Voices of Silence (36 page)

Kneel then in the warm lamplight, O my Love,

Your dear dark head against my quiet breast,

And take me in your arms again and so

Hush my tired heart to rest;

And say that of all the glories you have won

My love’s most dear and best.

Only to-night I want you all my own,

(Tomorrow I will laugh and bid you go,)

That if these fourteen days of heaven on earth

Are all the love-time we shall ever know

I may remember I am yours: My Dear,

Hold me still closer, still . . . and tell me so.

May Cannan

‘Good-bye. You’ll write and tell me how you are?’

‘Rather. It looks as if it will be wet.’

‘Yes, so it does. I’m glad I’ve got the car.

Here is your pipe, in case I should forget.’

‘Oh, thanks; I think we’ll soon be starting now.

We’re very late, unless my watch is fast.

What? Yes, these engines make a beastly row;

Good-bye, old girl, good-bye, we’re off at last.’

And so they go the way all Britons tread,

Leaving the things that they feel most unsaid.

Apart sweet women (for whom Heaven be blessed),

Comrades, you cannot think how thin and blue

Look the leftovers of mankind that rest,

Now that the cream has been skimmed off in you.

War has its horrors, but has this of good –

That its sure processes sort out and bind

Brave hearts in one intrepid brotherhood

And leave the shams and imbeciles behind.

Now turn we joyful to the great attacks,

Not only that we face in a fair field

Our valiant foe and all his deadly tools,

But also that we turn disdainful backs

On that poor world we scorn yet die to shield –

That world of cowards, hypocrites, and fools.

Alan Seeger

There was a little Hun, and at war he tried his hand,

And while that Hun was winning war was fine you understand,

But when the others hit him back he shouted in alarm,

A little drop of peace wouldn’t do me any harm.

‘How beautiful upon the mountain-tops

Their feet would sound, the messengers of Peace!’

So into neutral ears your unction drops,

Hinting a pious hope that War may cease –

War, with its dreadful waste

Which never suited your pacific taste.

Strange you should turn so suddenly humane,

So sick of ravage and the reek of gore!

Dare we assume that Verdun’s long-drawn strain

Makes you perspire at each Imperial pore?

Or that your nerve’s mislaid

Through cardiac trouble caused by our Blockade?

You thought to finish on the high wave’s crest;

To say, ‘These lands that ’neath our sceptre lie –

Such as we want we’ll keep, and chuck the rest,

And to the vanquished, having drained ’em dry,

We will consent to give,

Out of our clemency, the right to live.’

Then you came down a long, long way, and said,

‘For pure desire of Peace, and that alone,

We’ll deem the dead past buried with its dead,

Taking, in triumph’s hour, a generous tone;

Uplift the fallen foe

And affably restore the
status quo
.’

Fool’s talk and idle. In this Dance of Death

The man who called the piper’s tune must pay,

Nor can he stop at will for want of breath.

Though War you chose, and chose its opening day,

It lies not in your power

To stay its course or fix its final hour.

Owen Seaman

Thou shalt have peace enough when war is o’er,

When nations gather at the conference

Which Time shall hold to weigh thy great offence

Against the crimes of History’s full store:

Thou then shalt stand in all thy guilt before

The human virtues, dumb of all defence,

Confronting Youth whom thy mad violence

Has hounded through death’s youth-excluding door.

Cry not for Peace! Thou art her murderer!

Thou’st violated nature with thy breath

Of war – nature, mother of peace and light.

Thy god’s the bloody god of massacre,

The raging dragon, breathing blasting death,

Blackening the dawn just breaking out of night.

William Dowsing

There are our terms – concise, emphatic, plain;

Take them or leave them – we’ll not compromise

Though all the flower of our young manhood dies.

’Tis all or nothing. We will still maintain

The contest till we have the victory,

Or till our final shilling and last man

Shall be expended. That’s our simple plan,

Free of all guile or ambiguity.

Peace on our terms then – or no peace at all,

And we fight on, however high the cost.

What matter if more million lives be lost;

What matter if our race and Empire fall,

So Lothringen be called once more Lorraine

And Hartmannsweilerskopf be French again?

W.N. Ewer

Abundant woman panting there,

Whose breast is flecked with spots of grease

That splutter from your laboured hair,

O dew-lapped woman, you who reek

Of stout and steak and fish and chips,

Why does the short indignant shriek

Come toppling from your fleshy lips;

Because, poor smitten fool, I dare

To breathe the outcast name of Peace?

And shall your flesh grow less to view,

And shall your chubby arms grow thin,

And shall you miss your stout and stew,

The bracelets which you wear so well,

If blinded boys no more shall creep

Along the scorching roads to Hell,

If thick red blood no more shall steep

Green fields in France, nor corpses smell;

If Peace send down her blasting blight,

O shall it spoil your sleep at night

And shall you lose your treble chin?

Louis Golding

Now William Hohenzollern, the King of all the Huns,

Had quite a lot of country and he also had six sons,

Of money too he’d plenty and a larder fully stocked –

In fact he’d all the wanted – so at grief and care he mocked.

Karl Baumberg lived in comfort with his frau and family,

His sons they numbered seven, and his daughters numbered three;

They’d just enough of everything and wished for nothing more,

(This happy time, you understand, was just before the war).

For reasons which they never knew Karl Baumberg’s seven sons

Were quickly clad in suits of grey and labelled ‘food for guns’.

Two rot in mud near Wipers, and another at Verdun,

The Somme accounted for a brace, and Passchendaele for one.

The one remaining to old Karl is minus both his arms,

His fighting days are finished, and he’s sick of war’s alarms;

He grinds his teeth with fury, while old Karl hunts round for food,

And his mother freely curses both the Kaiser and his brood.

His one remaining sister (death has claimed the other two)

Out of water and a horse bone tries to make a dish of stew.

Comes a mandate ‘Our great Kaiser has another victory won,

Fly your flags and cheer, by order, for the victory of Verdun.’

Then old Karl, whose waking senses grasp a fact both strange and new,

That the victories are worthless if they bring no end in view,

And he curses Kaiser William who’s the King of all the Huns,

But his frau is quietly sobbing for – the Kaiser has six sons.

I went and walked by Arras

In the dim uncertain night;

I went and walked by Arras

In the dazzling noonday light;

First I saw a fairy glamour,

Later, ’twas another sight.

Out by Arras in the night-time,

Star-shells in the starlit sky

Showered like wild silver raindrops

From a fountain scattered high,

Like the silver scales of fishes

In the tideway curving by.

Out by Arras in the night-time

There were glints of red and green

Like the glow of fairy camp-fires

In some hidden high wood seen,

Like the day-dawn of the night-land

Where no man has ever been.

Out by Arras in the day-time

There stretched broad the sun-parched sand:

Where together men and torture

Lived with foul death hand in hand,

Horror-stricken, God-forsaken,

There stretched far the war-cursed land.

And upon the stretches barren

Far I saw the thousands lie

That the wind of war had blasted,

Sweeping on without a sigh;

In the hollows, huddled hundreds

Who were not afraid to die.

John Peterson

I woke at dawn and flung the window wide.

Beneath the hedge the lazy river ran;

And dusky barges idled down the tide;

In the laburnum-tree the birds began;

And it was May and half the world in flower;

I saw the sun creep over an Eastward brow,

And thought ‘It may be, this is Zero-hour;

Somewhere the lads are “going over” now’.

Somewhere the guns speak sudden on the height

And build for miles their battlement of fire;

Somewhere the men that shivered all the night

Peer anxious forth and scramble through the wire,

Swarm slowly out to where the Maxims bark,

And green and red the panic rockets rise;

And Hell is loosed, and shyly sings the lark,

And the red sun climbs sadly up the skies.

Now they have won some sepulchered Gavrelle,

Some shattered homes in their own dust concealed;

Now no Boche troubles them nor any shell,

But almost quiet holds the thankful field,

Whilst men draw breath, and down the Arras Road

Come the slow mules with battle’s dreary stores,

And there is time to see the wounded stowed,

And stretcher-squads besiege the doctors’ doors.

Then belches Hell anew. And all day long

The afflicted place drifts heavenward in dust;

All day the shells shriek out their devils’ song;

All day men cling close to the earth’s charred crust;

Till, in the dusk, the Huns come on again,

And, like some sluice, the watchers up the hill

Let loose the guns and flood the soil with slain,

And they go back, but scourge the village still.