Voices of Silence (38 page)

Those dreams are dead: now in my Wiper’s dug-out

I only dream of Kirchner’s naughtiest chromo;

The brazier smokes; no window lets the fug out;

And the Bosche shells; and ‘Q’ still issues bromo.

‘For information’ – ‘Urgent’ – ‘Confidential’ –

‘Secret’ – ‘For necessary action, please’ –

‘The G.O.C. considers it essential’ –

My soldier-soul must steel itself to these;

Must face, by dawn’s dim light, by night’s dull taper,

Disciplined, dour, gas-helmeted, and stern,

Brigades, battalions, batteries, of paper, –

The loud ‘report’, the treacherous ‘return’,

Division orders, billeting epistles,

Barbed ‘Zeppelin’ wires that baffle G.H.Q.,

And the dread ‘Summary’ whose blurred page bristles

With ‘facts’ no German general ever knew.

Let the Hun hate! We need no beer-roused passions

To keep our sword-blade bright, our powder dry,

The while we chase October’s o’erdrawn rations

And hunt that missing pair of ‘Gumboots, thigh’.

Gilbert Frankau

When sending requisitions it is well to have a care

That you’re absolutely right in your appeal;

‘Wheelbarrows’ must be written – if you only want a pair

‘Barrows (Wheel)’.

It’s a simple little process and, though puzzling for a bit,

It doesn’t take so
very
long to think

That an ‘inkstand’ should be designated when you order it –

‘Stand (Ink)’.

Suppose you want some paper and that ‘foolscap’ is the word

Which you want to write, remember that the rule’s

To reverse the whole expression and you’ll put – it sounds absurd

‘Cap (Fools).’

To rag the War Department you will not attempt, I hope,

Though I quite admit it
would
be tempting (very)

To ask for and to call the soldier’s friend, the periscope,

‘Scope (Peri).’

W. Hodgson Burnet

Listen reader, while I tell you

Stirring deeds both old and new,

Tales of battles during which we

Chits received from Batt. H.Q.

Fought we had a losing battle

All the day and all the night;

All communications broken,

Never was there such a plight.

Now the Hun comes o’er the sandbags

In one long unbroken mass –

Just in time – the welcome message

‘Indent now for helmets gas.’

Shelled they’d been for three days solid

In a trench just two feet high;

Couldn’t get retaliation

Matter not how they might try.

Binks’s men had held the trenches,

(Binks is
NOT
his proper name),

Savagely he sent the message,

‘Can’t you stop their purple game?’

Anxiously they wait the answer,

What a brave but serried band.

Here it comes – Binks grabs the paper,

‘Deficiencies not yet to hand!’

Have you ever heard the tale, lad,

How we took the trench at A?

Said the good old 92nd,

Here we are, and here we’ll stay.

What a tale of awful trial,

Cut off was our food supply.

If we do not get some bully

– Bread or biscuits – we shall die.

The foe comes on in countless thousands

Bearing down with savage cry.

Jones receives a frantic message,

‘Indent now for gum boots thigh’.

Thus you see, O gentle reader,

Why the O.C. Coys are grey.

These and other kindred worries

Are their portion day by day.

We all admire the Sapper,

He is so full of brain;

He makes the most tremendous sumps

That keep out all the rain;

And happy should I be if I

Could find a dug-out half as dry.

He works both day and night

With fierce and furrowed brow –

Or, rather, watches others work

And tells them why and how;

And, with a muffled kind of sob,

Gives someone else the hardest job.

The Gunner’s on a higher plane –

His hours are 10 to 3,

He takes a day off when there’s rain,

Because he cannot see.

You find him seated on a knoll,

Dreaming of range and fuse,

And wishing that the Div. Amm. Col.

Were like the widow’s cruse.

He loves his little weekly hate,

And once he’s fairly set,

He rarely puts much more than eight

Rounds through the parapet.

The Signal man wears blue and white

Most gorgeous on his arm,

And causes heaps of fun at night

By spreading Gas Alarm.

He bags your wire – a thing I’d hate

To do behind your back,

And when you gently remonstrate

He murmurs, ‘A(c) A(c) A(c)’.

Some men I know have billets fine

And motor cars galore,

They live – oh miles behind the line . . .

The Army Service Corps.

They often go to A——s

To pass the time away;

Their life must be one constant grind

To earn their extra pay.

Arise, My M
USE
, and from the muddied trench

Let us give utterance to malicious thought,

Shouting aloud the things we never ought

Even to dream of: come, you shameless Wench,

With tongue in cheek let us set out to strafe

Gunners and Sappers, and the Gilded Staff.

Gunners are a race apart,

Hard of head and hard of heart.

Like the gods they sit and view

All that other people do:

Like the Sisters Three of Fate,

They do not discriminate.

Our Support Line, or the Hun’s,

– What’s the difference to the Guns?

Retaliation do you seek?

Ring them up, and – wait a week!

They will certainly reply

In the distant by-and-bye.

Should a shell explode amiss

Each will swear it was not his:

For he’s never, never shot

Anywhere about that spot,

And, what’s more, his Guns could not.

Sappers are wonderfully clever by birth,

And though they’re not meek, they inherit the Earth.

Should your trenches prove leaky, they’ll work with a will

To make all the water flow up the next hill.

(And when I say ‘work’, I should really explain

That we find the Labour, while they find the Brain.)

They build nice, deep dug-outs as quick as can be,

But quicker still mark them ‘
RESERVED FOR R.E.
’:

And, strangely, this speed of theirs seems to decline

As the scene of their labours draws near the Front Line.

Realising Men must laugh,

Some Wise Men devised the Staff:

Dressed them up in little dabs

Of rich variegated tabs:

Taught them how to win the War

On A.F.Z. 354:

Let them lead the Simple Life

Far from all our vulgar strife:

Nightly gave them downy beds

For their weary, aching heads:

Lest their relatives might grieve

Often, often gave them leave,

Decorations, too, galore:

What on earth could man wish more?

Yet, alas, or so says Rumour,

He forgot a sense of Humour!

And now, Old Girl, we’ve fairly had our whack,

Be off, before they start to strafe us back!

Come, let us plod across the weary Plain,

Until we sight T
ENTH
A
VENUE
again:

On, up the interminable C.T.,

Watched by the greater part of Germany:

And, as we go, mark each familiar spot

Where fresh work has been done – or p’r’aps not:

On, past the footboards no one seems to mend,

Till even
VENDIN ALLEY
finds an end,

And wading through a Minnie-hole (brand-new),

We gingerly descend to C.H.Q.,

Our journey ended in a Rabbit-hutch –

‘How goes the Battle? Have they Minnied much?’

God made the bees,

The bees make the honey;

The Glosters do the work

And the R.E.s get the money.

Who eats the honey,

Is it Glosters or the bee?

The bee gets no cash

From the bally infantry.

Who pinches sandbags

Required for parapet,

Drops them in the mud

To save his feet from wet?

When dugout, sap or bridge

Is required by infantry,

The Gloster bends his knee

To the better paid R.E.

Who taught him how to bomb,

Revet and to demolish,

To build a house or knock it down,

The Germans for to dish?

Why should the Gloster grouse

At the R.E. and his pay?

When the Glosters wants to know a thing

The R.E. shows the way.

The gunner rides on horseback, he lives in luxury,

The sapper has his dug-out as cushy as can be,

The flying man’s a sportsman, but his home’s a long way back,

In painted tent or straw-spread barn or cosy little shack;

Gunner and sapper and flying man (and each to his job, say I)

Have tickled the Hun with mine or gun or bombed him from on high,

But the quiet work, and the dirty work, since ever the War began

Is the work that never shows at all, the work of the infantryman.

The guns can pound the villages and smash the trenches in,

And the Hun is fain for home again when the T.M.B.s begin,

And the Vickers gun is a useful one to sweep a parapet,

But the real work is the work that’s done with bomb and bayonet.

Load him down from heel to crown with tools and grub and kit,

He’s always there where the fighting is – he’s there unless he’s hit;

Over the mud and the blasted earth he goes where the living can;

He’s in at the death while he yet has breath, the British infantryman!

Trudge and slip on the shell-hole’s lip, and fall in the clinging mire –

Steady in front, go steady! Close up there! Mind the wire!

Double behind where the pathways wind! Jump clear of the ditch, jump clear!

Lost touch at the back? Oh, halt in front! and duck when the shells come near!

Carrying parties all night long, all day in a muddy trench,

With your feet in the wet and your head in the rain and the sodden khaki’s stench!

Then over the top in the morning, and onward all you can –

This is the work that wins the War, the work of the infantryman.

E.F. Clarke

In general, if you want a man to do a dangerous job: –

Say, swim the Channel, climb St Paul’s, or break into and rob

The Bank of England, why, you find his wages must be higher

Than if you merely wanted him to light the kitchen fire.

But in the British Army, it’s just the other way,

And the maximum of danger means the minimum of pay.

You put some men inside a trench, and call them infantrie,

And make them face ten kinds of hell, and face it cheerfully;

And live in holes like rats, with other rats, and lice, and toads,

And in their leisure time, assist the R.E.s with their loads.

Then, when they’ve done it all, you give ’em each a bob a day!

For the maximum of danger means the minimum of pay.

We won’t run down the A.S.C., nor yet the R.T.O.,

They ration and direct us on the way we’ve got to go.

They’re very useful people, and it’s pretty plain to see

We couldn’t do without ’em, nor yet the A.P.C.,

But comparing risks and wages, – I think they all will say

That the maximum of danger means the minimum of pay.

There are men who make munitions – and seventy bob a week;

They never see a lousy trench nor hear a big shell shriek;

And others
sing
about the war at high-class music-halls

Getting heaps and heaps of money and encores from the stalls.

They ‘keep the home fires burning’ and bright by night and day,

While the maximum of danger means the minimum of pay.

I wonder if it’s harder to make big shells at a bench,

Than to face the screaming beggars when they’re crumping up a trench;

I wonder if it’s harder to sing in mellow tones

Of danger, than to face it – say, in a wood like Trones;

Is discipline skilled labour, or something children play?

Should the maximum of danger mean the minimum of pay?

F.W. Harvey

Gone is the Summer, and gone are the flies,

Gone the green hedges that gladdened our eyes;

Around us the landscape is reeking with rain,

Gone is all comfort – ’tis Winter again.

So here’s to the lads of the P.B.I.,

Who live in a ditch that never is dry;

Who grin through discomfort and danger alike,

Go ‘over the top’ when a chance comes to strike;

Though they’re living in Hell they are cheery and gay,

And draw as their stipend just one bob per day.