The Trenches
- Endless lanes sunken in the clay,
- Bays, and traverses, fringed with wasted herbage,
- Seed-pods of blue scabious, and some lingering blooms;
- And the sky, seen as from a well,
- Brilliant with frosty stars.
- We stumble, cursing, on the slippery duck-boards.
- Goaded like the damned by some invisible wrath,
- A will stronger than weariness, stronger than animal fear,
- Implacable and monotonous.
-
- Here a shaft, slanting, and below
- A dusty and flickering light from one feeble candle
- And prone figures sleeping uneasily,
- Murmuring,
- And men who cannot sleep,
- With faces impassive as masks,
- Bright, feverish eyes, and drawn lips,
- Sad, pitiless, terrible faces,
- Each an incarnate curse.
-
- Here in a bay, a helmeted sentry
- Silent and motionless, watching while two sleep,
- And he sees before him
- With indifferent eyes the blasted and torn land
- Peopled with stiff prone forms, stupidly rigid,
- And tho' they had not been men.
-
- Dead are the lips where love laughed or sang,
- The hands of youth eager to lay hold of life,
- Eyes that have laughed to eyes,
- And these were begotten,
- O Love, and lived lightly, and burnt
- With the lust of a man's first strength: ere they were rent,
- Almost at unawares, savagely; and strewn
- In bloody fragments, to be the carrion
- Of rats and crows.
-
- And the sentry moves not, searching
- Night for menace with weary eyes.
Frederic Manning
- On Les Aura!
- Soldat Jacques Bonhomme loquitur:
- See you that stretch of shell-torn mud spotted with pools of
mire,
- Crossed by a burst abandoned trench and tortured strands of
wire,
- Where splintered pickets reel and sag and leprous
trench-rats play,
- That scour the Devil's hunting-ground to seek their carrion
prey?
- That is the field my father loved, the field that once was
mine,
- The land I nursed for my child's child as my fathers did
long syne.
See there a mound of powdered stones, all flattened, smashed,
and torn,
Gone black with damp and green with slime? -- Ere you and I were
born
My father's father built a house, a little house and bare,
And there I brought my woman home -- that heap of rubble there!
The soil of France! Fat fields and green that bred my blood and
bone!
Each wound that scars my bosom's pride burns deeper than my own.
But yet there is one thing to say -- one thing that pays for
all,
Whatever lot our bodies know, whatever fate befall,
We hold the line! We hold it still! My fields are No Man's Land,
But the good God is debonair and holds us by the hand.
On les aura!" See there! and there! soaked heaps of
huddled grey!
My fields shall laugh -- enriched by those who sought them for a
prey.
Hills of
Home
- Oh! yon hills are filled with sunlight, and the green leaves
paled to gold,
- And the smoking mists of Autumn hanging faintly o'er the
wold;
- I dream of hills of other days whose sides I loved to roam
- When Spring was dancing through the lanes of those distant
hills of home.
-
- The winds of heaven gathered there as pure and cold as dew;
- Wood-sorrel and wild violets along the hedgerows grew,
- The blossom on the pear-trees was as white as flakes of foam
- In the orchard 'neath the shadow of those distant hills of
home.
-
- The first white frost in the meadow will be shining there
today
- And the furrowed upland glinting warm beside the woodland
way;
- There, a bright face and a clear hearth will be waiting when
I come,
- And my heart is throbbing wildly for those distant hills of
home.
Malcolm Hemphrey
-
Ernst Friedrich, from Berlin, gathered
private pictures that showed dead and horribly mutilated soldiers.
- He
published them in 1924 in a book called Krieg dem Kriege (War
Against War).
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