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Six War Poems
Hugo Claus (1929-)
In Flanders Fields
The soil here is superbly rich.
Even after all those years without manure
you could cultivate a dead man's leek here
The shaky English veterans have dwindled.
Each year they point out to their dwindling friends:
Hill Sixty, Hill Sixty-One, Poelkapelle.
The combine harvesters in Flanders Fields describe
ever closer circles around the winding corridors
of hardened sandbags, the bowels of death.
The butter of this region
Translated by Theo Hermans (in ‘Dutch Interior: Postwar Poetry of the Netherlands and Flanders’, New York, 1984).
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Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883-1917)
Trenches: St Eloi
Over the flat slope of St Eloi
In the silence desultory men
Pottering over small fires, cleaning their mess-tins:
To and fro, from the lines,
Men walk as on Piccadilly,
Making paths in the dark,
Through scattered dead horses,
Over a dead Belgian's belly.
The Germans have rockets. The English have no rockets.
Behind the line, cannon, hidden, lying back miles.
My mind is a corridor. The minds about me are corridors.
Nothing suggests itself. There is nothing to do but keep on.
From ‘Trenches: St Eloi’. In: A.R. Jones, The Life and Opinions of Thomas Ernest Hulme (London: Gollancz, 1960).
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John McCrae (1872-1918)
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
From In Flanders Fields and Other Poems
(New York: Putnam's, 1919).
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Julian Grenfell (1888-1915)
Into Battle
The naked earth is warm with Spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun's gaze glorying,
And quivers in the sunny breeze;
And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light,
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead who will not fight;
And who dies fighting has increase.
The fighting man shall from the sun
Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth;
Speed with the light-foot winds to run,
And with the trees to newer birth;
And find, when fighting shall be done,
Great rest, and fullness after dearth.
All the bright company of Heaven
Hold him in their high comradeship,
The Dog-Star and the Sisters Seven,
Orion's Belt and sworded hip.
The woodland trees that stand together,
They stand to him each one a friend,
They gently speak in the windy weather;
They guide to valley and ridges' end.
The kestrel hovering by day,
And the little owls that call by night,
Bid him be swift and keen as they,
As keen of ear, as swift of sight.
The blackbird sings to him ‘Brother, brother,
If this be the last song you shall sing
Sing well, for you may not sing another;
In dreary, doubtful, waiting hours,
Before the brazen frenzy starts,
The horses show him nobler powers;
O patient eyes, courageous hearts!
And when the burning moment breaks,
And all things else are out of mind,
And only Joy of Battle takes
Him by the throat, and makes him blind.
Through joy and blindness he shall know,
Not caring much to know, that still
Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so
That it be not the Destined Will.
The thundering line of battle stands,
And in the air Death moans and sings;
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
And Night shall fold him in soft wings.
From Julian Grenfell: His Life and the Times of his Death 1888-1915 (by Nicholas Mosley)
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976).
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Herbert Read (1893-1968)
4
There are a few left who will find it hard to forget
The earth was scarr'd and broken
By torrents of plunging shells;
Then wash'd and sodden with autumnal rains.
(Perhaps a rippling stream
In the days of Kneeshaw's gloom)
Spread itself like a fatal quicksand, -
A sucking, clutching death.
They had to be across the beke
And in their line before dawn.
A man who was marching by Kneeshaw's side
Hesitated in the middle of the mud,
And slowly sank, weighted down by equipment and arms.
Rifles were stretched to him;
He clutched and they tugged,
Grew visibly when the viscous ooze
And there he seemed to stick,
They could not dig him out -
The oozing mud would flow back again.
An officer shot him through the head:
Not a neat job - the revolver
From ‘Kneeshaw Goes to War’. In: Collected Poems
(London: Faber and Faber, 1966).
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Edmund Blunden (1896-1974)
From ‘Third Ypres’
The second night steals through the shrouding rain.
We in our numb thought crouching long have lost
The mockery triumph, and in every runner
Have urged the mind's eye see the triumph to come,
The sweet relief, the straggling out of hell
Into whatever burrows may be given
For life's recall. Then the fierce destiny speaks.
This was the calm, we shall look back for this.
The hour is come; come, move to the relief!
Dizzy we pass the mule-strewn track where once
The ploughman whistled as he loosed his team;
And where he turned home-hungry on the road,
The leaning pollard marks us hungrier turning.
We crawl to save the remnant who have torn
Back from the tentacle wire, those whom no shell
Has charred into black carcasses - Relief!
They grate their teeth until we take their room,
And through the churn of moonless night and mud
And flaming burst and sour gas we are huddled
Into the ditches where they bawl sense awake,
And in a frenzy that none could reason calm,
(Whimpering some, and calling on the dead)
They turn away: as in a dream they find
Strength in their feet to bear back that strange whim
At the noon of the dreadful day
Our trench and death's is on a sudden stormed
With huge and shattering salvoes, the clay dances
In founts of clods around the concrete sites,
Where still the brain devises some last armour
To live out the poor limbs.
Found four of us together in a pillbox,
Skirting the abyss of madness with light phrases,
White and blinking, in false smiles grimacing.
The demon grins to see the game, a moment
Passes, and - still the drum-tap dongs my brain
To a whirring void - through the great breach above me
The light comes in with icy shock and the rain
Horridly drips. Doctor, talk, talk! if dead
Or stunned I know not; the stinking powdered concrete,
The lyddite turns me sick - my hair's all full
Of this smashed concrete. O I'll drag you, friends,
Out of the sepulchre into the light of day,
For this is day, the pure and sacred day.
And while I squeak and gibber over you,
Look, from the wreck a score of field-mice nimble,
And tame and curious look about them; (these
Calmed me, on these depended my salvation).
There comes my sergeant, and by all the powers
The wire is holding to the right battalion,
And I can speak - but I myself first spoken
Hear a known voice now measured even to madness
‘For God's sake send and help us,
Here in a gunpit, all headquarters done for,
Forty or more, the nine-inch came right through,
All splashed with arms and legs, and I myself
The only one not killed nor even wounded.
You'll send - God bless you!’ The more monstrous fate
Shadows our own, the mind swoons doubly burdened,
Taught how for miles our anguish groans and bleeds,
A whole sweet countryside amuck with murder;
Each moment puffed into a year with death.
Still wept the rain, roared guns,
Still swooped into the swamps of flesh and blood,
All to the drabness of uncreation sunk,
And all thought dwindled to a moan, Relieve!
But who with what command can now relieve
The dead men from that chaos or my soul?
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