Some Desperate Glory (30 page)

 

But there he was, haunting heart-known ancestral ground;

Near to all Nature; and in that nearness somehow strange;

Whose native humour, human-simple yet profound,

And strength of spirit no calamity could change.

To whom, designed for countrified contentments, came

Honours unsought and unrewarding foreign fame:

And, at the last, that darkened world wherein he moved

In memoried deprivation of life once learnt and loved.

S
IEGFRIED
S
ASSOON

 

 

The Last Day of Leave (1916)

We five looked out over the moor

At rough hills blurred with haze, and a still sea:

Our tragic day, bountiful from the first.

 

We would spend it by the lily lake

(High in a fold beyond the farthest ridge),

Following the cart-track till it faded out.

 

The time of berries and bell-heather;

Yet all that morning nobody went by

But shepherds and one old man carting turfs.

 

We were in love: he with her, she with him,

And I, the youngest one, the odd man out,

As deep in love with a yet nameless muse.

 

No cloud; larks and heath-butterflies,

And herons undisturbed fishing the streams;

A slow cool breeze that hardly stirred the grass.

 

When we hurried down the rocky slope,

A flock of ewes galloping off in terror,

There shone the waterlilies, yellow and white.

 

Deep water and a shelving bank.

Off went our clothes and in we went, all five,

Diving like trout between the lily groves.

 

The basket had been nobly filled:

Wine and fresh rolls, chicken and pineapple –

Our braggadocio under threat of war.

 

The fire on which we boiled our kettle

We fed with ling and rotten blackthorn root;

And the coffee tasted memorably of peat.

 

Two of us might stray off together

But never less than three kept by the fire,

Focus of our uncertain destinies.

 

We spoke little, our minds in tune –

A sigh or laugh would settle any theme;

The sun so hot it made the rocks quiver.

 

But when it rolled down level with us,

Four pairs of eyes sought mine as if appealing

For a blind-fate-aversive afterword: –

 

‘Do you remember the lily lake?

We were all there, all five of us in love,

Not one yet killed, widowed or broken-hearted.'

R
OBERT
G
RAVES

 

 

Report on Experience

I have been young, and now am not too old;

And I have seen the righteous forsaken,

His health, his honour and his quality taken.

This is not what we were formerly told.

 

I have seen a green country, useful to the race,

Knocked silly with guns and mines, its villages vanished,

Even the last rat and the last kestrel banished –

God bless us all, this was peculiar grace.

 

I knew Seraphina; Nature gave her hue,

Glance, sympathy, note, like one from Eden.

I saw her smile warp, heard her lyric deaden;

She turned to harlotry; – this I took to be new.

 

Say what you will, our God sees how they run.

These disillusions are His curious proving

That He loves humanity and will go on loving;

Over there are faith, life, virtue in the sun.

E
DMUND
B
LUNDEN

 

 

Recalling War

Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean,

The track aches only when the rain reminds.

The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood,

The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm.

The blinded man sees with his ears and hands

As much or more than once with both his eyes.

Their war was fought these twenty years ago

And now assumes the nature-look of time,

As when the morning traveller turns and views

His wild night-stumbling carved into a hill.

 

What, then, was war? No mere discord of flags

But an infection of the common sky

That sagged ominously upon the earth

Even when the season was the airiest May.

Down pressed the sky, and we, oppressed, thrust out

Boastful tongue, clenched fist and valiant yard.

Natural infirmities were out of mode,

For Death was young again: patron alone

Of healthy dying, premature fate-spasm.

 

Fear made fine bed-fellows. Sick with delight

At life's discovered transitoriness,

Our youth became all-flesh and waived the mind.

Never was such antiqueness of romance,

Such tasty honey oozing from the heart.

And old importances came swimming back –

Wine, meat, log-fires, a roof over the head,

A weapon at the thigh, surgeons at call.

Even there was a use again for God –

A word of rage in lack of meat, wine, fire,

In ache of wounds beyond all surgeoning.

 

War was return of earth to ugly earth,

War was foundering of sublimities,

Extinction of each happy art and faith

By which the world had still kept head in air,

Protesting logic or protesting love,

Until the unendurable moment struck –

The inward scream, the duty to run mad.

 

And we recall the merry ways of guns –

Nibbling the walls of factory and church

Like a child, piecrust; felling groves of trees

Like a child, dandelions with a switch.

Machine-guns rattle toy-like from a hill,

Down in a row the brave tin-soldiers fall:

A sight to be recalled in elder days

When learnedly the future we devote

To yet more boastful visions of despair.

R
OBERT
G
RAVES

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX OF POEMS

INDEX

 

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the following and to their representatives for allowing me to use material that is still in copyright: the Blunden family and David Higham Associates (Edmund Blunden); the Graves family, the Carcanet Press and United Artists (Robert Graves); Mrs Anne Charlton (Robert Nichols); the executors of the late George Sassoon and the Barbara Levy Literary Agency (Siegfried Sassoon). This book's existence owes a huge amount to Kate Harvey and Kris Doyle of Picador in London and to Jonathan Galassi of Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York; my thanks to them, and to Peter James, its brilliant copy editor. My agent, Gill Coleridge, has been most supportive throughout. My wife, Caroline, has, as always, given me a calm and loving atmosphere in which to write.

 

Notes

The page numbers for the notes that appear in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

P
RELUDE

‘hated' the army: Nicholas Mosley,
Julian Grenfell
(London 1976), p. 213.

‘Nobody ever told me': Isaac Rosenberg,
Collected Works
, ed. Ian Parsons (London 1979), p. 181.

‘the fiendish persistence': Rosenberg,
Selected Poems and Letters
, ed. Jean Liddiard (London 2003), p. 122.

‘it is the same':
ibid.

‘that yearning exotic music': Max Egremont,
Siegfried Sassoon
(London 2005), p. 61.

‘It may hold off': H. G. Wells,
Mr Britling Sees It Through
(London 1985 edn), pp. 75–6.

‘Were we so totally unfit?': E. M. Forster,
The Longest Journey
(London 1907), p. 98.

‘the peace of Europe':
Manchester Guardian
, 30 July 1914.

‘the gospel of joy': Richard Davenport-Hines,
Ettie: The Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough
(London 2008), pp. 6–7.

‘this utterly abominable': Mosley,
Julian Grenfell
, p. 206.

‘the utter beastliness':
ibid.

‘ugly cataracts of brick': Forster,
The Longest Journey
, p. 336.

‘indolent days leaving': Wells,
Mr Britling
, p. 116.

‘intimations of the future':
ibid.
, p. 47.

‘everlasting children':
ibid.

‘Nine-tenths of the Tradition': Christopher Hassall,
Edward Marsh
(London 1959), p. 17.

‘I HATE the upper classes': Rupert Brooke and James Strachey,
Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey 1905–1914
,
ed. Keith Hale (New Haven and London 1998), p. 49.

‘great, easy-going, tolerant': Ford Madox Ford,
Return to Yesterday
(Manchester 1999 edn), p. 312.

‘Patriotism for … Great, noble … Thank God I'm English': Forster,
The Longest Journey
, pp. 55–6.

‘a civilized out-of-door life': A. G. Bradley
et al.
,
A History of Marlborough College
(London 1923), pp. 169–70.

‘a tale of Harrow': Wilfred Owen,
Collected Letters
, ed. Harold Owen and John Bell (Oxford 1967), p. 535.

‘the best piece of Nation':
ibid.
, p. 570.

‘an embarrassment': see Peter Parker,
The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos
(London 1987), p. 193.

‘the lower classes': C. H. Sorley,
The Letters of Charles Sorley
, ed. W. R. Sorley (Cambridge 1916), p. 38.

‘five years':
ibid.
, p. 129.

‘England is seen':
ibid.
, p. 209.

‘the poet of the tramp':
ibid.
, p. 45.

‘undoubtedly a poet':
ibid.
, p. 46.

‘all through the closing':
ibid.
, p. 52.

‘Even the weeks': Owen,
Collected Letters
, p. 352.

‘the roar could be': Sorley,
Letters
, p. 93.

‘I felt that perhaps':
ibid.
, p.
97.

‘it is chiefly':
ibid.
, p. 102.

‘simple day system':
ibid.
, p. 103.

‘there is something':
ibid.

‘in the midst':
ibid.
, p. 198.

‘a bigot and a braggart':
ibid.
, p. 192.

‘spent his life':
ibid.
, p. 93.

‘inconceivable that the army':
ibid.
, p. 132.

‘Down with the Serbs':
ibid.
, p. 213.

‘wayside crucifixes': Robert Graves,
Goodbye to All That
(London 1995 edn), p. 32.

‘hellish': Anne and William Charlton,
Putting Poetry First: A Life of Robert Nichols 1893–1944
(Norwich 2003), p. 16.

‘all she stood for':
ibid.
, p. 39.

‘I have read the whole': Christopher Hassall,
Rupert Brooke
(London 1964), p. 78.

‘That is exactly what': Leonard Woolf,
Beginning Again
(London 1964), pp. 18–19.

‘with a hysterical despair': Hassall,
Rupert Brooke
, p. 128.

‘a Shelleyan eagerness':
ibid.
, p.
240.

‘a kind people': Rupert Brooke,
Collected Poems, with a Memoir
, ed. Edward Marsh (London 1918), p. lix.

‘German culture':
ibid.
, p. lxiii.

‘I renounce England':
ibid.
, p. lxiv.

‘by the organ pealing': Hermione Lee,
Virginia Woolf
(London 1996), p. 296.

‘under that irresponsible': Hassall,
Rupert Brooke
, p. 438.

Brooke on Dymock: Matthew Hollis,
Now All Roads Lead to France
(London 2011), p. 117.

‘all was foretold': Edward Thomas,
The Annotated Collected Poems
, ed. Edna Longley (Tarset 2008), p. 203.

‘I was born to be a ghost':
ibid.
, p. 202.

‘I sat thinking about ways': Hollis,
Now All Roads
, p. 21.

‘the simple and the primitive':
ibid.
, p. 39.

‘I believe he has taken':
ibid.
, p. 97.

‘a mild fellow':
ibid.
, p.
62.

‘absolutely delightful': Egremont,
Sassoon
, p. 62.

‘the look of latent force': Michael Hurd,
The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney
(Oxford 1978), p. 33.

‘London is worse':
ibid.
, p.
45.

‘Your best poems': Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden,
Selected Letters of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden 1919–1967
, ed. Carol Z. Rothkopf, 3 vols (London 2012), vol. I, p. 87.

‘golden security': Simon Nowell-Smith (ed.),
Edwardian England 1901–1914
(Oxford 1964), pp. 572–3.

‘C.H. was never out': Barry Webb,
Edmund Blunden
(New Haven and London 1990), p. 42.

‘no sort of feeling':
ibid.
, p. 27.

‘deep gentleness':
ibid.
, p. 44.

‘it looks as though':
ibid.

‘I feel my own life': Owen,
Collected Letters
, p. 282.