Church wasn’t changed on Christmas Day –
Old Westmacott took round the plate;
The old Major stood up stiff and straight,
And it seems somehow just like play
Saluting him, retired an’ all.
Home – no, the War, I think – seems small . . .
This evening I go back to France
And take my chance.
W.W. Blair Fish
English Leave
Kneel then in the warm lamplight, O my Love,
Your dear dark head against my quiet breast,
And take me in your arms again and so
Hush my tired heart to rest;
And say that of all the glories you have won
My love’s most dear and best.
Only to-night I want you all my own,
(Tomorrow I will laugh and bid you go,)
That if these fourteen days of heaven on earth
Are all the love-time we shall ever know
I may remember I am yours: My Dear,
Hold me still closer, still . . . and tell me so.
May Cannan
The Train for the Front
‘Good-bye. You’ll write and tell me how you are?’
‘Rather. It looks as if it will be wet.’
‘Yes, so it does. I’m glad I’ve got the car.
Here is your pipe, in case I should forget.’
‘Oh, thanks; I think we’ll soon be starting now.
We’re very late, unless my watch is fast.
What? Yes, these engines make a beastly row;
Good-bye, old girl, good-bye, we’re off at last.’
* * *
And so they go the way all Britons tread,
Leaving the things that they feel most unsaid.
On Returning to the Front after Leave
Apart sweet women (for whom Heaven be blessed),
Comrades, you cannot think how thin and blue
Look the leftovers of mankind that rest,
Now that the cream has been skimmed off in you.
War has its horrors, but has this of good –
That its sure processes sort out and bind
Brave hearts in one intrepid brotherhood
And leave the shams and imbeciles behind.
Now turn we joyful to the great attacks,
Not only that we face in a fair field
Our valiant foe and all his deadly tools,
But also that we turn disdainful backs
On that poor world we scorn yet die to shield –
That world of cowards, hypocrites, and fools.
Alan Seeger
FIFTEEN
Spring and Early Summer 1917
Calls for peace, the Battle of Arras, the retreat to the Hindenberg Line, the old battlefields
In December 1916 the Germans began to make moves towards a negotiated peace. The British believed that, if such discussions were to have any hope of creating a lasting peace, essential conditions of restitution, reparation and a guarantee against repetition must first be laid down. President Woodrow Wilson requested from both sides a statement of terms, meanwhile proposing an immediate gathering of peace delegates. Germany ignored his request to state their terms, but agreed to talks. On 30 December the British turned down the proposition, believing that the German proposals were empty and insincere.
Meanwhile, living conditions in Germany were very bad as a result of the allied blockade and the exceptionally hard winter. In July 1917 the Reichstag passed a peace resolution, which proposed that overtures should be made towards a negotiated end to the fighting, a move that angered their military high command. To the British, the resolution appeared to exonerate the Germans from any blame for the outbreak of the war, accusing the Allies of threats of conquest and domination in the face of Germany’s need to defend its freedom and independence. The two sides were far apart and the proposals came to nothing, but there were many who despaired at the endlessness of hostilities.
The Allied advances of the Battle of the Somme had broken the strongly fortified German line, and so in mid-March the Germans began to retreat to a new defensive position, the Siegfried or Hindenburg Line, laying waste the country across which they moved. As the British and French came up out of their trenches and advanced in open warfare, stretches of the old Somme battlefields fell into their hands without a fight. In April the British attacked at Arras and the Canadians captured the strategically important ridge of Vimy.
[There was a little Hun, and at war he tried his hand]
There was a little Hun, and at war he tried his hand,
And while that Hun was winning war was fine you understand,
But when the others hit him back he shouted in alarm,
A little drop of peace wouldn’t do me any harm.
More Peace-Talk in Berlin
To the War-Lord
‘How beautiful upon the mountain-tops
Their feet would sound, the messengers of Peace!’
So into neutral ears your unction drops,
Hinting a pious hope that War may cease –
War, with its dreadful waste
Which never suited your pacific taste.
Strange you should turn so suddenly humane,
So sick of ravage and the reek of gore!
Dare we assume that Verdun’s long-drawn strain
Makes you perspire at each Imperial pore?
Or that your nerve’s mislaid
Through cardiac trouble caused by our Blockade?
You thought to finish on the high wave’s crest;
To say, ‘These lands that ’neath our sceptre lie –
Such as we want we’ll keep, and chuck the rest,
And to the vanquished, having drained ’em dry,
We will consent to give,
Out of our clemency, the right to live.’
Then you came down a long, long way, and said,
‘For pure desire of Peace, and that alone,
We’ll deem the dead past buried with its dead,
Taking, in triumph’s hour, a generous tone;
Uplift the fallen foe
And affably restore the status quo.’
Fool’s talk and idle. In this Dance of Death
The man who called the piper’s tune must pay,
Nor can he stop at will for want of breath.
Though War you chose, and chose its opening day,
It lies not in your power
To stay its course or fix its final hour.
Owen Seaman
The Kaiser’s Cry for Peace
Thou shalt have peace enough when war is o’er,
When nations gather at the conference
Which Time shall hold to weigh thy great offence
Against the crimes of History’s full store:
Thou then shalt stand in all thy guilt before
The human virtues, dumb of all defence,
Confronting Youth whom thy mad violence
Has hounded through death’s youth-excluding door.
Cry not for Peace! Thou art her murderer!
Thou’st violated nature with thy breath
Of war – nature, mother of peace and light.
Thy god’s the bloody god of massacre,
The raging dragon, breathing blasting death,
Blackening the dawn just breaking out of night.
William Dowsing
War Aims
There are our terms – concise, emphatic, plain;
Take them or leave them – we’ll not compromise
Though all the flower of our young manhood dies.
’Tis all or nothing. We will still maintain
The contest till we have the victory,
Or till our final shilling and last man
Shall be expended. That’s our simple plan,
Free of all guile or ambiguity.
Peace on our terms then – or no peace at all,
And we fight on, however high the cost.
What matter if more million lives be lost;
What matter if our race and Empire fall,
So Lothringen be called once more Lorraine
And Hartmannsweilerskopf be French again?
W.N. Ewer
The Woman who Shrieked against Peace
Abundant woman panting there,
Whose breast is flecked with spots of grease
That splutter from your laboured hair,
O dew-lapped woman, you who reek
Of stout and steak and fish and chips,
Why does the short indignant shriek
Come toppling from your fleshy lips;
Because, poor smitten fool, I dare
To breathe the outcast name of Peace?
And shall your flesh grow less to view,
And shall your chubby arms grow thin,
And shall you miss your stout and stew,
The bracelets which you wear so well,
If blinded boys no more shall creep
Along the scorching roads to Hell,
If thick red blood no more shall steep
Green fields in France, nor corpses smell;
If Peace send down her blasting blight,
O shall it spoil your sleep at night
And shall you lose your treble chin?
Louis Golding
Profit and Loss
Now William Hohenzollern, the King of all the Huns,
Had quite a lot of country and he also had six sons,
Of money too he’d plenty and a larder fully stocked –
In fact he’d all the wanted – so at grief and care he mocked.
Karl Baumberg lived in comfort with his frau and family,
His sons they numbered seven, and his daughters numbered three;
They’d just enough of everything and wished for nothing more,
(This happy time, you understand, was just before the war).
For reasons which they never knew Karl Baumberg’s seven sons
Were quickly clad in suits of grey and labelled ‘food for guns’.
Two rot in mud near Wipers, and another at Verdun,
The Somme accounted for a brace, and Passchendaele for one.
The one remaining to old Karl is minus both his arms,
His fighting days are finished, and he’s sick of war’s alarms;
He grinds his teeth with fury, while old Karl hunts round for food,
And his mother freely curses both the Kaiser and his brood.
His one remaining sister (death has claimed the other two)
Out of water and a horse bone tries to make a dish of stew.
Comes a mandate ‘Our great Kaiser has another victory won,
Fly your flags and cheer, by order, for the victory of Verdun.’
Then old Karl, whose waking senses grasp a fact both strange and new,
That the victories are worthless if they bring no end in view,
And he curses Kaiser William who’s the King of all the Huns,
But his frau is quietly sobbing for – the Kaiser has six sons.
Arras
I went and walked by Arras
In the dim uncertain night;
I went and walked by Arras
In the dazzling noonday light;
First I saw a fairy glamour,
Later, ’twas another sight.
Out by Arras in the night-time,
Star-shells in the starlit sky
Showered like wild silver raindrops
From a fountain scattered high,
Like the silver scales of fishes
In the tideway curving by.
Out by Arras in the night-time
There were glints of red and green
Like the glow of fairy camp-fires
In some hidden high wood seen,
Like the day-dawn of the night-land
Where no man has ever been.
Out by Arras in the day-time
There stretched broad the sun-parched sand:
Where together men and torture
Lived with foul death hand in hand,
Horror-stricken, God-forsaken,
There stretched far the war-cursed land.
And upon the stretches barren
Far I saw the thousands lie
That the wind of war had blasted,
Sweeping on without a sigh;
In the hollows, huddled hundreds
Who were not afraid to die.
John Peterson
Zero!
(‘Zero-hour’ – commonly known as ‘Zero’ – is the hour fixed for the opening of an Infantry attack.)
I woke at dawn and flung the window wide.
Beneath the hedge the lazy river ran;
And dusky barges idled down the tide;
In the laburnum-tree the birds began;
And it was May and half the world in flower;
I saw the sun creep over an Eastward brow,
And thought ‘It may be, this is Zero-hour;
Somewhere the lads are “going over” now’.
Somewhere the guns speak sudden on the height
And build for miles their battlement of fire;
Somewhere the men that shivered all the night
Peer anxious forth and scramble through the wire,
Swarm slowly out to where the Maxims bark,
And green and red the panic rockets rise;
And Hell is loosed, and shyly sings the lark,
And the red sun climbs sadly up the skies.
Now they have won some sepulchered Gavrelle,
Some shattered homes in their own dust concealed;
Now no Boche troubles them nor any shell,
But almost quiet holds the thankful field,
Whilst men draw breath, and down the Arras Road
Come the slow mules with battle’s dreary stores,
And there is time to see the wounded stowed,
And stretcher-squads besiege the doctors’ doors.
Then belches Hell anew. And all day long
The afflicted place drifts heavenward in dust;
All day the shells shriek out their devils’ song;
Till, in the dusk, the Huns come on again,
And, like some sluice, the watchers up the hill
Let loose the guns and flood the soil with slain,
And they go back, but scourge the village still.
I see it all, I see the same brave souls
To-night, to-morrow, though the half be gone,
Deafened and dazed, and hunted from their holes,
Helpless and hunger-sick, but holding on.
I shall be happy all the long day here,
But not till night shall they go up the steep,
And nervous now because the end is near,
Totter at last to quietness and to sleep.
And men who find it easier to forget,
In England here, among the daffodils,
That there in France are fields unflowered yet,
And murderous May-days on the unlovely hills –
Let them go walking where the land is fair
And watch the breaking of a morn in May,
And think, ‘It may be Zero over there,
But here is Peace’ – and kneel a while, and pray.
A.P. Herbert
Open Warfare
Men said, ‘At last! at last the open battle!
Now shall we fight unfettered o’er the plain,
No more in catacombs be cooped like cattle,
Nor travel always in a devious drain!’
They were in ecstasies. But I was damping;
I like a trench, I have no lives to spare;
And in those catacombs, however cramping,
You did at least know vaguely where you were.
Ah, happy days in deep well-ordered alleys,
Where, after dining, probably with wine,
One felt indifferent to ho
stile sallies,
And with a pipe meandered round the line;
You trudged along a trench until it ended;
It led at least to some familiar spot;
It might not be the place that you’d intended,
But then you might as well be there as not.
But what a wilderness we now inhabit
Since this confounded ‘open’ strife prevails!
It may be good; I do not wish to crab it,
But you should hear the language it entails,
Should see this waste of wide uncharted craters
Where it is vain to seek the companies,
Seeing the shell-holes are as like as taters
And no one knows where anybody is.
Oft in the darkness, palpitant and blowing,
Have I set out and lost the hang of things,
And ever thought, ‘Where can the guide be going?’
But trusted long and rambled on in rings,
For ever climbing up some miry summit,
And halting there to curse the contrite guide,
For ever then descending like a plummet
Into a chasm on the other side.
Oft have I sat and wept, or sought to study
With hopeless gaze the uninstructive stars,
Hopeless because the very skies were muddy;
I only saw a red malicious Mars;
Or pulled my little compass out and pondered,
And set it sadly on my shrapnel hat,
Which, I suppose, was why the needle wandered,
Only, or course, I never thought of that.
And then perhaps some 5.9s start dropping,
As if there weren’t sufficient holes about;
I flounder on, hysterical and sopping,
And come by chance to where I started out,
And say once more, while I have no objection
To other people going to Berlin,
Give me a trench, a nice revetted section,
And let me stay there till the Bosch gives in!
A.P. Herbert
Beaucourt Revisited
I wandered up to Beaucourt. I took the river track,
And saw the lines we lived in before the Boche went back.
But peace was now in Pottage, the front was far ahead,