The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry by Various Contributors

symmetry.
    50             Laughter and shouting filled the sparkling air.
    Bright flakes of scattered water everywhere
    Leapt from their diving. Hosts of little billows
    Beat the shores, and hanging boughs of willows
    Glittered with glassy drops. Then, bright as fire,
    A bugle sounded, and their happy din
    Stopped, and the boys, with that swift discipline
    By which keen life answers the soul’s desire,
    Rushed for the bank. And soon the bank was bright
    With bodies swarming up out of the stream.
    60             From the water and the boughs they came in sight:
    Across the leaves I saw their quick limbs gleam.
    Then brandished towels flashed whitely here and there.
    They dried their ears and scrubbed their towzled hair.
    One, stepping to the water, carefully
    Stretched a bare leg to rinse a muddy foot:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â One sat with updrawn knee,
    Bent head, and both hands tugging on a boot.
    And gradually the bright and flashing crowd
    Dimmed into sober khaki. Then the loud
    70             Laughter and shouts and songs died at a word.
    The ranks fell in: No sound, no movement stirred.
    The willow-boughs were still: the blue sky burned:
    The party numbered down, formed fours, right turned,
    Marched. And their shadows faded from the stream
    And the dark pool swayed back into its dream:
    Only the trodden meadow-grass reported
    Where all that gay humanity had sported.
    So the dream fades. I wake, remembering how
    Many of those smart boys no longer now
    80             Cast running shadows on the grass or make
    Â Â Â Â Â White tents with laughter shake,
    But lie in narrow chambers underground,
    Eyes void of sunlight, ears unthrilled by sound
    Of laughter. Round my post on every hand
    Stretches this grim, charred skeleton of land
    Where ruined homes and shell-ploughed fields are lost
    In one great sea of clay, clay seared by fire,
    Battered by rainstorms, jagged and scarred and crossed
    By gaping trench-lines hedged with rusted wire.
    90             The rainy evening fades. A rainy night
    Sags down upon us. Wastes of sodden clay
    Fade into mist, and fade all sound and sight,
    All broken sounds and movements of the day,
    To emptiness and listlessness, a grey
    Unhappy silence tremulous with the poise
    Of hearts intent with fearful expectation
    Â Â Â Â Â Â And secret preparation,
    Silence that is not peace but bated breath,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â A listening for death,
    100                 The quivering prelude to tremendous noise.
    O give us one more day of sun and leaves,
    The laughing soldiers and the laughing stream,
    And when at dawn the loud destruction cleaves
    The silence, and (like men that walk in dream,
    Knowing the stern ordeal has begun)
    We climb the trench, and cross the wire and start,
    We’ll stumble through the shell-bursts with good heart
    Like boys who race through meadows in the sun.
    Martin Armstrong
    Nameless Men
    Around me, when I wake or sleep,
    Men strange to me their vigils keep;
    And some were boys but yesterday,
    Upon the village green at play.
    Their faces I shall never know;
    Like sentinels they come and go.
    In grateful love I bow the knee
    For nameless men who die for me.
    There is in earth or heaven no room
    10             Where I may flee this dreadful doom.
    For ever it is understood
    I am a man redeemed by blood.
    I must walk softly all my days
    Down on my redeemed and solemn ways.
    Christ, take the men I bring to Thee,
    The men who watch and die for me.
    Edward Shillito
    Greater Love
    Red lips are not so red
    Â Â Â Â Â As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
    Kindness of wooed and wooer
    Seems shame to their love pure.
    O Love, your eyes lose