Some Desperate Glory (11 page)

The army, at least initially, brought exhilaration to most of the poets. Ivor Gurney said that after joining the Gloucestershire Regiment in February 1915 he was in a better state of mind than he had been for years. Gurney felt later that it would have been much worse not to have fought, cherishing particularly the comradeship of his fellow soldiers as an affirmation of human goodness. In April 1915, he said he couldn't have been happier anywhere else, although life was hard. He declared that autumn, ‘I cannot remember a time when my health was better…'

Gurney read Edward Thomas's review of Rupert Brooke's poems. He doubted if the poet would have improved had he lived, for the lines had come much too quickly from events not fully experienced. ‘Rupert Brooke soaked it in quickly and gave it out with as great ease.' His own ‘To the Poet Before Battle', written in July or early August, is Brooke-like. But Gurney read adventurously, ranging far. ‘Have you read the Undying Past by Sudermann…?' he asked a friend about a book by the nationalistic German writer Hermann Sudermann. ‘I doubt whether any of our young men could touch it. It is German … everything so intense and volcanic and half-mad…'

Edward Thomas felt happy at Hare Hall Camp in Essex – where Wilfred Owen had also been sent for training, although there's no record of them meeting. Thomas wrote ‘Cock-Crow' soon after his enlistment in July, comparable to Hardy's ‘Men Who March Away'. At Hare Hall, he said that he'd never been ‘so well'. His first poem in the camp was ‘There's Nothing Like the Sun' about the sun's kindness to all things that it touched, except snow, ending with the words ‘till we are dead'. Owen wrote similarly in ‘Futility', during the last spring of his life. ‘This is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong', which Thomas wrote in December 1915, has ‘God save England' not as a cry that might be made by ‘one fat patriot' but as a celebration of the land: ‘an England beautiful'.

Isaac Rosenberg joined the army not from pure patriotism but at least partly to bring financial help to his family. In October 1915, when he enlisted at a Whitechapel recruiting station, he felt that he was doing ‘a criminal thing' in becoming part of the killing. When he told his mother he had joined up, she was upset. He wanted to escape poverty and, as he told Marsh in 1918, ‘I thought if I'd join there would be a separate allowance for my mother.' This was never paid, although by January 1916 his mother was receiving half of Isaac's wages. Rosenberg had hoped not to be part of the fighting machine. But he was too short for the Royal Army Medical Corps and had to join a so-called bantam battalion that was part of the Suffolk Regiment.

The war of Ivor Gurney and Isaac Rosenberg was the private soldier's war, with worse food, worse conditions, worse pay, than the other poets who were officers. But officers went first over the top and were more likely to be killed. Rosenberg was bullied because of his Jewishness. At first, however, as with Gurney, the training and exercise made him healthier than he'd been in the Whitechapel smog. His apocalyptic imagination turned to the future, in the December poem ‘Marching'. The vision is of machine-inflicted carnage, of a mythical war – the field of Mars and charging cavalry – turned into ‘an iron cloud' that rains ‘immortal darkness'. This wasn't the poetry through which the public, or most poets, saw the war in 1915. The dominant spirits were still those of Brooke and Grenfell. Sassoon hadn't yet written his satires. Owen wasn't yet in France. The huge offensive of the next year, 1916, would change everything.

 

1915 POEMS

 

‘
The Unknown Bird
' – Edward Thomas

‘
Absolution
' – Siegfried Sassoon

‘
To the Poet Before Battle
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
Home
' – Edward Thomas

‘
In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)
' – Edward Thomas

‘
Fragment
' – Rupert Brooke

‘
Thanksgiving
' – Robert Nichols

‘
The Owl
' – Edward Thomas

‘
Prayer for Those on the Staff
' – Julian Grenfell

‘
A Private
' – Edward Thomas

‘
Into Battle
' – Julian Grenfell

‘
Battery Moving Up to a New Position from Rest Camp: Dawn
' – Robert Nichols

‘
Marching – As Seen from the Left File
' – Isaac Rosenberg

‘
Such, Such is Death
' – Charles Sorley

‘
Cock-Crow
' – Edward Thomas

‘
When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead
' – Charles Sorley

‘
The Redeemer
' – Siegfried Sassoon

‘
This is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong
' – Edward Thomas

 

 

The Unknown Bird

Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard

If others sang; but others never sang

In the great beech-wood all that May and June.

No one saw him: I alone could hear him

Though many listened. Was it but four years

Ago? or five? He never came again.

 

Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,

Nor could I ever make another hear.

La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off –

As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,

As if the bird or I were in a dream.

Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes

Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still

He sounded. All the proof is – I told men

What I had heard.

 

I never knew a voice,

Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told

The naturalists; but neither had they heard

Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,

I had them clear by heart and have them still.

Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then

As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:

Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say

That it was one or other, but if sad

'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off

For me to taste it. But I cannot tell

If truly never anything but fair

The days were when he sang, as now they seem.

This surely I know, that I who listened then,

      Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering

      A heavy body and a heavy heart,

      Now straightway, if I think of it, become

      Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.

E
DWARD
T
HOMAS

 

 

Absolution

The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes

Till beauty shines in all that we can see.

War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise,

And, fighting for our freedom, we are free.

 

Horror of wounds and anger at the foe,

And loss of things desired; all these must pass.

We are the happy legion, for we know

Time's but a golden wind that shakes the grass.

 

There was an hour when we were loth to part

From life we longed to share no less than others.

Now, having claimed this heritage of heart,

What need we more, my comrades and my brothers?

S
IEGFRIED
S
ASSOON

 

 

To the Poet Before Battle

Now, youth, the hour of thy dread passion comes;

Thy lovely things must all be laid away;

And thou, as others, must face the riven day

Unstirred by rattle of the rolling drums,

Or bugles' strident cry. When mere noise numbs

The sense of being, the sick soul doth sway,

Remember thy great craft's honour, that they may say

Nothing in shame of poets. Then the crumbs

Of praise the little versemen joyed to take

Shall be forgotten; then they must know we are,

For all our skill in words, equal in might

And strong of mettle as those we honoured; make

The name of poet terrible in just war,

And like a crown of honour upon the fight.

I
VOR
G
URNEY

 

 

Home

Often I had gone this way before:

But now it seemed I never could be

And never had been anywhere else;

'Twas home; one nationality

We had, I and the birds that sang,

One memory.

 

They welcomed me. I had come back

That eve somehow from somewhere far:

The April mist, the chill, the calm,

Meant the same thing familiar

And pleasant to us, and strange too,

Yet with no bar.

 

The thrush on the oaktop in the lane

Sang his last song, or last but one;

And as he ended, on the elm

Another had but just begun

His last; they knew no more than I

The day was done.

 

Then past his dark white cottage front

A labourer went along, his tread

Slow, half with weariness, half with ease;

And, through the silence, from his shed

The sound of sawing rounded all

That silence said.

E
DWARD
T
HOMAS

 

 

In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

This Eastertide call into mind the men,

Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should

Have gathered them and will do never again.

E
DWARD
T
HOMAS

 

 

Fragment

I strayed about the deck, an hour, to-night

Under a cloudy moonless sky; and peeped

In at the windows, watched my friends at table,

Or playing cards, or standing in the doorway,

Or coming out into the darkness. Still

No one could see me.

 

I would have thought of them

– Heedless, within a week of battle – in pity,

Pride in their strength and in the weight and firmness

And link'd beauty of bodies, and pity that

This gay machine of splendour 'ld soon be broken,

Thought little of, pashed, scattered …

 

Only, always,

I could but see them – against the lamplight – pass

Like coloured shadows, thinner than filmy glass,

Slight bubbles, fainter than the wave's faint light,

That broke to phosphorous out in the night,

Perishing things and strange ghosts – soon to die

To other ghosts – this one, or that, or I.

R
UPERT
B
ROOKE

 

 

Thanksgiving

Amazement fills my heart to-night,

Amaze and awful fears;

I am a ship that sees no light,

But blindly onward steers.

 

Flung toward heaven's toppling rage,

Sunk between steep and steep,

A lost and wondrous fight I wage

With the embattled deep.

 

I neither know nor care at length

Where drives the storm about;

Only I summon all my strength

And swear to ride it out.

 

Yet give I thanks; despite these wars,

My ship – though blindly blown,

Long lost to sun or moon or stars –

Still stands up alone.

I need no trust in borrowed spars;

My strength is yet my own.

R
OBERT
N
ICHOLS

 

 

The Owl

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;

Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof

Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest

Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

 

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,

Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.

All of the night was quite barred out except

An owl's cry, a most melancholy cry.

 

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,

No merry note, nor cause of merriment,

But one telling me plain what I escaped

And others could not, that night, as in I went.

 

And salted was my food, and my repose,

Salted and sobered too, by the bird's voice

Speaking for all who lay under the stars,

Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

E
DWARD
T
HOMAS

 

 

Prayer for Those on the Staff

Fighting in mud, we turn to Thee

In these dread times of battle, Lord,

To keep us safe, if so may be,

From shrapnel, snipers, shell and sword.

 

Yet not on us – (for we are men

Of meaner clay, who fight in clay) –

But on the Staff, the Upper Ten,

Depends the issue of the Day.

 

The Staff is working with its Brains

While we are sitting in the trench;

The Staff the universe ordains

(Subject to Thee and General French).

 

God, help the Staff – especially

The young ones, many of them sprung

From our high aristocracy;

Their task is hard, and they are young.

 

O Lord, who mad'st all things to be,

And madest some things very good

Please keep the Extra A.D.C.

From horrid scenes, and sights of blood …

 

See that his eggs are newly laid,

Not tinged – as some of them – with green;

And let no nasty draughts invade

The windows of his limousine.

 

When he forgets to buy the bread,

When there are no more minerals,

Preserve his smooth well-oilèd head

From wrath of costive Generals.

 

O Lord, who mad'st all things to be,