.

Now I have cast my broken toys aside

And flung my lute away.

A singer once, I now am fain to weep.

Within my soul I feel strange music swell,

Vast chants of tragedy too deep – too deep

For my poor lips to tell.

Leslie Coulson

Still I see them coming, coming

In their broken ragged line,

Walking wounded in the sunlight,

Clothed in majesty divine.

For the fairest of the lilies

That God’s summer ever sees

Ne’er was robed in royal beauty

Such as decks the least of these;

Tattered, torn and bloody khaki,

Gleams of white flesh in the sun,

Robes symbolic of their glory

And the great deeds they have done:

Purple robes and snowy linen

Have for earthly kings sufficed,

But these bloody, sweaty tatters

Were the robes of Jesus Christ.

T.D. Studdert Kennedy

I cannot quite remember . . . There were five

Dropt dead beside me in the trench – and three

Whispered their dying messages to me . . .

Back from the trenches, more dead than alive,

Stone-deaf and dazed, and with a broken knee,

He hobbled slowly, muttering vacantly:

I cannot quite remember . . . There were five

Dropt dead beside me in the trench – and three

Whispered their dying messages to me . . .

Their friends are waiting, wondering how they thrive –

Waiting a word in silence patiently . . .

But what they said, or who their friends may be

I cannot quite remember . . . There were five

Dropt dead beside me in the trench – and three

Whispered their dying messages to me . . .

Wilfrid W. Gibson

Into the siding very wearily

She comes again:

Singing her endless song so drearily,

The midnight winds sink down to drift the rain.

So she comes home once more.

Is it an ancient chanty

Won from some classic shore?

The stretcher-bearers stand

Two on either hand.

They bend and lift and raise

Where the doors open wide

With yellow light ablaze.

Into the dark outside

Each stretcher passes. Here

(As if each on his bier

With sorrow they were bringing)

Is peace, and a low singing.

The ambulances load,

Move on and take the road.

Under the stars alone

Each stretcher passes out.

And the ambulances’ moan

And the checker’s distant shout

All round to the old sound

Of the lost chanty singing.

And the dark seamen swinging.

Far off some classic shore . . .

So she comes home once more.

Wimereux

Carola Oman

A bowl of daffodils,

A crimson-quilted bed,

Sheets and pillows white as snow –

White and gold and red –

And sisters moving to and fro,

With soft and silent tread.

So all my spirit fills

With pleasure infinite,

And all the feathered wings of rest

Seem flocking from the radiant West

To bear me thro’ the night.

Gilbert Waterhouse

Cover him up! My nerve hath not the steel,

Doctor, of yours! – And so you tended him?

Your fingers dress’d each torn and shatter’d limb?

You swath’d that ruin’d face? Ye Gods! I feel,

Did we but know, we lesser men would kneel

In reverence for the hands no terrors grim

Can shake, the eye no horror can make dim.

– This lad hath taught me what it means to heal!

So young! So far from home! – Alas! ’twas best!

Rejoice, poor boy, for that dividing sea,

And think thee in thy lonely death thrice blest!

So shall a mourning mother-heart be free

To see thee still the baby at her breast,

The pretty child that danc’d upon her knee.

E. Armine Wodehouse

‘Killed – Wounded – Missing. Officers and men,

So many hundreds.’ Numbers leave us cold.

But when next day the tale again is told

In serried lines of printed names – Ah then!

The tragic meaning of it all grows plain.

We know them not; yet picture in each one

Some woman’s husband, some fond mother’s son,

Some maiden’s lover, some child’s father – slain!

The cost of war looms large before our eyes;

Our hearts beat quicker, tears unbidden rise.

Then thoughts fly upward, shape themselves in prayer.

‘God of our fathers, for the stricken care!

The wounded do Thou heal, the lost restore;

Bind broken hearts, bid mourners weep no more;

Loved ones in peril guard by day and night;

And speed, O Lord, the triumph of the Right!’