Sunday WW1 Remembered..

A Sampling of War Poets

1918

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

1850 -1919

War Mothers

There is something in the sound of drum and fife

That stirs all the savage instincts into life.

In the old times of peace we went our ways,

Through proper days

Of little joys and tasks. Lonely at times,

When from the steeple sounded wedding chimes,

Telling to all the world some maid was wife—

But taking patiently our part in life

As it was portioned us by Church and State,

Believing it our fate.

Our thoughts all chaste

Held yet a secret wish to love and mate

Ere youth and virtue should go quite to waste.

But men we criticised for lack of strength,

And kept them at arm's length.

Then the war came—

The world was all aflame!

The men we had thought dull and void of power

Were heroes in an hour.

He who had seemed a slave to petty greed

Showed masterful in that great time of need.

He who had plotted for his neighbour's pelf,

Now for his fellows offers up himself.

And we were only women, forced by war

To sacrifice the things worth living for.

Something within us broke,

Something within us woke,

The wild cave-woman spoke.

When we heard the sound of drumming,

As our soldiers went to camp,

Heard them tramp, tramp, tramp;

As we watched to see them coming,

And they looked at us and smiled

(Yes, looked back at us and smiled),

As they filed along by hillock and by hollow,

Then our hearts were so beguiled

That, for many and many a day,

We dreamed we heard them say,

'Oh, follow, follow, follow!'

And the distant, rolling drum

Called us 'Come, come, come!'

Till our virtue seemed a thing to give away.

War had swept ten thousand years away from earth.

We were primal once again.

There were males, not modern men;

We were females meant to bring their sons to birth.

And we could not wait for any formal rite,

We could hear them calling to us, 'Come to-night;

For to-morrow, at the dawn,

We move on!'

And the drum

Bellowed, 'Come, come, come!'

And the fife

Whistled, 'Life, life, life!'

So they moved on and fought and bled and died;

Honoured and mourned, they are the nation's pride.

We fought our battles, too, but with the tide

Of our red blood, we gave the world new lives.

Because we were not wives

We are dishonoured. Is it noble, then,

To break God's laws only by killing men

To save one's country from destruction?

We took no man's life but gave our chastity,

And sinned the ancient sin

To plant young trees and fill felled forests in.

Oh, clergy of the land,

Bible in hand,

All reverently you stand,

On holy thoughts intent

While barren wives receive the sacrament!

Had you the open visions you could see

Phantoms of infants murdered in the womb,

Who never knew a cradle or a tomb,

Hovering about these wives accusingly.

Bestow the sacrament! Their sins are not well known—

Ours to the four winds of the earth are blown.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born in Johnstown, Wisconsin and her poetry was being published by the time she graduated from high school. Her poetry was very popular, generally written in plain, rhyming verse.

(Source: Poetry Foundation.org )

~****~

Sunday WW1 Remembered..

A Sampling of War Poets

1917

Mary Borden

(1886-1968)

At The Somme: The Song of 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.

American writer Mary Borden was born in Chicago in 1886 and earned a BA from Vassar College in 1907. One year later, she married George Douglas Turner, a British army general and member of Parliament, and they lived in England. She served as a director of French field hospitals in both World Wars, for which she received military medals for bravery.

(Source poetry foundation.org)

~****~

Sunday WW1 Remembered..

A Sampling of War Poets

1916



Arthur Graeme West

1891- 1917

The Night Patrol

France, March 1916.

Over the top! The wire’s thin here, unbarbed

Plain rusty coils, not staked, and low enough:

Full of old tins, though—“When you’re through, all three,

Aim quarter left for fifty yards or so,

Then straight for that new piece of German wire;

See if it’s thick, and listen for a while

For sounds of working; don’t run any risks;

About an hour; now, over!”

And we placed

Our hands on the topmost sand-bags, leapt, and stood

A second with curved backs, then crept to the wire,

Wormed ourselves tinkling through, glanced back, and dropped.

The sodden ground was splashed with shallow pools,

And tufts of crackling cornstalks, two years old,

No man had reaped, and patches of spring grass.

Half-seen, as rose and sank the flares, were strewn

The wrecks of our attack: the bandoliers,

Packs, rifles, bayonets, belts, and haversacks,

Shell fragments, and the huge whole forms of shells

Shot fruitlessly—and everywhere the dead.

Only the dead were always present—present

As a vile sickly smell of rottenness;

The rustling stubble and the early grass,

The slimy pools — the dead men stank through all,

Pungent and sharp; as bodies loomed before,

And as we passed, they stank: then dulled away

To that vague fœtor, all encompassing,

Infecting earth and air. They lay, all clothed,

Each in some new and piteous attitude

That we well marked to guide us back: as he,

Outside our wire, that lay on his back and crossed

His legs Crusader-wise: I smiled at that,

And thought on Elia and his Temple Church.

From him, at quarter left, lay a small corpse,

Down in a hollow, huddled as in a bed,

That one of us put his hand on unawares.

Next was a bunch of half a dozen men

All blown to bits, an archipelago

Of corrupt fragments, vexing to us three,

Who had no light to see by, save the flares.

On such a trail, so light, for ninety yards

We crawled on belly and elbows, till we saw,

Instead of lumpish dead before our eyes,

The stakes and crosslines of the German wire.

We lay in shelter of the last dead man,

Ourselves as dead, and heard their shovels ring

Turning the earth, then talk and cough at times.

A sentry fired and a machine-gun spat;

They shot a glare above us, when it fell

And spluttered out in the pools of No Man’s Land,

We turned and crawled past the remembered dead:

Past him and him, and them and him, until,

For he lay some way apart, we caught the scent

Of the Crusader and slide past his legs,

And through the wire and home, and got our rum.

Arthur Graeme West was a British writer and war poet. West was born in Eaton, Norfolk, educated at Highgate School, then Blundell's School and Balliol College, Oxford.

He enlisted as a private in the Public Schools Battalion in January 1915. In August 1916 he was a second lieutenant in the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. In 1917 he was killed, near the town of Baupame, by a sniper's bullet.

~****~

Sunday WW1 Remembered ...

A Sampling of War Poets

1915

Edward Thomas

1898 - 1917

Home

Fair was the morning, fair our tempers, and

We had seen nothing fairer than that land,

Though strange, and the untrodden snow that made

Wild of the tame, casting out all that was

Not wild and rustic and old; and we were glad.

Fair, too, was afternoon, and first to pass

Were we that league of snow, next the north wind.

There was nothing to return for, except need,

And yet we sang nor ever stopped for speed,

As we did often with the start behind.

Faster still strode we when we came in sight

Of the cold roofs where we must spend the night.

Happy we had not been there, nor could be.

Though we had tasted sleep and food and fellowship

Together long. 

“How quick” to someone's lip

The words came, “will the beaten horse run home.”

The word “home” raised a smile in us all three,

And one repeated it, smiling just so

That all knew what he meant and none would say.

Between three counties far apart that lay

We were divided and looked strangely each

At the other, and we knew we were not friends

But fellows in a union that ends

With the necessity for it, as it ought. 

Never a word was spoken, not a thought

Was thought, of what the look meant with the word

“Home” as we walked and watched the sunset blurred.

And then to me the word, only the word,

“Homesick,” as it were playfully occurred:

No more. If I should ever more admit

Than the mere word I could not endure it

For a day longer: this captivity

Must somehow come to an end, else I should be

Another man, as often now I seem,

Or this life be only an evil dream.

Phillip Edward Thomas was an Anglo-Welsh poet. Although few of his poems deal directly with war, he is considered to be a war poet.

He enlisted in the army in 1915, and was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in 1917, soon after he arrived in France.

~****~

Sunday WW1 Remembered..

A Sampling of War Poets

1914

Thomas Hardy

1840 - 1928

Men Who March Away
(Song of the Soldiers)

What of the faith and fire within us

Men who march away

Ere the barn-cocks say

Night is growing gray,

Leaving all that here can win us;

What of the faith and fire within us

Men who march away?

Is it a purblind prank, O think you,

Friend with the musing eye,

Who watch us stepping by

With doubt and dolorous sigh?

Can much pondering so hoodwink you!

Is it a purblind prank, O think you,

Friend with the musing eye?

Nay. We well see what we are doing,

Though some may not see—

Dalliers as they be—

England's need are we;

Her distress would leave us rueing:

Nay. We well see what we are doing,

Though some may not see!

In our heart of hearts believing

Victory crowns the just,

And that braggarts must

Surely bite the dust,

Press we to the field ungrieving,

In our heart of hearts believing

Victory crowns the just.

Hence the faith and fire within us

Men who march away

Ere the barn-cocks say

Night is growing gray,

Leaving all that here can win us;

Hence the faith and fire within us

Men who march away.

September 5, 1914.

Although known for his Wessex inspired classic fiction, Thomas Hardy considered himself to be a poet and is now considered to be one of the greatest twentieth century poets.

Men Who March Away was written in September 1914 at the very start of the Great War when English optimism was running high and the war was fully expected to be over 'by Christmas'.

Hardy was no stranger to war poetry and had penned several during the earlier Boer War - he took a pragmatic approach to conflict and Men Who March Away is seen as a rallying cry.

~****~

Sunday WW1 Remembered...

Over the last four years of adding WW1 information onto my blog I have found lots of books really interesting so I thought it was time to share them.

Corgi Childrens
2016

Who'll Sing the Anthem

Who will tell the story?

One of my absolute favourite go-to books is this classic remembrance book from Michael Morpurgo which was originally published in 2014 to mark the start of the WW1 centenary.

Only Remembered is a  lovely collection of extracts, poems and memories of the Great war . Aimed primarily at the young adult market, this is, most definitely, a book which can be enjoyed by grown ups too. Simply and beautifully illustrated Only Remembered brings the poignancy, the horrors and the heroes of the Great War into stark reality.

Those who have contributed with words, thoughts and deeds are Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cornwall, Sir Andrew Motion, Miranda Hart, Dame Jacqueline Wilson, Anthony Horowitz, Eoin Colfer, Antony Beevor, Emma Thompson, David Almond, Dr Rowan Williams, Richard Curtis, Joanna Lumley, Raymond Briggs, Shami Chakrabarti and Sir Tony Robinson.

Royalties from the publication of Only Remembered will be spilt between the Royal British Legion and projects for soldiers' children and families at SSAFA.

About the Author

Sir Michael Andrew Morpurgo, OBE, FRSL is the author of many books for children, five of which have been made into films.

~****~

Sunday WW1 Remembered..

Ordinary Lives of the First World War

Mothering

The Mother

by

May Herschel-Clarke

1850-1950

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England.

If you should die, think only this of me

In that still quietness where is space for thought,

Where parting, loss and bloodshed shall not be,

And men may rest themselves and dream of nought:

That in some place a mystic mile away

One whom you loved has drained the bitter cup

Till there is nought to drink; has faced the day

Once more, and now, has raised the standard up.

And think, my son, with eyes grown clear and dry

She lives as though for ever in your sight,

Loving the things you loved, with heart aglow

For country, honour, truth, traditions high,

--Proud that you paid their price.

(And if some night Her heart should break--well, lad, you will not know)

May Hershel Clarke was an English poet better known for her anti-war poems.
The Mother was published in 1919 in direct response to  Rupert Brookes very famous sonnet
The Soldier.

For Mothers today and every day

for

they are always our sons and daughters.

Sunday WW1 Remembered..

This week, on the 6th February, it was a 100 years since The Representation of the People Act which gave women over thirty and men over 21 the vote.

 And whilst it didn't go very far, it did, however, allow a glimmer of hope to those brave women who had long been campaigning for Votes for Women.

And so I started to think about all those women who kept the country functioning during the long years of WW1, and this 1917 poem by war poet, Jessie Pope speaks eloquently about their public service contribution.

War Girls

There's the girl who clips your ticket for the train,

  And the girl who speeds the lift from floor to floor,

There's the girl who does a milk-round in the rain,

  And the girl who calls for orders at your door.

      Strong, sensible, and fit,

      They're out to show their grit,

    And tackle jobs with energy and knack.

      No longer caged and penned up,

      They're going to keep their end up

    Till the khaki soldier boys come marching back.

There's the motor girl who drives a heavy van,

  There's the butcher girl who brings your joint of meat,

There's the girl who cries 'All fares, please!' like a man,

  And the girl who whistles taxis up the street.

      Beneath each uniform

      Beats a heart that's soft and warm,

    Though of canny mother-wit they show no lack;

      But a solemn statement this is,

      They've no time for love and kisses

    Till the khaki soldier-boys come marching back.

**

The Women's Work in the War Production 1914-1918

A female switchboard cleaner of the tramways department of the Corporation of Glasgow (now Glasgow City Council). Two such women were employed by the department, starting in November 1915. They worked forty-five hours per week and earned 25 shillings per week, including a bonus.

Women taking up the challenge of public service work during 1914-1918 allowed more men to go to war.

© IWM (Q 110155)

A female worker operating a slugging machine at the boot manufacture of J. Rawson and Sons Limited in Leicester.

© IWM (Q 109965)

Source IWM  archive collection.

~****~

Christmas Sunday WW1 Remembered...

A Christmas Prayer

(From the Trenches)

by 

Cyril Winterbotham

1887- 1916

Not yet for us may Christmas bring

Good-will to men, and peace;

In our dark sky no angels sing,

Not yet the great release

For men, when war shall cease.

So must the guns our carols make,

Our gifts must bullets be,

For us no Christmas bells shall wake;

These ruined homes shall see

No Christmas revelry.

In hardened hearts we fain would greet

The Babe at Christmas born,

But lo, He comes with pierced feet,

Wearing a crown of thorn,-

His side a spear has torn.

For tired eyes are all too dim,

Our hearts too full of pain,

Our ears too deaf to hear the hymn

Which angels sing in vain,

"The Christ is born again."

O Jesus, pitiful, draw near,

That even we may see

The Little Child who knew not fear;

Thus would we picture Thee

Unmarred by agony.

O'er death and pain triumphant yet

Bid Thou Thy harpers play,

That we may hear them, and forget

Sorrow and all dismay,

And welcome Thee to stay

With us on Christmas Day.

Cyril Winterbotham was a Lieutenant in the 1/5th Battalion Gloucester Regiment.

He was killed in  August 1916 and is listed on the Thiepval memorial.

Jaffareadstoo wishes you a peaceful and loving Christmas

Sunday WW1 Remembered...

The Fallen

by

Diana Gurney

Shall we not lay our holly wreath

Here at the foot of this high cross?

We do not know, perhaps a breath

Of our remembering may come

To them at last where they are sleeping,

They are quiet, they are dumb,

No more of mirth, no more of weeping,

Silent Christmas they are keeping;

Ours the sorrow, ours the loss.




There are few references about Diana Gurney other than she is recognised as one of the 
WW1 War Poets.

Her book of poems The Poppied Dream was published in 1921

Sunday WW1 Remembered..

Poems written in 1917

Servitude

by

Ivor Gurney

If it were not for England, who would bear

This heavy servitude one moment more?

To keep a brothel, sweep and wash the floor

Of filthiest hovels were noble to compare

With this brass-cleaning life. Now here, now there

Harried in foolishness, scanned curiously o'er

By fools made brazen by conceit, and store

Of antique witticisms thin and bare.

Only the love of comrades sweetens all,

Whose laughing spirit will not be outdone.

As night-watching men wait for the sun

To hearten them, so wait I on such boys

As neither brass nor Hell-fire may appal,

Nor guns, nor sergeant-major's bluster and noise.

1917

Ivor Gurney was a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. At the outbreak of war he volunteered as a private in the Gloucestershire regiment but was initially turned down because of poor eyesight. 

 He joined the 2nd and 5th Gloucestershire regiment in 1915.

 He was wounded and gassed in 1917 while serving in France.



~****~

Sunday WW1 Remembered...

Poems written in 1917

The Dead Kings

by

Francis Ledwidge

All the dead kings came to me

At Rosnaree, where I was dreaming,

A few stars glimmered through the morn,

And down the thorn the dews were streaming.

And every dead king had a story

Of ancient glory, sweetly told.

It was too early for the lark,

But the starry dark had tints of gold.

I listened to the sorrows three

Of that Eire passed into song.

A cock crowed near a hazel croft,

And up aloft dim larks winged strong.

And I, too, told the kings a story

Of later glory, her fourth sorrow:

There was a sound like moving shields

In high green fields and the lowland furrow.

And one said: ‘We who yet are kings

Have heard these things lamenting inly.’

Sweet music flowed from many a bill

And on the hill the morn stood queenly.

And one said: ‘Over is the singing,

And bell bough ringing, whence we come;

With heavy hearts we’ll tread the shadows,

In honey meadows birds are dumb.’

And one said: ‘Since the poets perished

And all they cherished in the way,

Their thoughts unsung, like petal showers

Inflame the hours of blue and grey.’

And one said: ‘A loud tramp of men

We’ll hear again at Rosnaree.’

A bomb burst near me where I lay.

I woke, ’twas day in Picardy.

1917

Francis Edward Ledwidge was an Irish war poet from County Meath in Ireland.

 Sometimes known as the "poet of the blackbirds".

He was killed in action at the Battle of Paschendaele in 1917.



~****~

Sunday WW1 Remembered...

November is the month of remembrance

Since They Have Died

by 

May Wedderburn Cannan

Since they have died to give us gentleness,

And hearts kind with contentment and quiet mirth,

Let us who live also give happiness

And love, that’s born of pity, to the earth.

For, I have thought, some day they may lie sleeping

Forgetting all the weariness and pain,

And smile to think their world is in our keeping,

And laughter comes back to the earth again.

~****~

Sunday WW1 Remembered...

November is the Month of Remembrance

Now to be still and rest

by 

P H B Lyon

Now to be still and rest, while the heart remembers

All that is learned and loved in the days of long past,

To stoop and warm our hands at the fallen embers,

Glad to have come to the long way’s end at last.

Now to awake, and feel no regret at waking,

Knowing the shadowy days are white again,

To draw our curtains and watch the slow dawn breaking

Silver and grey on English field and lane.

Not to fulfil our dreams, in woods and meadows

Treading the well-loved paths – to pause and cry

‘So, even so I remember it’ – seeing the shadows

Weave on the distant hills their tapestry.

Nor to rejoice in children and join their laughter,

Tuning our hearts once more to the fairy strain,

To hear our names on voices we love, and after

Turn with a smile to sleep and our dream again.

Then – with a new-born strength, the sweet rest over,

Gladly to follow the great white road once more,

To work with a song on our lips and the heart of a lover,

Building a city of peace on the wastes of war.

~***~

Sunday WW1 Remembered...

November is the month of Remembrance

In Flanders Fields

By 

John McCrae

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,

In Flanders fields.

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

In Flanders fields.

On Remembrance Sunday in our family we remember

Private John Hopkins

The Loyal North Lancashire Regiment

Died 24 January 1919
Buried Ince Cemetery, Wigan, Lancashire

Driver Frederick Arkwright

Royal Army Service Corps

Died 1 February 1945

Buried Schoonselhof Cemetery 
Antwerp, Belgium

Sunday WW1 Remembered...

November is the month of Remembrance

Flanders Fields

by 

Elizabeth Daryush

Here the scanted daisy glows

Glorious as the carmined rose;

Here the hill-top's verdure mean

Fair is with unfading green;

Here, where sorrow still must tread,

All her graves are garlanded.

And still, O glad passer-by

Of the fields of agony,

Lower laughter's voice, and bare

Thy head in the valley where

Poppies bright and rustling wheat

Are a desert to love's feet.

~****~