In Flanders Fields
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.
FJohn McCrae
Reprinted by special permission of London “Punch”
THE ANXIOUS DEAD
O guns, fall silent till the dead men hear
Above their heads the legions pressing on:
(These fought their fight in time of bitter fear,
And died not knowing how the day had gone.)
O flashing muzzles, pause, and let them see
The coming dawn that streaks the sky afar;
Then let your mighty chorus witness be
To them, and Cæsar, that we still make war.
Tell them, O guns, that we have heard their call,
That we have sworn, and will not turn aside,
That we will onward till we win or fall,
That we will keep the faith for which they died.
Bid them be patient, and some day, anon,
They shall feel earth enwrapt in silence deep;
Shall greet, in wonderment, the quiet dawn,
And in content may turn them to their sleep.
John McCrae
By permission of “The Spectator”
EXTRACT FROM SPEECH OF RT. HON. DAVID
LLOYD GEORGE ON BECOMING PREMIER
(December 19, 1916)
I should like to say one word about the lesson of the fighting on the western front—not about the military strategy, but about the significance of the whole of that great struggle, one of the greatest struggles ever waged in the history of the world. It is full of encouragement and of hope. Just look at it! An absolutely new Army! The old had done its duty and spent itself in the achievement of that great task. This is a new Army. But a year ago it was ore in the earth of Britain, yea, and of Ireland. It became iron. It has passed through a fiery furnace, and the enemy knows that it is now fine steel. An absolutely new Army, new men, new officers taken from schools, from colleges, from counting-houses, never trained to war, never thought of war, many of them perhaps never handled a weapon of war, generals never given the opportunity of handling great masses of men. Some of us had seen the manœuvres. A division which is now set to attack a small village is more than our generals ever had the opportunity of handling before the war. Compared with the great manœuvres on the Continent, they were toy manœuvres. And yet this new Army, new men, new officers, generals new to this kind of work, they have faced the greatest army in the world, the greatest army the world has ever seen, the best equipped and the best trained, and they have beaten them, beaten them, beaten them! Battle after battle, day after day, week after week! From the strongest entrenchments ever devised by human skill they have driven them out by valour, by valour which is incredible when you read the story of it.
SUBALTERNS
(A Song of Oxford)
They had so much to lose; their radiant laughter
Shook my old walls—how short a time ago.
I hold the echoes of their song hereafter
Among the precious things I used to know.
Their cup of life was full to overflowing,
All earth had laid its tribute at their feet.
What harvest might we hope from such a sowing?
What noonday from a dawning so complete?
And I—I watched them working, dreaming, playing,
Saw their young bodies fit the mind’s desire,
Felt them reach outward, upward, still obeying
The passionate dictates of their hidden fire.
Yet here and there some graybeard breathed derision,
“Too much of luxury, too soft an age!
Your careless Galahads will see no vision,
Your knights will make no mark on honour’s page.”
No mark?—Go ask the broken fields in Flanders,
Ask the great dead who watched in ancient Troy,
Ask the old moon as round the world she wanders
What of the men who were my hope and joy!
They are but fragments of Imperial splendour,
Handfuls of might amid a mighty host,
Yet I, who saw them go with proud surrender,
May surely claim to love them first and most.
They who had all, gave all. Their half-writ story
Lies in the empty halls they knew so well,
But they, the knights of God, shall see His glory,
And find the Grail ev’n in the fire of hell.
Mildred Huxley
By permission of the Author
THE SEARCHLIGHTS
(Political morality differs from individual morality, because there is no power above the State.—General von Bernhardi)
Shadow by shadow, stripped for fight
The lean black cruisers search the sea.
Night-long their level shafts of light
Revolve, and find no enemy.
Only they know each leaping wave
May hide the lightning, and their grave.
And in the land they guard so well
Is there no silent watch to keep?
An age is dying, and the bell
Rings midnight on a vaster deep.
But over all its waves, once more,
The searchlights move, from shore to shore.
And captains that we thought were dead,
And dreamers that we thought were dumb,
And voices that we thought were fled,
Arise, and call us, and we come:
And “search in thine own soul”, they cry;
“For there, too, lurks thine enemy”.
Search for the foe in thine own soul,
The sloth, the intellectual pride;
The trivial jest that veils the goal
For which our fathers lived and died;
The lawless dreams, the cynic Art,
That rend thy nobler self apart.
Not far, not far into the night,
These level swords of light can pierce;
Yet for her faith does England fight,
Her faith in this our universe,
Believing Truth and Justice draw
From founts of everlasting law:
The law that rules the stars, our stay,
Our compass through the world’s wide sea,
The one sure light, the one sure way,
The one firm base of Liberty;
The one firm road that men have trod
Through Chaos to the throne of God.
Therefore a Power above the State,
The unconquerable Power returns.
The fire, the fire that made her great
Once more upon her altar burns.
Once more, redeemed, and healed and whole,
She moves to the Eternal Goal.
Alfred Noyes
Reprinted by permission from the “Lord of Misrule”, by Alfred Noyes. Copyright, 1915, by Frederick A. Stokes Company
THE SEA IS HIS
The Sea is His: He made it,
Black gulf and sunlit shoal,
From battered bight to where the long
Leagues of Atlantic roll:
Small strait and ceaseless ocean
He bade each one to be:
The Sea is His: He made it—
And England keeps it free.
By pain and stress and striving
Beyond the nations’ ken,
By vigils stern when others slept,
By many lives of men;
Through nights of storm, through dawnings
Blacker than midnights be—
This Sea that God created,
England has kept it free.
Count me the splendid captains
Who sailed with courage high
To chart the perilous ways unknown—
Tell me where these men lie!
To light a path for ships to come
They moored at Dead Man’s quay;
The Sea is God’s—He made it,
And these men made it free.
Oh, little land of England,
Oh, Mother of hearts too brave,
Men say this trust shall pass from thee
Who guardest Nelson’s grave.
Aye, but these braggarts yet shall learn,
Who’d hold the world in fee,
The Sea is God’s—and England,
England shall keep it free.
GR. E. Vernède
From “War Poems”, by R. E. Vernède. By permission of the Publishers, Wm. Heinemann, London
VOLUNTEER
Here lies a clerk who half his life had spent
Toiling at ledgers in a city gray,
Thinking that so his days would drift away
With no lance broken in life’s tournament:
Yet ever ’twixt the books and his bright eyes
The gleaming eagles of the legions came,
And horsemen, charging under phantom skies,
Went thundering past beneath the oriflamme.
And now those waiting dreams are satisfied;
From twilight into spacious dawn he went;
His lance is broken; but he lies content
With that high hour, in which he lived and died.
And falling thus he wants no recompense,
Who found his battle in the last resort;
Nor needs he any hearse to bear him hence,
Who goes to join the men of Agincourt.
Herbert Asquith
By permission of Rt. Hon. H. H. Asquith
EXTRACT FROM PRESIDENT WILSON’S
MESSAGE TO CONGRESS
(April 2, 1917)
We are now about to accept the gage of battle with this natural foe to liberty, and shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the nation to check and nullify its pretensions and powers. We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretence about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German people included; for the rights of nations great and small, and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the trusted foundations of political liberty.
We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those have been made as secure as the faith and freedom of the nation can make them.
Just because we fight without rancour and without selfish objects, seeking nothing for ourselves but what we shall wish to share with all free peoples, we shall, I feel confident, conduct our operations as belligerents without passion and ourselves observe with proud punctilio the principles of right and of fair play we profess to be fighting for.... We enter this war only where we are clearly forced into it because there are no other means of defending our rights.
It will be all the easier for us to conduct ourselves as belligerents in a high spirit of right and fairness because we act without animus, not in enmity toward a people or with the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them, but only in armed opposition to an irresponsible Government which has thrown aside all considerations of humanity and of right and is running amuck.... There are, it may be, many months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us.
It is a fearful thing to lead this great, peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest to our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.
To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.
FROM “VIMY RIDGE”
(April, 1917)
..........
England, our mother, we, thy sons, are young;
Our exultation this day cannot be
Bounded as thine: but thou wilt pardon us,
Thou wilt forgive us if we cry, “Now see!
See now, our mother, these are they that clung
Once to thy breasts, and are they not well sung?”
..........
Aye, not since France herself first stood at bay,
To conquer or to die on Marne’s green banks,
Driving at last across its crimsoned flood
The flower of Germany in shattered ranks,
Has there been crowded in a single day
More breathless glory for heroic lay.
England, our mother, once our boasting hear!
And in thy streets let flags and banners fly!
To drums and bugles let the people march
While Vimy Ridge is shouted to the sky!
..........
Thereafter of our pride let naught be said,
Saving on stone, inscribed with but one line:
Canada—Vimy Ridge—1917
Our hearts the tablets of a secret shrine:
Though henceforth we shall lift a higher head
Because of Vimy and its glorious dead.
Alfred Gordon
From “Vimy Ridge and New Poems”—By permission of the Author and of J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., Toronto