Some Desperate Glory (19 page)

Nineteen-seventeen brought two new anthologies.
The Muse at Arms
, edited by E. B. Osborne (‘an attempt to show the British warrior's soul'), offered a conventional view, with stirring verses and not much to stir the thoughts; Sassoon was represented by ‘Absolution' (a call to arms of 1915) and ‘The Redeemer', a front-line work but less sharp than the later ‘Blighters'. Osborne gave Robert Nichols more poems than any other writer, reflecting the view that this was the new Rupert Brooke.

Edward Marsh's new
Georgian Poetry
was more adventurous. His 1915 volume, too early for war poetry, had sold 19,000 copies, a startling amount, and was dedicated to two poets who had died that year, Brooke and James Elroy Flecker. In 1917 the editor's taste for verse drama is shown in an extract from ‘Moses' by Isaac Rosenberg, and there were also war poems by Sassoon, Graves and Robert Nichols, the Sassoon selection including ‘They', ‘The Kiss', ‘The Death Bed' and ‘In the Pink' and only one ‘happy warrior' work, ‘To Victory'. Marsh showed his reverence for rank with an embarrassingly bad poem by the former Prime Minister's son Raymond Asquith, who'd been killed on the Somme.

The poets began to be lionized. Sassoon and Nichols read in November in the drawing room of the London hostess Mrs Colefax, the poems interspersed by Ivor Novello at the piano; and in December, Nichols read at Mrs Colefax's again, this time with Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley. A young officer in the audience, Bernard Freyberg, who'd won the Victoria Cross, disapproved; it was ‘offensive,' Freyberg declared, for Siegfried Sassoon ‘to come back and say, I can't lead men to their death any more', which claimed ‘a monopoly of virtue, as if other officers liked doing it, because they acquiesced in their duty'. Nichols, by this time an experienced and keen reader, didn't always impress. Huxley was scathing, declaring that he ‘raved and screamed and hooted his filthy war poems like a lyceum villain who hasn't learnt how to act'.

Aldous Huxley was moving towards pacifism; Nichols, Sassoon and Owen weren't pacifists. All, however, wanted the war to end. In Britain there was some movement towards this. H. G. Wells's Mr Britling pleads for some form of world government, or at least an understanding of German demands. In August 1917, Professor Alfred Pollard, an eminent constitutional historian, said that wartime controls were making Britain as regimented as Prussia. In November, Lord Lansdowne, a former Foreign Secretary, Leader of the House of Lords and Viceroy of India, wrote to the
Daily Telegraph
calling for a negotiated peace.

For peace, there had to be a response from the other side. Germany seemed strong at the end of 1917, with all her troops fighting on foreign soil. After the Bolshevik revolution of October the Germans began negotiations for a treaty with the new Soviet Russia that would take vast swathes of land and release the armies from the eastern front. In the Middle East, the Turks had humiliated the British; in Flanders, the Ypres and Passchendaele offensive had ended inconclusively at huge cost. The military dictators that ruled Germany – Hindenburg, Ludendorff and their cipher the Emperor – still thought the war could be won before enough Americans came over. The quickest and surest way for the Allies to end the fighting was to surrender.

The war was becoming a test of endurance, with the grind at the front ever more relentless. In November, Isaac Rosenberg was at Cambrai, back with the 11th King's Own, which attacked Bourlon Wood when flu kept the poet in hospital. He read Marsh's new Georgian anthology, with his piece from ‘Moses' and eight poems by Siegfried Sassoon, and reflected that ‘Sassoon has power.' From his sick bed, Rosenberg asked for watercolours so that he might paint; and wrote ‘Girl to Soldier on Leave' and a fresh version of a verse play. By the start of January 1918, he was well enough to return to the line. ‘I am back in the trenches which are terrible now,' he told Marsh. ‘We spend most of our time pulling each other out of the mud. I am not fit at all.' Christ, he thought, had not suffered as much as this.

 

1917 POEMS

‘
After-Glow
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
Song
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
Soldier: Twentieth Century
' – Isaac Rosenberg

‘
Blighters
' – Siegfried Sassoon

‘
Ballad of the Three Spectres
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
Servitude
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
Louse Hunting
' – Isaac Rosenberg

‘
Dead Men's Dump
' – Isaac Rosenberg

‘
The General
' – Siegfried Sassoon

‘
Returning, We Hear the Larks
' – Isaac Rosenberg

‘
Sergeant-Major Money
' – Robert Graves

‘
To Any Dead Officer
' – Siegfried Sassoon

‘
Vlamertinghe: Passing the Chateau
' – Edmund Blunden

‘
Counter-Attack
' – Siegfried Sassoon

‘
To the Prussians of England
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
Anthem for Doomed Youth
' – Wilfred Owen

‘
To his Love
' – Ivor Gurney

‘
I Saw his Round Mouth's Crimson
' – Wilfred Owen

‘
Photographs (To Two Scots Lads)
' – Ivor Gurney

 

 

After-Glow

(To F. W. Harvey)

Out of the smoke and dust of the little room

With tea-talk loud and laughter of happy boys,

I passed into the dusk. Suddenly the noise

Ceased with a shock, left me alone in the gloom,

To wonder at the miracle hanging high

Tangled in twigs, the silver crescent clear.

Time passed from mind. Time died, and then we were

Once more at home together, you and I.

 

The elms with arms of love wrapped us in shade

Who watched the ecstatic west with one desire,

One soul uprapt; and still another fire

Consumed us, and our joy yet greater made:

That Bach should sing for us, mix us in one

The joy of firelight and the sunken sun.

I
VOR
G
URNEY

 

 

Song

Only the wanderer

      Knows England's graces,

Or can anew see clear

      Familiar faces.

 

And who loves joy as he

      That dwells in shadows?

Do not forget me quite,

      O Severn meadows.

I
VOR
G
URNEY

 

 

Soldier: Twentieth Century

I love you, great new Titan!

Am I not you?

Napoleon or Caesar

Out of you grew.

 

Out of the unthinkable torture,

Eyes kissed by death,

Won back to the world again,

Lost and won in a breath,

 

Cruel men are made immortal.

Out of your pain born.

They have stolen the sun's power

With their feet on your shoulders worn.

 

Let them shrink from your girth,

That has outgrown the pallid days,

When you slept like Circe's swine,

Or a word in the brain's ways.

I
SAAC
R
OSENBERG

 

 

Blighters

The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin

And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks

Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;

‘We're sure the Kaiser loves our dear old Tanks!'

 

I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls,

Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ‘Home, sweet Home',

And there'd be no more jokes in Music-halls

To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

S
IEGFRIED
S
ASSOON

 

 

Ballad of the Three Spectres

As I went up by Ovillers

      In mud and water cold to the knee,

There went three jeering, fleering spectres,

      That walked abreast and talked of me.

 

The first said, ‘Here's a right brave soldier

      That walks the dark unfearingly;

Soon he'll come back on a fine stretcher,

      And laughing for a nice Blighty.'

 

The second, ‘Read his face, old comrade,

      No kind of lucky chance I see;

One day he'll freeze in mud to the marrow,

      Then look his last on Picardie.'

 

Though bitter the word of these first twain

      Curses the third spat venomously;

‘He'll stay untouched till the war's last dawning

      Then live one hour of agony.'

 

Liars the first two were. Behold me

      At sloping arms by one – two – three,

Waiting the time I shall discover

      Whether the third spake verity.

I
VOR
G
URNEY

 

 

Servitude

If it were not for England, who would bear

This heavy servitude one moment more?

To keep a brothel, sweep and wash the floor

Of filthiest hovels were noble to compare

With this brass-cleaning life. Now here, now there

Harried in foolishness, scanned curiously o'er

By fools made brazen by conceit, and store

Of antique witticisms thin and bare.

 

Only the love of comrades sweetens all,

Whose laughing spirit will not be outdone.

As night-watching men wait for the sun

To hearten them, so wait I on such boys

As neither brass nor Hell-fire may appal,

Nor guns, nor sergeant-major's bluster and noise.

I
VOR
G
URNEY

 

 

Louse Hunting

Nudes – stark aglisten

Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces of fiends

And raging limbs

Whirl over the floor one fire,

For a shirt verminously busy

Yon soldier tore from his throat

With oaths

Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice.

And soon the shirt was aflare

Over the candle he'd lit while we lay.

Then we all sprang up and stript

To hunt the vermin brood.

Soon like a demons' pantomime

The place was raging.

See the silhouettes agape,

See the gibbering shadows

Mixed with the battled arms on the wall.

See gargantuan hooked fingers

Dug in supreme flesh

To smutch the supreme littleness.

See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling

Because some wizard vermin

Charmed from the quiet this revel

When our ears were half lulled

By the dark music

Blown from Sleep's trumpet.

I
SAAC
R
OSENBERG

 

 

Dead Man's Dump

The plunging limbers over the shattered track

Racketed with their rusty freight,

Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,

And the rusty stakes like sceptres old

To stay the flood of brutish men

Upon our brothers dear.

 

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead

But pained them not, though their bones crunched,

Their shut mouths made no moan,

They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,

Man born of man, and born of woman,

And shells go crying over them

From night till night and now.

 

Earth has waited for them,

All the time of their growth

Fretting for their decay:

Now she has them at last!

In the strength of their strength

Suspended – stopped and held.

 

What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit

Earth! have they gone into you?

Somewhere they must have gone,

And flung on your hard back

Is their soul's sack,

Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.

Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

 

None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass,

Or stood aside for the half used life to pass

Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,

When the swift iron burning bee

Drained the wild honey of their youth.

 

What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre,

Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,

Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,

Immortal seeming ever?

Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,

A fear may choke in our veins

And the startled blood may stop.

 

The air is loud with death,

The dark air spurts with fire,

The explosions ceaseless are.

Timelessly now, some minutes past,

Those dead strode time with vigorous life,

Till the shrapnel called ‘an end!'

But not to all. In bleeding pangs

Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,

Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

 

A man's brains splattered on

A stretcher-bearer's face;

His shook shoulders slipped their load,

But when they bent to look again

The drowning soul was sunk too deep

For human tenderness.

 

They left this dead with the older dead,

Stretched at the cross roads.

 

Burnt black by strange decay

Their sinister faces lie

The lid over each eye,

The grass and coloured clay

More motion have than they,

Joined to the great sunk silences.

 

Here is one not long dead;