Sunday WW1 Remembered ...

Richard Aldington

1892 - 1962

Field Manoeuvres

The long autumn grass under my body

Soaks my clothes with its dew;

Where my knees press into the ground

I can feel the damp earth.

In my nostrils is the smell of the crushed grass,

Wet pine-cones and bark.

Through the great bronze pine trunks

Glitters a silver segment of road.

Interminable squadrons of silver and blue horses

Pace in long ranks the blank fields of heaven.

There is no sound;

The wind hisses gently through the pine needles;

The flutter of a finch's wings about my head

Is like distant thunder,

And the shrill cry of a mosquito

Sounds loud and close.

I am 'to fire at the enemy column

After it has passed' -

But my obsolete rifle, loaded with 'blank',

Lies untouched before me,

My spirit follows after the gliding clouds,

And my lips murmur of the mother of beauty

Standing breast-high, in golden broom

Among the blue pine-woods!

'Richard' Aldington christened Edward Godfree Aldington was an English writer and poet . He was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, on July 8, 1892. At an early age, he moved with his mother, Jesse May, and father, middle-class lawyer Albert Edward Aldington, to Dover. There he grew up with his sister Margery and attended preparatory schools, after which he studied for four years at Dover College.

Aldington was commissioned as a second Lieutenant  in the Royal Sussex Regiment and served on the Western Front, 1916-1918

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