11.06.2008, 11:41
In the Field
I
Two hours before the mist of morning paled
Beneath a sun that never showed his flame,
And spectral day stole on the world with sham,
into the night unsentinelled theire sailed
The whistling murder, sudden. Sudden wailed
Shrapnel, and breaking cloud, began to claim
Window and tile down clattering from the frame
Into the littered causeway. Dreamers quailed,
And propped themselves to listen, or rising, crept
From corridors by fitful candle; then
Gathered scared children down the winding stair,
And only whispers passed where no one slept.
And thought drew rein, surmising wildly, when
The guns spoke murder over doomed Estaires.
II
"Stand to!" The warning word was hardly said,
And had not moved a man, when round and round
Forthwith the steaming kettles came to ground,
And the men swarmed to dip their hasty bread,
A soldier's morning bite. Still overhead
murder flew hurtling, shell by shell, and found
Earth in some rearward purlieu, quenched in sound.
Breakfast began, but not a man was fed
Ere the growled "Fall in" menacingly proved
The dog's bone kinsman to a soldier's meal.
We mustered, lowering, hungry. The ranks grew;
And it was seen the world again had moved,
As at the impulse of a groaning wheel,
Unto some issue, from that first "Stand to!"
III
Unto some issue, Whither? No one dreamed
What menace crouched behind that bankèd mist,
Massing to bear down on us. No one wist
What power that shrapnel covered as it screamed
Futilely overhead. Scarce more it seemed
Than many a day had happed, of trials the least,
Vexation interruption of a feast,
A broken night, a day spoiled ere it gleamed.
But still the thickening barrage combed the air;
Still whistling shrapnel sputtered into smoke;
And momently the cobbed roadway shook
With sickening thud where freighted monsters took
The earth with double thunder. Here and there
Blood trickled into hollows. No one spoke.
IV
The bridge across the Lys! A slender thread
To bind or bar thy holders to their own;
But one span, small and narrow, lightly thrown
Over these sullen waters, lightly shed.
Upon thy planks the heavy-booted tread
Of men who seemed with sudden trouble grown
Haggard. "What are you?" "Durhams." What is known?"
"Our billet down, our officers are dead.
We seek a new position further on."
Position! Little recked they then how steep
The way, how sure the ending. They were gone,
And the keen harvester prepared to reap
In fresh fields. The mourne blanket of the dawn
Gathered the Durhams to eternal sleep.
V
The Church of Nouveau Monde! Lead on. This there
We concentrate. There hung in the void street
A local silence, which our sudden feet
With lesser clangour startled in its lair,
While, strangely, not the brood that racked the air
Could break the boding hush of that retreat.
So in a thnder-storm the quickened beat
Of one's own startled pulses may impair
The silence of a room which the onfall
Of shafted noise o'erhead left deadly still.
Perchance the mind doth place as on some plan
The figured sounds which figured space do fill,
Far or more near. 'Tis sure the hodding van
Broke forward into silence virginal
VI
Waiting! A soldier's sacrament of strain,
The eager cup of poising destiny,
That may not pass from him till it is dry,
And Death with peace, or Life unveils with pain.
Full many in this demented play must drain
That cup but once. Full many a soul must try
It´s sharpness, till numbed sense hath lost the lie
Of a life's landscape, smitten from the brain.
Then in a falling twilight of the mind
Their way into that temple oft they grope,
Where from the true, strong human hand doth slip
Life's vesture of live colours, meaning, hope,
Purpose and fear, leaving dumb wont behind,
While the word "Fate" drops dreaming from the lip.
VII
What of our comrades in the forward post?
The fog of war but deepened with the day.
We knew that in that troubled ocean lay
Uncharted shoals, blind rocks, and treacherous coast.
And what of yonder never-ending host
Of wan, unwounded Portuguese? Ah, stay,
Pale sergant. Do you bleed? You came that way?
What is the tidings? Is the front line lost?
"Nothing is known of posts that lie before
Laventie. At the cross-roads hellish fire
Has cut them off who shouldered the first load."
Can they live trough it? "They can not retire,
Nor can you reinforce. I know no more
But this. No living thing comes down that road."
VIII
Still waiting! And the oozing hours have crept
The morning out in vapour shot with fire,
That struck now here now there in random ire
Bloodily something human down, yet kept
Alone stagnation at arm's length. Men leapt
Suddenly to their feet, smith with a dire
Surmise, collapsed, and huddled in the mire.
No whisper passed. Some seemed as though they slept.
Only the stolid bearers wound about,
Shouldering their still and dabbled burdens white;
Or sharply a familiar voice rang out,
Comfortingly peremptory: "All right?
Then keep together. Lie low. Do not doubt.
The hour will surely come when we shall fight."
IX
Does the first softening of the season break
The winter of Glenogle? Do the sighs
Of wooning spring bid curling brackens rise
On hillsides out of nothing for love's sake?
How sweet it is to think that harebells shake
Over Green Lowther, where the shadow lies
Far in the Enterkin, beneath blue skies;
In trance to see the catkined willows quake,
Where April stirs along Loch Lomond side;
To watch the sands of Morar gently take
The Atlantic swell that softly combs the Isles;
And through the gorgeous portals of the Clyde
To hear at dawn the thudding paddle wake
The ever-brooding silence of the Kyles.
X
There is a stillness in the heart of sound,
How dire soever, if unloosed too long.
There is a time for pause in every song,
And in the whirling cyclone's heady round
A core of peace. So the taut soul is bound
With iron girdle, and with leathern thong
To the acute wheel of the sense's wrong
Only until the creaking spring is wound.
Then softening come sweet phantoms of far things,
Peopling the vacancy with joys unspent,
And visions of fair spaces left behind,
As if the genius of the place had wings,
And in the migratory hour were sent
To haunt awhile the silence of the mind.
XI
Back from it, back! The quelling mandate rang,
As the mad moment swooped upon the dream.
Straight heathered hillside, mountain, loch, and stream
Flashed out of sight, and but the shrapnel sang,
And greater guns with stunning double clang
Rocked the earth under us. It well might seem
All hell was in the air - not without gleam
Of hope, the worst might prove the final pang.
Men crouched together, shaken as they took
That presence far too massive for their fear,
A quivering sense that something tidal welled
Over their perfect helplessness, and shook
The core of being; yet that being held.
We knew a limber clattered to the rear.
XII
'Twixt Nouveau Monde and Laventie there lies
A breastwork, where the clearing tempest found
Tossed remnants of the cyclone come to ground,
Part English, Portuguese in part. The skies
Brightened, the housing spirit to entice
Into the air; the string its length unwound,
And nightmare, having pinioned, now unbound
Our helplessness. The hour had come to rise.
Alas, the lifting battle-fog proclaimed
The line was gone, with those who bore the brunt,
Our comrades, whom the fierce Valkyries claimed,
Closing upon them in the bloody hunt;
And Verey lights at hand too well explained
The long and boding silence of the front.
XIII
Gray figures stealing, and a headlong dash
from hedge to house, from house again to hedge,
And fifty rifles levelled on the ledge!
One instant on the aim, and then, the crash!
He went to earth and vanished in a flash.
And there once more was house, and there was hedge,
With sprouting field, and farm, and ditch with sedge,
And crop-head pollard row and leafless ash -
A cheerless landscape gray, and the profound
Loneliness of the battlefield. The next
Moment trench-mortar shells were on our head;
Another, and the day was sealed and fixed
On front and flank. Among the stricken dead
One in the skull, behind, his summons found.
XIV
- Found it behind, while yet his soul was set
And his eyes eager with the death he planned
For his foe forward, where he stood and manned
His gun upon the roaring parapet.
We knew the sign, the closing of the net,
The baying of the pack on every hand,
Terror of isolation. Still it fanned
Some flame within. We were not conquered yet.
Circled with unseen fire, we only heard
The bullets whistle round us, only saw
The solitude of battle. Nothing stirred.
And yet, unseen, we felt his forces draw
Upon us, earthed at length where earth had lured
Treacherously to cover. We endured.
XV
A man dashed in among us and caught breath.
A sergeant, resolute and silent, one
That we who knew him trusted. He had run
As men run only in the face of death,
Yet had not fled. What is it that he saith?
"The game is all but up, the end begun.
Live men we shall not see another sun.
Laventie North has fallen, a feast of death.
'Tis your turn, sir. Your left is in the air,
And through the breach, five hundred yards away,
His fours have marched on Sailly and Estaires."
Column of fours? No! Then God save the day!
These breastwork trenches! - 'Twas as if there snapped
Some evilish mechanism on us - trapped!
XVI
How it befel? - The overreaching arm,
Bombs; and he was among us. In his plan
Surprise completed what surprise began.
The treacherous shelter of a too-near farm,
A ditch along a road, a false alarm,
Thirty yards of the open; in the van
A desperado running - How he ran! -
And the pack had us. Hands up and disarm!
-It is the end of all, the bitter end,
The unpardonable, though ineluctable,
A breach in life no living now will mend;
The sin that sinned not; fell not, yet a fall.
One thought burned in the brain: How dear it cost
England to gain what I this day have lost!
I
Two hours before the mist of morning paled
Beneath a sun that never showed his flame,
And spectral day stole on the world with sham,
into the night unsentinelled theire sailed
The whistling murder, sudden. Sudden wailed
Shrapnel, and breaking cloud, began to claim
Window and tile down clattering from the frame
Into the littered causeway. Dreamers quailed,
And propped themselves to listen, or rising, crept
From corridors by fitful candle; then
Gathered scared children down the winding stair,
And only whispers passed where no one slept.
And thought drew rein, surmising wildly, when
The guns spoke murder over doomed Estaires.
II
"Stand to!" The warning word was hardly said,
And had not moved a man, when round and round
Forthwith the steaming kettles came to ground,
And the men swarmed to dip their hasty bread,
A soldier's morning bite. Still overhead
murder flew hurtling, shell by shell, and found
Earth in some rearward purlieu, quenched in sound.
Breakfast began, but not a man was fed
Ere the growled "Fall in" menacingly proved
The dog's bone kinsman to a soldier's meal.
We mustered, lowering, hungry. The ranks grew;
And it was seen the world again had moved,
As at the impulse of a groaning wheel,
Unto some issue, from that first "Stand to!"
III
Unto some issue, Whither? No one dreamed
What menace crouched behind that bankèd mist,
Massing to bear down on us. No one wist
What power that shrapnel covered as it screamed
Futilely overhead. Scarce more it seemed
Than many a day had happed, of trials the least,
Vexation interruption of a feast,
A broken night, a day spoiled ere it gleamed.
But still the thickening barrage combed the air;
Still whistling shrapnel sputtered into smoke;
And momently the cobbed roadway shook
With sickening thud where freighted monsters took
The earth with double thunder. Here and there
Blood trickled into hollows. No one spoke.
IV
The bridge across the Lys! A slender thread
To bind or bar thy holders to their own;
But one span, small and narrow, lightly thrown
Over these sullen waters, lightly shed.
Upon thy planks the heavy-booted tread
Of men who seemed with sudden trouble grown
Haggard. "What are you?" "Durhams." What is known?"
"Our billet down, our officers are dead.
We seek a new position further on."
Position! Little recked they then how steep
The way, how sure the ending. They were gone,
And the keen harvester prepared to reap
In fresh fields. The mourne blanket of the dawn
Gathered the Durhams to eternal sleep.
V
The Church of Nouveau Monde! Lead on. This there
We concentrate. There hung in the void street
A local silence, which our sudden feet
With lesser clangour startled in its lair,
While, strangely, not the brood that racked the air
Could break the boding hush of that retreat.
So in a thnder-storm the quickened beat
Of one's own startled pulses may impair
The silence of a room which the onfall
Of shafted noise o'erhead left deadly still.
Perchance the mind doth place as on some plan
The figured sounds which figured space do fill,
Far or more near. 'Tis sure the hodding van
Broke forward into silence virginal
VI
Waiting! A soldier's sacrament of strain,
The eager cup of poising destiny,
That may not pass from him till it is dry,
And Death with peace, or Life unveils with pain.
Full many in this demented play must drain
That cup but once. Full many a soul must try
It´s sharpness, till numbed sense hath lost the lie
Of a life's landscape, smitten from the brain.
Then in a falling twilight of the mind
Their way into that temple oft they grope,
Where from the true, strong human hand doth slip
Life's vesture of live colours, meaning, hope,
Purpose and fear, leaving dumb wont behind,
While the word "Fate" drops dreaming from the lip.
VII
What of our comrades in the forward post?
The fog of war but deepened with the day.
We knew that in that troubled ocean lay
Uncharted shoals, blind rocks, and treacherous coast.
And what of yonder never-ending host
Of wan, unwounded Portuguese? Ah, stay,
Pale sergant. Do you bleed? You came that way?
What is the tidings? Is the front line lost?
"Nothing is known of posts that lie before
Laventie. At the cross-roads hellish fire
Has cut them off who shouldered the first load."
Can they live trough it? "They can not retire,
Nor can you reinforce. I know no more
But this. No living thing comes down that road."
VIII
Still waiting! And the oozing hours have crept
The morning out in vapour shot with fire,
That struck now here now there in random ire
Bloodily something human down, yet kept
Alone stagnation at arm's length. Men leapt
Suddenly to their feet, smith with a dire
Surmise, collapsed, and huddled in the mire.
No whisper passed. Some seemed as though they slept.
Only the stolid bearers wound about,
Shouldering their still and dabbled burdens white;
Or sharply a familiar voice rang out,
Comfortingly peremptory: "All right?
Then keep together. Lie low. Do not doubt.
The hour will surely come when we shall fight."
IX
Does the first softening of the season break
The winter of Glenogle? Do the sighs
Of wooning spring bid curling brackens rise
On hillsides out of nothing for love's sake?
How sweet it is to think that harebells shake
Over Green Lowther, where the shadow lies
Far in the Enterkin, beneath blue skies;
In trance to see the catkined willows quake,
Where April stirs along Loch Lomond side;
To watch the sands of Morar gently take
The Atlantic swell that softly combs the Isles;
And through the gorgeous portals of the Clyde
To hear at dawn the thudding paddle wake
The ever-brooding silence of the Kyles.
X
There is a stillness in the heart of sound,
How dire soever, if unloosed too long.
There is a time for pause in every song,
And in the whirling cyclone's heady round
A core of peace. So the taut soul is bound
With iron girdle, and with leathern thong
To the acute wheel of the sense's wrong
Only until the creaking spring is wound.
Then softening come sweet phantoms of far things,
Peopling the vacancy with joys unspent,
And visions of fair spaces left behind,
As if the genius of the place had wings,
And in the migratory hour were sent
To haunt awhile the silence of the mind.
XI
Back from it, back! The quelling mandate rang,
As the mad moment swooped upon the dream.
Straight heathered hillside, mountain, loch, and stream
Flashed out of sight, and but the shrapnel sang,
And greater guns with stunning double clang
Rocked the earth under us. It well might seem
All hell was in the air - not without gleam
Of hope, the worst might prove the final pang.
Men crouched together, shaken as they took
That presence far too massive for their fear,
A quivering sense that something tidal welled
Over their perfect helplessness, and shook
The core of being; yet that being held.
We knew a limber clattered to the rear.
XII
'Twixt Nouveau Monde and Laventie there lies
A breastwork, where the clearing tempest found
Tossed remnants of the cyclone come to ground,
Part English, Portuguese in part. The skies
Brightened, the housing spirit to entice
Into the air; the string its length unwound,
And nightmare, having pinioned, now unbound
Our helplessness. The hour had come to rise.
Alas, the lifting battle-fog proclaimed
The line was gone, with those who bore the brunt,
Our comrades, whom the fierce Valkyries claimed,
Closing upon them in the bloody hunt;
And Verey lights at hand too well explained
The long and boding silence of the front.
XIII
Gray figures stealing, and a headlong dash
from hedge to house, from house again to hedge,
And fifty rifles levelled on the ledge!
One instant on the aim, and then, the crash!
He went to earth and vanished in a flash.
And there once more was house, and there was hedge,
With sprouting field, and farm, and ditch with sedge,
And crop-head pollard row and leafless ash -
A cheerless landscape gray, and the profound
Loneliness of the battlefield. The next
Moment trench-mortar shells were on our head;
Another, and the day was sealed and fixed
On front and flank. Among the stricken dead
One in the skull, behind, his summons found.
XIV
- Found it behind, while yet his soul was set
And his eyes eager with the death he planned
For his foe forward, where he stood and manned
His gun upon the roaring parapet.
We knew the sign, the closing of the net,
The baying of the pack on every hand,
Terror of isolation. Still it fanned
Some flame within. We were not conquered yet.
Circled with unseen fire, we only heard
The bullets whistle round us, only saw
The solitude of battle. Nothing stirred.
And yet, unseen, we felt his forces draw
Upon us, earthed at length where earth had lured
Treacherously to cover. We endured.
XV
A man dashed in among us and caught breath.
A sergeant, resolute and silent, one
That we who knew him trusted. He had run
As men run only in the face of death,
Yet had not fled. What is it that he saith?
"The game is all but up, the end begun.
Live men we shall not see another sun.
Laventie North has fallen, a feast of death.
'Tis your turn, sir. Your left is in the air,
And through the breach, five hundred yards away,
His fours have marched on Sailly and Estaires."
Column of fours? No! Then God save the day!
These breastwork trenches! - 'Twas as if there snapped
Some evilish mechanism on us - trapped!
XVI
How it befel? - The overreaching arm,
Bombs; and he was among us. In his plan
Surprise completed what surprise began.
The treacherous shelter of a too-near farm,
A ditch along a road, a false alarm,
Thirty yards of the open; in the van
A desperado running - How he ran! -
And the pack had us. Hands up and disarm!
-It is the end of all, the bitter end,
The unpardonable, though ineluctable,
A breach in life no living now will mend;
The sin that sinned not; fell not, yet a fall.
One thought burned in the brain: How dear it cost
England to gain what I this day have lost!