By tradition and as I have now done for many years now on Remembrance Sunday, what follows is a selection of personally chosen war poetry collected over many years, some of it for the first time, some that may be well known to you and some that may not and this year, rather longer than before as what follows contains many that I have used before.
These poems are chosen not only in order to embrace those who served in the Army, Royal Navy, Royal Flying Corps which in 2018 was transformed into the Royal Air Force, but particularly those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of our nation as well as those of our allies in the Great War (1914 -1918), the Second World War (1939 -1945) and so that we may be free.
This year they also reflect civilians who suffered through the carnage of war at home, who performed crucial tasks that often tend to be ignored and who also risked and often gave their lives for the same cause, those who died in subsequent wars in the service of our nation, those who serve in our armed forces today and of what our military and brilliant defence industry did during wars and still do today and of how we should be so proud. Lest we forget.
To begin, a quite beautiful and unusual poem written by a pupil at Hertford Grammar School who was a member of the School Officer Training Corps, written in tribute to the young men who, just a few years before were pupils at the school and that was sent to me by my friend Ben Griffiths:
Three years ago – three years ago, the wall of the school was bare;
And now there are too many photographs, photographs hanging there.
Some of the glad to be soldiers, all of them willing to go.
All of them willing and knowing what they were going to do -What they were warding from England, what they were facing for you.
Flanders and France and Gallipoli, Tigris and Struma and Nile,
Save them, and marvelled to see them marching to death with a smile;
Clean and alert when they landed, mud-stained and battered when they tried, Gun-less and shell less to shield you, shielding their England they died.
“Live for the land that we died for! Fight, and hold on, to the end”
This is the call for the young ones, this is the message they send.
Young ones! But what of the old ones? England could better have been spared.
The old ones who babbled of peace and of freedom – but never prepared;
Who blundered and babbled again as they babbled in the years of ease;
Who mocked at a soldiers warning then shrieked for the shelter of these.
Three years ago – three years ago, the wall of the School was bare;
And now there are too many photographs, photographs hanging there.
Each has a cap badge above it, each has a legend below.
With the date of a fight, and a name of a lad – a lad that we used to know;
All of them willing and knowing what they were going to do –
All of them died like soldiers – sent to their death for you.
An Eighteenth-Century Prophecy
(translated from Luna Habitabilis by Thomas Gray (1716 – 1771)
The time will come, when thou shalt lift thine eyes to watch a long-drawn battle in the skies.
While aged peasants, too amazed for words, stare at the flying fleets of wondrous birds.
England, so long mistress of the sea, where wind and wave caress her sovereignty, her ancient
triumphs yet on high shall bear, And reign, the sovereign of the conquered airs
London Chimes – (Punch November 1940)
Spitfires and Blenheim’s,
Said the bells of St. Clement’s,
Aren’t built for five farthings, Said the bells of St Martins,
Donations, I pray ye,
Said the bells of Old Bailey,
On account o’ the Blitz,
Said the bells of Shoreditch.
Downhearted! Not we!
Said the bells of Stepney;
Lor’ love yer, no no, Boomed the big bell of Bow.
Dulce et Decorum Est – Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! —An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Marching (Punch – August 1940)
Men marching ceaselessly as in a dream,
But with a rhythm beyond a dreamer’s ken,
The motivated march of wakened wide-eyed men,
Who see the moment’s needs and those that seem contingent on them;
Men who do esteem,
Their Heritage of mountain, field and fen worth dying for – as ever and again, are onward marching in an endless stream.
You who perceive their glory and their dust,
Or only hear their footsteps as they go,
You who remain at home because you must
(maybe you too once marched to meet the foe, or are woman, guarding the children’s crust),
Give thanks to-day that men are fashioned so.
IN FLANDERS FIELDS – (by John McCrae 1915)
“In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks still bravely 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 raise up high
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep. Though poppies grow
In Flanders Fields.
ARMISTICE DAY – (by Robert Graves 1918)
What’s all this hubbub and yelling,
Commotion and scamper of feet,
With ear-splitting clatter of kettles and cans,
Wild laughter down Mafeking Street?
O, those are the kids whom we fought for
(You might think they’d been scoffing our rum)
With flags that they waved when we marched off to war
In the rapture of bugle and drum.
Now they’ll hang Kaiser Bill from a lamp-post,
Von Tirpitz they’ll hang from a tree….
We’ve been promised a ‘Land Fit for Heroes’—
What heroes’ we heroes must be!
And the guns that we took from the Fritzes,
That we paid for with rivers of blood,
Look, they’re hauling them down to Old Battersea Bridge
Where they’ll topple them, souse, in the mud!
But there’s old men and women in corners
With tears falling fast on their cheeks,
There’s the armless and legless and sightless—
It’s seldom that one of them speaks.
And there’s flappers gone drunk and indecent
Their skirts kilted up to the thigh,
The constables lifting no hand in reproof
And the chaplain averting his eye….
When the days of rejoicing are over,
When the flags are stowed safely away,
They will dream of another wild ‘War to End Wars’
And another wild Armistice day.
But the boys who were killed in the trenches,
Who fought with no rage and no rant,
We left them stretched out on their pallets of mud
Low down with the worm and the ant.
From the ‘Bard of Erkowit’ – On the Strength of 223 Squadron
‘Twinkle, twinkle, one-one two,
How I wonder what you’ll do.
What next will your target be?
Italian foe or little me?
From a Sergeant Pilot (Punch – July 1940)
God, give us grace that we,
Flying our fighters to eternity,
May meteor-like before we fall,
Leave fiery trails of light, that all truths sons may clutch, and clutching rise
To blast Hell’s spawn from Heaven’s skies.
AND IN THE MORNING……. (By Corporal Mollie Wilson W.A.A.F – December 1942)
Shall we remember, through long aching years,
The heartbreak in laughter, rare, comforting tears,
The silence of sorrow, deep uplifting pride,
Soft whispered consolings of those who have died?
Shall we remember how planes throb at night,
How swift bursting shells pattern darkness with light?
Will we remember the flame ridden skies?
Or picture the sadness in some mother’s eyes?
Shall we remember the horrors of hate,
The unflaunted courage of those who must wait,
Remember the ramping’s of rough hungry seas,
See shadows of graves under sheltering trees?
Shall we remember staunch weary-eyed youth,
Remember the bleakness of ungilded truth,
Remember eternal, grim soul-burning sand,
The full-hearted clasp of an unfettered hand?
Shall we remember in purpled content,
The mud and the blood and the bugles lament,
Remember who secretly unsolaced weep,
While death swathes their sons in cold unwaking sleep?
Shall we remember as long as we live,
Remember, though loving we still must forgive?
Shall we remember forever? – and yet,
Since this is our destiny, can we forget?
Midsummer Night Watch – LDV (Punch – June 1940)
At least a kind of soldier once again, my midnight vigil, heavy-eyed, I keep,
And try and pity comfortable men, relaxed as mere civilians still in sleep:
How much more noble my nocturnal lot,
Protecting them and theirs – a parashot!
The darkened homes of decent folk I know around my elevated outpost, lie,
Pathetically helpless roofs, below the vastness of the dim suspected sky – from which, however, nothing need they fear
So long as I am awake and watchful here.
And if I had a tendency to sleep and put on peace-time habitudes the blame,
You Corncrake in the hayfield deep would guard me from the sentry’s crying shame;
You let no moment’s soothing silence pass without your challenge from the dew-grey grass.
And, when at long, long last I am relieved and lay me down to snooze awhile in peace shall you regard your object as achieved and, for the sake of my earned slumber, cease?
Or must you play this part the whole night through, keeping alert the next-for-duty too?
THE OLD FRONT LINE – (John Masefield -1917)
All wars end: even this war will someday end, and the ruins will be rebuilt and the field full of death will grow food, and all this frontier of trouble will be forgotten…
In a few years’ time, when this war is a romance in memory, the soldier looking for his battlefield will find his marks gone.
Centre Way, Peel trench, Munster Alley and these other paths to glory will be deep under the corn and gleaners will sing at Dead Mule Corner.
THE NORTH SEA – (Miles Jeffrey Game Day -1916)
Dawn on the drab North Sea! —
colourless, cold, and depressing,
with the sun that we long to see
refraining from his blessing.
To the westward — sombre as doom:
to the eastward — grey and foreboding:
Comes a low, vibrating boom —
the sound of a mine exploding.
Day on the drear North Sea! —
wearisome, drab, and relentless.
The low clouds swiftly flee;
bitter the sky, and relentless.
Nothing at all in sight
save the mast of a sunken trawler,
fighting her long, last fight
with the waves that mouth and maul her.
Gale on the bleak North Sea! —
howling a dirge in the rigging.
Slowly and toilfully
through the great, grey breakers digging,
thus we make our way,
hungry, wet, and weary,
soaked with the sleet and spray,
desolate, damp, and dreary.
Fog in the dank North Sea! —
silent and clammily dripping.
Slowly and mournfully,
ghostlike, goes the shipping.
Sudden across the swell
come the fog-horns hoarsely blaring
or the clang of a warning bell
to leave us vainly staring.
Night on the black North Sea!—
black as hell’s darkest hollow.
Peering anxiously,
we search for the ships that follow.
One are the sea and sky
dim are the figures near us,
with only the sea-bird’s cry
and the swish of the waves to cheer us.
Death on the wild North Sea! —
death from the shell that shatters
(death we will face with glee,
’tis the weary wait that matters):—
death from the guns that roar
and the splinters weirdly shrieking.
‘Tis a fight to the death; ’tis war;
and the North Sea is redly reeking
ON PASSING THE NEW MENIN GATE – (Siegfried Sassoon)
Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
the unheroic dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,-
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.
Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride
‘Their name liveth for ever’, the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
as these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.
HIGH FLIGHT (by Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee Jr RCAF)
(Considered by many as THE Poem of the RAF)
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter –silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
On sun-split clouds, – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air…
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew –
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God
BOMBER COUNTY (by Jim Brookbank)
(Note: Having first used this and two other poems written by Sergeant Jim Brookbank in the past, Bomber County has been included on the request of two currently serving RAF Officers. The author was a bomb aimer with 1X (B) Squadron).
The stillness, wreathed in misty folds from Coningsby to Elsham Wolds,
Is shattered now as the engines roar and Lincolnshire ‘stands by’ for war.
From Fiskerton to Donna Nook the coughing Rolls-Royce Merlins shook
The frozen silence of the night as bomber crews prepared to fight
Fast spinning ‘props’ disturb the earth at Bardney and at Faldingworth.
They’re ready too with all checks done at Skellingthorpe and Waddington
At Wickenby and Woodhall Spa the ‘heavies’ start to role; and far North east
At Binbrook, one by one, they climb into the setting sun.
At Kirmington, East Kirkby too, bomb laden ‘Lancs’, with throttles through the ‘gate’, lift off.
Droning fills the air at North Killingholm and Spilsby.
With ‘hundred octanes’ in their tanks Hemswell and Fulbeck join the ranks.
Whilst Ludford Magna flashes ‘morse’ to start the aircraft on their course.
Now Scampton signals ‘Group’ to say they’ve sent their squadrons on their way.
At Strubby they are grim and tense as aircraft skim the bound’ry fence.
Metherington has not delayed to brief its squadron for the raid;
They also join the bomber stream as Lincolnshire lies down to dream.
These villages well remember the airfields that took their name.
Their forebears knew marching Roman feet where Ermine Street and Fossway meet.
But now the legions of the sky carve their transient roads on high, yet leave no evidence
To say that they had ever passed this way.
Whilst in the woods below, perhaps a stealthy poacher sets his traps. The Barn owl swoops
And talons drawn, in search of prey before the dawn.
Jack, busy with his rabbit snare, will maybe pause awhile and stare.
Eventually the droning fades and quietness floods the Lincolnshire glades.
Lincoln Cathedral’s shrouded towers stand patient watch throughout the hours of darkness.
Tall and noble still, promising peace on Lindum hill.
Holland, Lindsey, Kesteven sleeps once more.
The frozen silence creeps again across the fens and wolds as stillness spreads its misty folds.
‘DESTROYERS’ – (Henry Head)
With purple bays and tongues of shining sand,
Time, like and echoing tide;
Moves drowsily in idle ebb and flow;
The sunshine slumbers in the tangled grass
And homely folk with simple greeting pass,
As to their worship or their work they go.
Man, earth, and sea
Seem linked in elemental harmony,
And my insurgent sorrow finds release
In dreams of peace.
But silent, grey,
Out of the curtained haze,
Across the bay
Two fierce destroyers glide with bows a-foam
And predatory gaze,
Like cormorants that seek a submerged prey.
An angel of destruction guards the door
And keeps the peace of our ancestral home;
Freedom to dream, to work, and to adore,
These vagrant days, nights of untroubled breath,
Are bought with death
Dulce et Decorum Est – Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! —An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
THE SOLDIER – Rupert Brooke
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
And finally, as in every year since I first began sending poetry related to war on this very special day, my own three favourite WW2 poems written by John Pudney in 1941/2)
FOR JOHNNY
Do not despair, For Johnny-head-in-air;
He sleeps as sound, As Johnny underground.
Fetch out no shroud, For Johnny-in-the-cloud;
And keep your tears for him in after years.
Better by far, For Johnny-the-bright-star,
To keep your head, and see his children fed.
SMITH
Smith, living on air, your astral body, a mechanical wonder,
Your anger an affair, of fire and thunder.
Smith, who puts down fear, whose young heart, grapples with pity,
Whose spirit holds life on earth so dear, and death no merit.
MISSING
Less said the better, the bill unpaid, the dead letter,
No roses at the end of Smith, my friend.
Last words don’t matter and there are none to flatter.
Words will not fill the post of Smith, the ghost.
For Smith, our brother, only son of loving mother,
The ocean lifted, stirred, leaving no word.
CHW – (Birmingham – 14th November 2018)
Howard Wheeldon FRAeS
Wheeldon Strategic Advisory Ltd,
M: +44 7710 779785
Skype: chwheeldon
@AirSeaRescue