Voices of Silence (50 page)

Over the flat dim land I see you moving

Methodically; under a dark wide sky

Full of low clouds. You are gone far from our loving.

No fret of ours or grief can touch you now.

The road speaks nothing to our longing now.

The winds are dumb to us and pass us by.

The nameless tracks, the faded grass

Spread out as far as we can see.

The homeless shadows glance and pass

By shattered wood and naked tree.

Splintered and stark they rise alone

Against so wonderful a blue

Of distance – an intensity

At once so steadfast and so true

I wonder are you wholly gone?

Carola Oman

I fear this beautiful, unholy place!

But O, what frights me among elder-boughs

June-blossoming: wild roses? Evil’s here.

But how is evil here? What evil comes

Out of June meadows into the wood’s calm?

Is it with Earth the wrong lies? Or with me?

Did elders bloom like this, on a wood’s edge,

Close to pale foxgloves, neighbored with a briar,

When, long ago – how long I know not – hate,

First fear, or first injustice, bred in me?

Is this hid horror here, hid Memory?

J.C. Chadwick

Treasure not so the forlorn days

When dun clouds flooded the naked plains

With foul, remorseless rains;

Thread not those memory ways

Where by the dripping alien farms,

Starved orchards with their shrivelled arms,

The bitter mouldering wind would whine

At the brisk mules clattering towards the Line.

Remember not with so sharp skill

Each chasm in the clouds that with strange fire

Lit pyramid-fosse and spire

Miles on miles from our hill;

In the magic glass, aye, then their lure

Like heaven’s houses gleaming pure

Might soothe the long-imprisoned sight

And put the seething storm to flight.

Enact not you so like a wheel

The round of evenings in sandbagged rooms

Where candles flicked the glooms;

The jests old time could steal

From ugly destiny, on whose brink

The poor fools grappled fear with drink,

And snubbed the hungry, raving guns

With endless tunes on gramophones.

About you spreads the world anew,

The old fields all for your sense rejoice,

Music has found her ancient voice,

From the hills there’s heaven on earth to view;

And kindly Mirth will raise his glass

To bid you with dull Care go pass –

And still you wander muttering on

Over the shades of shadows gone.

‘Somewhere in France’ – we know not where – he lies,

’Mid shuddering earth and under anguished skies!

We may not visit him, but this we say:

Though our steps err, his shall not miss their way.

From the exhaustion of War’s fierce embrace

He, nothing doubting, went to his own place.

To him has come, if not the crown and palm,

The kiss of Peace – a vast, sufficing calm!

So fine a spirit, daring, yet serene, –

He may not, surely, lapse from what has been:

Greater, not less, his wondering mind must be;

Ampler the splendid vision he must see.

’Tis unbelievable he fades away, –

An exhalation at the dawn of day!

Nor dare we deem that he has but returned

Into the Oversoul, to be discerned

Hereafter in the bosom of the rose,

In petal of the lily, or in those

Far jewelled sunset skies that glow and pale,

Or in the rich note of the nightingale.

Nay, though all beauty may recall to mind

What we in his fair life were wont to find,

In sun his nature, and in morn his fire,

In sea his force, in love his pure desire;

He shall escape absorption, and shall still

Preserve a faculty to know and will.

Such is my hope, slow climbing to a faith:

(We know not Life, how should we then know Death?)

From our small limits, and withholdings free,

Somewhere he dwells and keeps high company;

Yet tainted not with so supreme a bliss

As to forget he knew a world like this.

John Hogben

Oh, nevermore shall a bud awake

On your tortured boughs at the call of Spring,

But for your sake

New life shall break

From the seeds that Victory shall fling

In earth of the soldier’s slumbering.

For a hopeful Spring shall come at last,

A summer of sunlight sweet and pure,

When the fiery blast

With its blight’s o’er past,

And the shade of the green young trees shall lure

The heirs of peace to a rest secure.

But ye shall stand as witnesses

Of the fight with a rude invading foe,

Of its fiery stress

And blood-bitterness,

Meet testament of the brave below

Who died for the peace the young trees know.

J. E. Stewart

Steady, heart, for here’s my journey’s end – earth’s end, for me

And this the door which closes once, and opens never –

These few unsodden clods of clay,

A shelter and a shade

To him who was, and is, my son.

To me a grave, to him the rainbow’s end.

Though Death make cowards of the living,

They know him not, the dead.

He the arrow, I the bow

Which launched his flight towards infinity.

That form of willow,

Those eyes more eager than the dawn,

With all their freshness and surprise!

To him was duty pleasure, pleasure joy,

And joy was gratitude.

And with him many parts I’ve played,

A perch for childhood clinging,

His boyhood’s anchor, in youth a shield,

And to his manhood’s dawn

An answering call.

And now am I an echo stilled,

A silent bell, a wave without a shore.

In him died out my name and line,

Ancestry’s sum of heritage

Back to the rim of Time.

And now he has the whole Picardian plain for a grave,

A fitting place to die

Where man has died for man,

To dream, to rest, and greet the morn.

A treader of the skies,

With brother falcons of the shield,

He made new worlds his own,

Soared beyond the condor’s ken,

And shamed the eagle’s flight.

He fought not treacherous foes on earth,

But in his venture toward the sun,

Met those for once ennobled by their deeds,

Who challenged, fought or fell, or died with him.

He knew not death, for as he fell,

He loosed from him that body which had served its day,

As wakes a sleeper from his dreams

And lays his cloak aside.

Then, eager went as eager came,

Up sped his soul and up, and ever up, a meteor in uncharted space,

A light to heavens new,

A banneret of valour ’gainst the setting sun.

And he has missed the heartache,

Life’s jealousies and pain, and sympathies deceived.

Away then, Sorrow, beguiling sister of Despair,

I’ll rest awhile with Sadness

In her twilight hour of balm,

And let grief’s embers die.

For I’ve a treasury of memories so rich and dear

’Twould beggar all the son-less men of earth to buy!

Since memory’s but the bridge of time,

I’ll build it true and high,

To carry me across the skies

When comes my journey far,

And never fear but I’ll know well

Where waits my boy for me –

At the rainbow’s western end!

France, September 1919

Wade Chance

It’s when the leaves are fallen I think of you,

And the long boulevards where the ghosts walk now,

And Paris is dark again save for one great star

That’s caught and held in the dark arms of a bough

And wonder, among them are two a girl and boy

Silent, because their love was greater than song,

Who whisper ‘farewell’ and whisper ‘if it’s for ever’;

And did not know, poor ghosts, for ever could be so long.

It’s when the leaves are fallen I think of you,

And if you’re lonely too, who went with the great host;

And know that Time’s no mender of hearts but only

Still the divider of Light and Darkness, Ghost.

May Cannan

This is a tale not relished by our time,

Soft with the thing that men call Victory.

You will not hear it round the midnight floor,

But only in the quiet, evening lane,

Or by the hearths of those that once were young

And stoop to feel the warmth of ashening fires,

Forgetting and remembering again.

They whisper that a thousand years ago,

A thousand years – unless this night just gone –

There was a road between the poplar trees

Long sleepless from the tramp of soldiery.

And as they marched, why! everybody sang

His dearest tunes, and, strangely, all of these

Together mingling, though in many a tongue,

Turned to an anthem, rapturous and free.

And this is true – that as their number passed,

Suddenly there was no more singing:

Only the silence, racked by crunching feet;

The level throb of drums, and worn studs ringing.

No emblem fluttered, not a hand was kissed,

And we that saw them found no word to say,

But stood there till the marching ebbed and died,

And all that distant company became

A vale of crosses wavering in the mist

A thousand years ago. – Or was it yesterday?

1933

William Box

Just got your letter and the poems. Thanks.

You always were a brainy sort of chap:

Though pretty useless as a subaltern –

Too much imagination, not enough

Of that rare quality, sound common-sense.

And so you’ve managed to get on the Staff:

Influence, I suppose: a Captain, too!

How do tabs suit you? Are they blue or green?

About your book. I’ve read it carefully,

So has Macfaddyen; (you remember him,

The light-haired chap who joined us after Loos?);

And candidly, we don’t think much of it.

The piece about the horses isn’t bad;

But all the rest, excuse the word, are tripe –

The same old tripe we’ve read a thousand times.

My grief, but we’re fed up to the back teeth

With war-books, war-verse, all the eye-wash stuff

That seems to please the idiots at home.

You know the kind of thing, or used to know:

‘Heroes who laugh while Fritz is strafing them’ –

(I don’t remember that
you
found it fun,

The day they shelled us out of Blauwport Farm!)

‘After the fight. Our cheery wounded. Note

The smile of victory: it won’t come off’ –

(Of course they smile; so’d you, if you’d escaped,

And saw three months of hospital ahead . . .

They don’t smile, much, when they’re shipped back to France!)

‘Out for the Great Adventure’ – (twenty-five

Fat, smirking wasters in some O.T.C.,

Who just avoided the Conscription Act!)

‘A strenuous woman-worker for the Cause’ –

(Miss Trixie Toogood of the Gaiety,

Who helped to pauperise a few Belgiques

In the great cause of self-advertisement!) . . .

Lord knows, the newspapers are bad enough;

But they’ve got some excuse – the censorship –

Helping to keep their readers’ spirits up –

Giving the public what it wants: (besides,

One mustn’t blame the press, the press has done

More than its share to help us win this war –

More than some other people I could name):

But what’s the good of war-books, if they fail

To give civilian-readers an idea

Of what life
is
like in the firing-line . . .