As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poets’ Corner
In say 1912 in the time of the supposedly big deal Basle Socialist Conference which got reflected in more circles than just workingmen, small shopkeepers and small farmers, or 1913 for that matter when the big deal European powers were waging "proxy" war, making ominous moves, but most importantly working three shifts in the munitions plants, oh hell, even in the beginning of 1914 before the war clouds got a full head of steam that summer they all profusely professed their undying devotion to peace, to wage no war for any reason. Reasons: artists who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society, freaked out at what humankind had produced, was producing to place everybody in an inescapable box and hence their cubic fascinations from which to run, put the pieces to paint; sculptors who put twisted pieces of scrape metal juxtaposed to each other to get that same effect, an effect which would be replicated on all those foreboding trenched fronts; writers, not all of them socialists either, some were conservatives that saw empire, their particular empire, in grave danger once the blood started flowing who saw the v of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress, humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy; writers of not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and for the sweet nothing maidens to spent their waking hours strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they with all their creative brethren would go to the hells, literary Dante's rings, before touching the hair of another human, that come the war drums they all would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist, world and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels.
And then the war drums intensified and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, they who could not resist the call, could not resist those maidens now busy all day strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets for their soldier boys, those poets, artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went sheepishly to the trenches with the rest of the flower of European youth to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for ….
SONG OF THE RED CROSS
O gracious ones, we bless your name
Upon our bended knee;
The voice of love with tongue of flame
Records your charity.
Your hearts, your lives right willingly ye gave,
That sacred ruth might shine;
Ye fell, bright spirits, brave amongst the brave,
Compassionate, divine.
Example from your lustrous deeds
The conqueror shall take,
Sowing sublime and fruitful seeds
Of _aidos_ in this ache.
And when our griefs have passed on gloomy wing,
When friend and foe are sped,
Sons of a morning to be born shall sing
The radiant Cross of Red;
Sons of a morning to be born shall sing
The radiant Cross of Red.
_Eden Phillpotts_
THE HEALERS
In a vision of the night I saw them,
In the battles of the night.
'Mid the roar and the reeling shadows of blood
They were moving like light,
Light of the reason, guarded
Tense within the will,
As a lantern under a tossing of boughs
Burns steady and still.
With scrutiny calm, and with fingers
Patient as swift
They bind up the hurts and the pain-writhen
Bodies uplift,
Untired and defenceless; around them
With shrieks in its breath
Bursts stark from the terrible horizon
Impersonal death;
But they take not their courage from anger
That blinds the hot being;
They take not their pity from weakness;
Tender, yet seeing;
Feeling, yet nerved to the uttermost;
Keen, like steel;
Yet the wounds of the mind they are stricken with,
Who shall heal?
They endure to have eyes of the watcher
In hell, and not swerve
For an hour from the faith that they follow,
The light that they serve.
Man true to man, to his kindness
That overflows all,
To his spirit erect in the thunder
When all his forts fall,--
This light, in the tiger-mad welter,
They serve and they save.
What song shall be worthy to sing of them--
Braver than the brave?
_Laurence Binyon_
THE RED CROSS NURSES
Out where the line of battle cleaves
The horizon of woe
And sightless warriors clutch the leaves
The Red Cross nurses go.
In where the cots of agony
Mark death's unmeasured tide--
Bear up the battle's harvestry--
The Red Cross nurses glide.
Look! Where the hell of steel has torn
Its way through slumbering earth
The orphaned urchins kneel forlorn
And wonder at their birth.
Until, above them, calm and wise
With smile and guiding hand,
God looking through their gentle eyes,
The Red Cross nurses stand.
_Thomas L. Masson_
KILMENY
(A SONG OF THE TRAWLERS)
Dark, dark lay the drifters, against the red west,
As they shot their long meshes of steel overside;
And the oily green waters were rocking to rest
When _Kilmeny_ went out, at the turn of the tide.
And nobody knew where that lassie would roam,
For the magic that called her was tapping unseen,
It was well nigh a week ere _Kilmeny_ came home,
And nobody knew where _Kilmeny_ had been.
She'd a gun at her bow that was Newcastle's best,
And a gun at her stern that was fresh from the Clyde,
And a secret her skipper had never confessed,
Not even at dawn, to his newly wed bride;
And a wireless that whispered above like a gnome,
The laughter of London, the boasts of Berlin.
O, it may have been mermaids that lured her from home,
But nobody knew where _Kilmeny_ had been.
It was dark when _Kilmeny_ came home from her quest,
With her bridge dabbled red where her skipper had died;
But she moved like a bride with a rose at her breast;
And "Well done, Kilmeny!" the admiral cried.
Now at sixty-four fathom a conger may come,
And nose at the bones of a drowned submarine;
But late in the evening _Kilmeny_ came home,
And nobody knew where _Kilmeny_ had been.
There's a wandering shadow that stares at the foam,
Though they sing all the night to old England, their queen,
Late, late in the evening _Kilmeny_ came home,
And nobody knew where _Kilmeny_ had been.
_Alfred Noyes_
