during the four years of the war, and that was all that they said to
me. I don’t know any more about them. The big red one was taken to the
British evacuating station that afternoon in an ambulance. There was
nothing much the matter with him. He didn’t say good-bye. I didn’t see
him when he left. I remember the only two phrases I heard him utter,
one to his pal and one to me:
“Stick it.”
“A1 at Lloyd’s, Madam.”
POEMS
THE HILL
From the top of the hill I looked down on the beautiful, the
gorgeous, the superhuman and monstrous landscape of the superb
exulting war.
There were no trees anywhere, nor any grasses or green thickets, nor
any birds singing, nor any whisper or flutter of any little busy
creatures.
There was no shelter for field mice or rabbits, squirrels or men.
The earth was naked and on its naked body crawled things of iron.
It was evening. The long valley was bathed in blue shadow and through
the shadow, as if swimming, I saw the iron armies moving.
And iron rivers poured through the wilderness that was peopled with a
phantom iron host.
Lights gleamed down there, a thousand machine eyes winked.
The sun was setting, gilding the smooth crests of the surging hills.
The red tents clustering on their naked yellow sides were like
scarlet flowers burning in a shining desert of hills.
Against the sunset, along the sharp edge of a hill, a strange
regiment was moving in single file, a regiment of monsters.
They moved slowly along on their stomachs,
Dragging themselves forward by their ears.
Their great encircling ears moved round and round like wheels.
They were big and very heavy and heavily armoured.
Obscene crabs, armoured toads, big as houses,
They moved slowly forward, crushing under their bellies whatever
stood in their way.
A flock of aeroplanes was flying home, a flight of wild ducks with
iron wings.
They passed over the monstrous regiment with a roar and disappeared.
I looked down, searching for a familiar thing, a leaf, a tuft of
grass, a caterpillar; but the ground dropped away in darkness before
my feet, that were planted on a heap of stones.
A path, the old deserted way of cattle, showed below beyond the
gaping caverns of abandoned dug-outs, where men had once lived
underground. And along the path a German prisoner was stumbling,
driven by a black man on a horse.
The black man wore a turban, and he drove the prisoner before him as
one drives an animal to market.
These three--the prisoner, the black man and the horse--seemed to
have wandered into the landscape by mistake. They were the only
creatures of their kind anywhere.
Where had they come from and where were they going in that wilderness
of iron with night falling?
The German stumbled on heavily beneath the nose of his captor’s
horse. I could see the pallid disc of his face thrust forward, and
the exhausted lurching of his clumsy body.
He did not look to the right or left, but watching him I saw him trip
over a battered iron helmet and an old boot that lay in his way.
Two wooden crosses showed just ahead of him, sticking out of the
rough ground.
The three passed in silence.
They passed like ghosts into the deepening shadow of the valley,
where the panorama of invisible phantom armies moved, as if swimming.
And as I watched I heard the faint music of bagpipes, and thought
that I heard the sound of invisible men marching.
The crests of the naked hills were still touched with gold.
Above the winking eyes of the prodigious war the fragile crescent of
the moon floated serene in the perfect sky.
THE SONG OF THE MUD
This is the song of the mud,
The pale yellow glistening mud that covers the hills like satin;
The grey gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the
valleys;
The frothing, squirting, spurting, liquid mud that gurgles along the
road beds;
The thick elastic mud that is kneaded and pounded and squeezed under
the hoofs of the horses;
The invincible, inexhaustible mud of the war zone.
* * * * *
This is the song of the mud, the uniform of the poilu.
His coat is of mud, his great dragging flapping coat, that is too big
for him and too heavy;
His coat that once was blue and now is grey and stiff with the mud
that cakes to it.
This is the mud that clothes him.
His trousers and boots are of mud,
And his skin is of mud;
And there is mud in his beard.
His head is crowned with a helmet of mud.
He wears it well.
He wears it as a king wears the ermine that bores him.
He has set a new style in clothing;
He has introduced the chic of mud.
* * * * *
This is the song of the mud that wriggles its way into battle.
The impertinent, the intrusive, the ubiquitous, the unwelcome,
The slimy inveterate nuisance,
That fills the trenches,
That mixes in with the food of the soldiers,
That spoils the working of motors and crawls into their secret parts,
That spreads itself over the guns,
That sucks the guns down and holds them fast in its slimy voluminous
lips,
That has no respect for destruction and muzzles the bursting shells;
And slowly, softly, easily,
Soaks up the fire, the noise; soaks up the energy and the courage;
Soaks up the power of armies;
Soaks up the battle.
Just soaks it up and thus stops it.
* * * * *
This is the hymn of mud--the obscene, the filthy, the putrid,
The vast liquid grave of our armies.
It has drowned our men.
Its monstrous distended belly reeks with the undigested dead.
Our men have gone into it, sinking slowly, and struggling and slowly
disappearing.
Our fine men, our brave, strong, young men;
Our glowing red, shouting, brawny men.
Slowly, inch by inch, they have gone down into it,
Into its darkness, its thickness, its silence.
Slowly, irresistibly, it drew them down, sucked them down,
And they were drowned in thick, bitter, heaving mud.
Now it hides them, Oh, so many of them!
Under its smooth glistening surface it is hiding them blandly.
There is not a trace of them.
There is no mark where they went down.
The mute enormous mouth of the mud has closed over them.
* * * * *
This is the song of the mud,
The beautiful glistening golden mud that covers the hills like satin;
The mysterious gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over
the valleys.
Mud, the disguise of the war zone;
Mud, the mantle of battles;
Mud, the smooth fluid grave of our soldiers:
This is the song of the mud.
WHERE IS JEHOVAH?
Where is Jehovah the God of Israel with his ark and his tabernacle
and his pillar of fire?
Here is a people pouring through a wilderness;
Here are armies camping in a desert;
Their little tents are like sheep flocking over the prairie,
Through a storm of iron, rain and thunder and wind of iron.
And pillars of cloud and pillars of fire stand all about the quaking
earth;
And a sacrifice is prepared.
Send for Moses, send messengers to Daniel, Elijah, Joshua, Gideon--to
someone who knows where Jehovah is hiding.
Tell them He’s wanted--the Great God, the Jealous God, the God of
Wrath who drowned the sinful world of men and sent the seven plagues
on Egypt, and led His people out of bondage to scatter them again
like dead leaves in a storm.
Let them look for Him on Sinai, or down by the bitter mouth of
Jordan, or in an empty sepulchre in Bethlehem. Tell the ten tribes
of Israel in their ten thousand scattered cities to go into the
synagogues and call Him.
He should know. He should be told. Let them hunt Him out and tell Him.
Picardy is shaking with a fever.
Picardy’s hills are wounded and broken.
Picardy’s fields are scarred as with smallpox.
What a chance for His prophets!
What a playground for miracles!
* * * * *
A land that was silent, suddenly roaring; wide plains screaming; the
slippery grey valleys sweating, heaving in agony.
And men on them; flocks and herds of men driven over them through
the iron storm--slipping, falling, clutching, fighting as they slip,
fall, clutch, are suffocated, sucked down, buried, tossed again,
thrown to the iron winds.
Herds of men, hosts of men, driven to the sacrifice, like sheep,
like dogs, like goats and bullocks;
Driven to slay other herds of sheep-men on the burning altars.
Whose altars?
Since no Lord of Hosts shows himself.
Since there’s no sign of God, no voice of God. No captain to command
the ghost battalions of the flying, panic-stricken souls.
* * * * *
What a chance for Jehovah.
He need scarce lift a finger.
Here are all his pet properties ready to hand:
The thunder, the lightning, the clouds and the fire.
This is His hour, but Jehovah has missed it.
This is not His thunder nor His lightning.
These are not His people.
These are the armies of France and of England.
The thunder is the thunder of their guns, and the lightning that runs
along the horizon is the flash of their guns.
Moses is dead, and Joshua who led his people into the promised
land is dead, and there are no more prophets to cry through the
wilderness to warn or to comfort these people.
They must look after themselves.
All the host of them, each one of them, quite alone each one of them,
every one of the hundred thousand of them, alone, must stand up to
meet the war.
With the sky cracking,
With creatures of wide metal wings tearing the sky over his head,
With the earth shaking,
With the solid earth under his feet giving way,
With the hills on fire and the valleys smoking, and the few bare
trees spitting bullets; and the long roads like liquid iron torrents,
rolling down on him with guns and iron food for guns--always guns
and more guns--with these long roads rolling down like cataracts, to
crush him and no way of escape,
With the few houses broken open--no sides, no covers to them, no
protection anywhere,
With all of the universe coming down on him, the cold dark storm of
death coming full on him,
With the men near him going mad, jibbering, sobbing, twisting,
With his comrade lying dead under his feet,
With the enemy beyond there--unseen, mysterious,
With eternity waiting, the great silence and emptiness waiting beyond
the noise of the cannon,
With the memory of his home haunting him and the face of a woman
expectant,
With the soft echoes of his children’s laughter sounding, and shells
bursting with roars to left and right of him, in front and behind
him, but not drowning those small voices:
He stands there, he keeps on standing; he stands solid, this sheep
man.
* * * * *
He is so small, so quiet in the iron storm.
Why does he stand there? What keeps him standing there?
Is he not a lost sheep? Why does he not turn, run, rush, scramble
back through the rain, wind and thunder of iron, bleating with terror?
Why does he wait to die, and die so quietly, so humbly, with hope
still looking back from his eyes?
Where is the Good Shepherd? And where is Jehovah?
Why does He hide, wait, avoid this thing?
If this is His world, if it is He that made it,
Let Him come and put an end to it.
Let Him not escape it.
Find Him. Bring Him down here. Hunt Him out in Heaven you flying
ghosts of the dead and bring Him.
Bring someone, some mighty God, Baal, Beelzebub, the Powers of
Darkness--anything, anyone--anyone who will put an end to this.
Or a Piteous God, Christ the Son, He who was crucified.
Oh, God, Piteous Son of God, where is God the Father?
You, the great God, the King of Kings and Lord of Hosts;
The One who drowned mercifully the children of men;
Let the waters cover the earth again. Let there be an end to it--an
end.
THE VIRGIN OF ALBERT
Oh, the poor Virgin!
She is throwing herself from Heaven;
She is plunging down from the high tower with the child in her hands.
Look, hold your breath, watch the awful gesture of her divine despair!
Her golden figure shoots head downwards through the air;
The red carcase of the Church gapes beneath her;
The ragged skeleton of the tower holds her up
High above the ruined town.
But she is plunging.
With her arms outstretched beyond her head, downward,
With the child in her terrible pointing hands,
She is diving down;
She will dash the child down, on to the stones of the desolate
abandoned street.
She has been betrayed.
God has betrayed her.
Oh, the pity!
Oh, the terrible, desperate creature!
She believed in God,
And her people worshipped her,
And because she was the Mother of Compassion,
She stood between them and the anger of God.
For she believed in the love of God.
Lifted up above the city,
Above the little dark homes of her helpless people,
She stood, holding up her child to God.
So for centuries she stood lifted up in her humility and love;
And because God had chosen her and given her a child,
Because she had borne a son to Him,
She believed he would be kind to her people.
* * * * *
One day destruction came like roaring dragons out of Heaven, and fell
upon the town.
Out of the soft mysterious distance invisible monsters came shrieking
past her head.
Flocks of them, unseen, with whistling wings, thick as vultures to a
carcase in a desert,
They swooped down and sprang upon the city.
And the city writhed in their clutches.
Houses staggered, the streets cracked open.
Meek, motionless, holding her child up to Heaven, the Virgin watched
from her tower.
She watched the houses vomit,
Watched them reel like drunkards--fall;
Watched the people running, pouring through the quaking streets with
their treasures piled on wagons;
Watched the wagons smothered, buried, with the horses, the beds and
bedding, the fowls and pretty birds in cages.
She could hear the women and the children screaming;
And the squealing of horses and groaning of cattle and squeaking of
pigs caught in burning stables, sheds, yards.
Helpless, high above them, prisoner in the thundering sky,
Bound to her shaking pedestal, with the church walls giving way
beneath her,
She stood holding her child up to God, while her people screamed to
her to save them.
Now the city is deserted.
The people are gone.
The roofless houses and the broken buildings grimace at the Virgin.
The houses of the people who once worshipped her are open filthy
places.
The church yawns horrid.
Where the altar was is a heap of dust.
The uncovered apse is choked with debris, and the wind and the rain
play new havoc there every day.
* * * * *
Oh, the poor desolate Virgin!
She has been abandoned;
She has been betrayed.
God has betrayed her.
She is throwing herself down from Heaven with the child in her
terrible pointing hands.
She is diving down;
But she is held.
In the very act of determined despair she is held.
Something holds her suspended in anguish.
Shooting head downwards, she hangs there.
The supreme moment of her unbearable agony is fixed there, forever,
against the sky.
Oh, the poor Virgin!
UNIDENTIFIED
Look well at this man. Look!
Come up out of your graves, philosophers,
And you who founded churches, and all you
Who for ten thousand years have talked of God.
Come out of your uncomfortable tombs, astronomers,
Who raked the heavens with your mighty eyes,
And died, unanswered questions on your lips,
For you have something interesting to learn
By looking at this man.
* * * * *
Stand all about, you many-legioned ghosts;
Fill up the desert with your shadowy forms,
And in the vast resounding waste of death,
Watch him while he dies;
He will not notice you.
* * * * *
Observe his ugliness.
See how he stands there planted in the mud like some old battered
image of a faith forgotten by its God.
Note his naked neck and jutting jaw under the iron hat that’s jammed
upon his head;
See how he rounds his shoulders, bends his back inside his clumsy
coat;
And how he leans ahead, gripping with grimy fists
The muzzle of his gun that digs it butt-end down into the mud between
the solid columns of his legs.
* * * * *
Look close, come close, pale ghosts!
Come back out of the dim unfinished past;
Crowd up across the edges of the earth,
Where the horizon, like a red hot wire, twists underneath tremendous
smoking blows.
Come up, come up across the quaking ground that gapes in sudden holes
beneath your feet;
Come fearlessly across the twisting field where bones of men stick
through the tortured mud.
Ghosts have no need to fear.
Look close at this man. Look!
He waits for death;
He watches it approach;
His little bloodshot eyes can see it bearing down on every side;
He feels it coming underneath his feet, running, burrowing underneath
the ground;
He hears it screaming in the frantic air.
Death that tears the shrieking sky in two,
That suddenly explodes out of the festering bowels of the earth--
Dreadful and horrid death.
He takes the impact of it on his back, his chest, his belly and his
arms;
Spreads his legs upon its lurching form;
Plants his feet upon its face and breathes deep into his pumping
lungs the gassy breath of death.
He does not move.
In all the running landscape there’s a solitary thing that’s
motionless:
The figure of this man.
* * * * *
The sky long since has fallen from its dome.
Terror let loose like a gigantic wind has torn it from the ceiling of
the world,
And it is flapping down in frantic shreds.
The earth ages ago leaped screaming up out of the fastness of its
ancient laws.
There is no centre now to hold it down.
It rolls and writhes, a shifting tortured thing, a floating mass of
matter set adrift.
And in between the fluttering tatters of the ruined sky,
And the convulsions of the maddened earth,
The man stands solid.
Something holds him there.
* * * * *
What holds him, timid ghosts?
What do you say, you shocked and shuddering ghosts,
Dragged from your sheltered vaults;
You who once died in quiet lamp-lit rooms;
Who were companioned to the end by friends;
And closed your eyes in languor on a world
That you had fashioned for your pleasant selves?
You scorned this man.
He was for you an ordinary man.
Some of you pitied him, prayed over his soul, worried him with
stories of Heaven and Hell.
Promised him Heaven if he would be ashamed of being what he was,
And everlasting sorrow if he died as he had lived, an ordinary man.
You gave him Gods he could not know, and images of God; laws he could
not keep, and punishment.
You were afraid of him.
Everything about him that was his very own
Made you afraid of him.
His love of women, food and drink, and fun,
His clumsy reach for life, his open grabbing fist,
His stupid open gaping heart and mouth.
He was a hungry man,
And you were afraid of him.
None of you trusted him;
No one of you was his friend.
* * * * *
Look at him now. Look well, look long
Your hungry brute, your ordinary man;
Your fornicator, drunkard, anarchist;
Your ruthless rough seed-sowing male;
Your angry greedy egotist;
Your lost, bewildered, childish dunce;
Come close and look into his haggard face.
It is too late to do him justice now, or even speak to him.
But look.
Look at the stillness of his face.
It’s made of little fragile bones and flesh, tissued of quivering
muscles fine as silk;
Exquisite nerves, soft membrane warm with blood,
That travels smoothly through the tender veins.
One blow, one minute more, and that man’s face will be a mass of
matter, horrid slime and little brittle splinters.
He knows.
He waits.
His face remains quite still.
And underneath the bullet-spattered helmet on his head
His steady eyes look out.
What is it that looks out?
What is deep mirrored in those bloodshot eyes?
Terror? No.
Despair? Perhaps.
What else?
Ah, poor ghosts--poor blind unseeing ghosts!
It is his self you see;
His self that does remember what he loved and what he wanted, and
what he never had;
His self that can regret, that can reproach its own self now; his
self that gave itself, let loose its hold of all but just itself.
Is that, then, nothing? Just his naked self, pinning down a shaking
world,
A single rivet driven down to hold a universe together.
* * * * *
Go back, poor ghosts. Go back into your graves.
He has no use for you, this nameless man.
Scholars, philosophers, men of God, leave this man alone.
No lamp you lit will show his soul the way;
No name restore his lost identity.
The guns will chant his death march down the world;
The flare of cannon light his dying;
The mute and nameless men beneath his feet will welcome him beside
them in the mud.
Take one last look and leave him standing there,
Unfriended, unrewarded, and unknown.
_Printed in England_
Transcriber’s Note:
Obvious errors in spelling, hyphenation and punctuation have been
silently corrected in this version, but minor inconsistencies and
archaic forms have been retained as printed.