Voices of Silence (32 page)

I’m not a soldier natural,

No more than most of us to-day;

I runs a business with a pal

(Meaning the Missis) Fulham way;

Greengrocery – the cabbages

And fruit and things I take meself,

And she has daffs and crocuses

A-smiling on a shelf.

‘Blighty’, I thinks. The doctor knows;

’E talks of punctured damn-the-things.

It’s me for Blighty. Down I goes;

I ain’t a singer, but I sings;

‘Oh, ’oo goes ’ome?’ I sort of ’ums;

‘Oh, ’oo’s for dear old England’s shores?’

And by-and-by Southampton comes –

‘Blighty!’ I says and roars.

I s’pose I thort I done my bit;

I s’pose I thort the War would stop;

I saw myself a-getting fit

With Missis at the little shop;

The same like as it used to be,

The same old markets, same old crowd,

The same old marrers, same old me,

But ’er as proud as proud.

The regiment is where it was,

I’m in the same old ninth platoon;

New faces most, and keen becos

They ’ope the thing is ending soon;

I ain’t complaining, mind, but still,

When later on some newish bloke

Stops one and laughs, ‘A blighty, Bill’,

I’ll wonder, ‘Where’s the joke?’

Same old trenches, same old view,

Same old rats and just as tame,

Same old dug-outs, nothing new,

Same old smell, the very same,

Same old bodies out in front,

Same old
strafe
from 2 till 4,

Same old scratching, same old ’unt,

Same old bloody War.

Ho Lor, it isn’t a dream,

It’s just as it used to be, every bit;

Same old whistle and same old bang

And me out again to be ’it.

A.A. Milne

Yon poisonous clod,

(Look! I could touch it with my stick!) that lies

In the next ulcer of this shell-pock’d land

To that which holds me now;

Yon carrion, with its devil-swarm of flies

That scorn the protest of the limp, cold hand,

Seeing half-rais’d to shield the matted brow;

Those festering rags whose colour mocks the sod;

And, O ye gods, those eyes!

Those staring, staring eyes.

How can I gaze unmov’d on sights like these?

What hideous enervation bids me sit

Here in the shelter of this neighbour pit,

Untroubled, unperturbèd, at mine ease,

And idly, coldly scan

This fearsome relic of what once was man?

Alas! what icy spell hath set

The seal upon warm pity? Whence

This freezing up of every sense?

I think not I lack pitifulness; – I know

That my affections were not ever so;

My heart is not of stone! – And yet

There’s something in the feeling of this place,

There’s something in the breathing of this air,

Which lets me gaze upon that awful face

Quite passionless; which lets me meet that stare

Most quietly. – Nay, I could touch that hair,

And sicken not to feel it coil and cling

About my fingers. Did occasion press,

Lo! I could spurn it with my foot – that thing

Which lies so nigh! –

Spurn it light-heartedly and pass it by.

So cold, so hard, so seeming pitiless

Am I!

And yet not I alone; – they know full well,

These others, that strange blunting of the heart:

They know the working of that devil’s-art,

Which drains a man’s soul dry,

And kills out sensibility!

They know it too, and they can tell

That this distemper strange and fell,

This hideous blotting of the sense

Creeps on one like a pestilence!

It is some deadly Power of ill

Which overbears all human will!

Some awful influence of the sky,

Some dreadful power of the place,

Wherein we live and breathe and move,

Which withers up the roots of Love

And dries the very springs of Grace.

It is the place! –
For, lo, we are in hell
.

That is the reason why!

And things that curse and writhe, and things that die,

And fearful, festering things that rot,

– They have their place here. They are not

Like unfamiliar portents hurl’d

From out some monstrous, alien world.

This is their place, their native atmosphere,

Their home; – they are in keeping here!

And, being in hell,

All we, who breathe this tense, fierce air,

– On us too, lies the spell,

Something of that soul-deadening blight we share;

That even the eye is, in a sense, made one

With what it looks upon;

That even the brain, in some strange fashion wrought,

Twists its familiar thought

To forms and shapes uncouth;

And even the heart – the heart that once did feel

The surge of tears and pity’s warm appeal –

Doth quite forget her ancient ruth,

Can look on piteous sights unmov’d,

As though, forsooth, poor fool! she had never lov’d.

They say we change, we men that come out here!

But do they know how great that change?

And do they know how darkly strange

Are those deep tidal waves that roll

Within the currents of the soul,

Down in the very founts of life,

Out here?

How can they know it? – Mother, sister, wife,

Friends, comrades, whoso else is dear,

How can they know? – Yet, haply, half in fear,

Seeing a long-time absent face once more,

Something they note which was not there before,

– Perchance, a certain habit of the eye,

Perchance, an alter’d accent in the speech –

Showing he is not what he was of yore.

Such little, curious signs they note. Yet each

Doth in its little, nameless way

Some portion of the truth betray.

Such tokens do not lie!

The change is there; the change is true!

And so, what wonder if the outward view

Do to the eye of Love unroll

Some hint of a transformèd soul?

– Some hint; for even Love dare peep

No further in that troubled deep;

And things there be too stern and dark

To live in any outward mark

The things that they alone can tell,

Like Dante, who have walk’d in hell.

E. Armine Wodehouse

I sat upon the fire-step – by my side

The adjutant – next him an F.O.O.

The trench was an old German one, reversed.

The parapet was made of many things

That should not have been there at all – the time

Was zero minus twenty: and the noise

That had been horrible enough before,

Grew to an unimaginable pitch.

It seemed as tho’ I had no eyes, no mouth,

No sense of sight or taste, no power of speech

But only hearing – hearing multiplied

To the last limit of a dizzy brain.

The noise was everywhere about – but mostly

Above us: and was made of every sort

Of bang, crash, whistle, whine, thump, shriek and thud.

If every devil from the pit of hell,

Each with an unmelodious instrument,

Each vieing with the other in making noise,

Had flown above me in the tortured air,

One great infernal pandemonium,

I do not think they would have made a tenth

Of the long seismic polyphony that passed

Over our heads: I saw the adjutant’s

Mouth open, and his lips move as in speech,

But no words came that I could hear, because

My hearing was entirely occupied.

The trench-wall rocked – then dust and clods of earth

Fell all about me – and I was aware

Of fat grey smoke-wreaths and an acrid smell.

And, dimly, as one hears a metronome,

In punctuating stabs of sharper sound

Thro’ a great orchestrated symphony,

I heard the German counter-barrage burst

On the high ground about us, saw my watch

Marking three minutes past the zero-hour,

Sat for another unremembered space,

Wondering what would happen if a shell

Fell in the trench beside me: felt again

By some sixth sense rather than thro’ my ears,

That there were fewer shells – that they had ceased.

Climbed on the parapet – and – north by east

From the torn hill of Ginchy Telegraph –

Saw – aye, and seeing cheered exultantly –

The long well-ordered lines of our advance

From Bouleaux Wood to distant Gueudecourt

Sweep from the valley underneath my feet

Up the long slopes to Morval and Les Bœufs.

F.W.D. Bendall

Forty feet down

A room dug out of the clay,

Roofed and strutted and tiled complete;

The floor still bears the mark of feet

(Feet that never will march again!)

The doorposts’ edge is rubbed and black

(Shoulders that never will lift a pack

Stooping in through the wind and rain!)

Forty feet from the light of day,

Forty feet down.

A week ago

Sixteen men lived there,

Lived, and drank, and slept, and swore,

Smoked, and shivered, and cursed the war,

Wrote to their people at home maybe,

While the rafters shook to the thudding guns;

Husbands, fathers, and only sons,

Sixteen fellows like you and me

Lived in that cavern twelve foot square

A week ago.

Into the dark

Did a cry ring out on the air,

Or died they stiffly and unafraid

In the crash and flame of the hand-grenade?

We took the trench and its mounded dead,

And the tale of their end is buried deep,

A secret which sixteen corpses keep

With the sixteen souls which gasped and fled

Up forty steps of battered stair,

Into the dark.

Forty feet down,

Veiled from the decent sky,

The clay of them turns to its native clay,

And the stench is a blot in the face of day.

Men are a murderous breed, it seems,

And these, maybe, are quieter so;

Their spirits have gone where such things go;

Nor worms nor wars can trouble their dreams;

And their sixteen twisted bodies lie

Forty feet down.

J.L. Crommelin Brown

It’s said that our fight with the Kaiser

Is the wettest affray since the Flood,

At least every day makes us wiser

In the infinite samples of mud.

We’ve mud on our knees and our faces,

We’ve mud on our ears and our hair,

We’ve mud on our tunics and braces,

On everything else that we wear.

We’ve mud on our sugar and coffee,

We’ve mud on our beef and our bread,

We seem to be tramping through toffee,

We’ve mud from our toes to our head.

We’ve mud that is dreadfully sticky

(Its depth may be more than a foot),

We’ve mud that is chalky and tricky,

We’ve mud that is liquefied soot.

At times we have mud that’s like treacle,

At times it is thinner than soup,

At times many men by a squeak’ll

Just fail to do ‘looping the loop’.

No matter what else may befall us,

No matter how smooth be our path,

When home the authorities call us,

The first thing we’ll need is a
BATH
.

Somewhere in France, November 1916.

Alfred Miller