Forgotten Dead, I Salute You - Muriel Stuart

Dawn has flashed up the startled skies,
Night has gone out beneath the hill
Many sweet times; before our eyes
Dawn makes and unmakes about us still
The magic that we call the rose.
The gentle history of the rain
Has been unfolded, traced and lost
By the sharp finger-tips of frost;
Birds in the hawthorn build again;
The hare makes soft her secret house;
The wind at tourney comes and goes,
Spurring the green, unharnessed boughs;
The moon has waxed fierce and waned dim:
He knew the beauty of all those
Last year, and who remembers him?

Love sometimes walks the waters still,
Laughter throws back her radiant head;
Utterly beauty is not gone,
And wonder is not wholly dead.
The starry, mortal world rolls on;
Between sweet sounds and silences,
With new, strange wines her beakers brim:
He lost his heritage with these
Last year, and who remembers him?

None remember him: he lies
In earth of some strange-sounding place,
Nameless beneath the nameless skies,
The wind his only chant, the rain
The only tears upon his face;
Far and forgotten utterly
By living man. Yet such as he
Have made it possible and sure
For other lives to have, to be;
For men to sleep content, secure.
Lip touches lip and eyes meet eyes
Because his heart beats not again:
His rotting, fruitless body lies
That sons may grow from other men.

He gave, as Christ, the life he hadÑ
The only life desired or known;
The great, sad sacrifice was made
For strangers; this forgotten dead
Went out into the night alone.
There was his body broken for you,
There was his blood divinely shed
That in the earth lie lost and dim.
Eat, drink, and often as you do,
For whom he died, remember him. 

Muriel Stuart

Night on The Shore:Northumberland August 6th 1914 - Marie Carmichael Stopes

A dusky owl in velvet moth-like flight,
With feathers spread on non-resistant air,
Wheels on its silent wings, brushing my cheek.
The circles of its course are interlaced
By chuckling seagull-flocks, whose wide white wing
Sweep down to settle on the bare-ribbed sand
Left rich with treasure by the distant tide.
The owl gyrates, a part of the soft air,
Then upright, solemn, on my lowly tent
Perches beside me with his eyes intent
As though upon Minerva’s shoulder.  He
And I together watch the waves of cloud
Which slowly break and ripple o’er the moon,
Silvering celestial foam from their frayed edge.
The dim ethereal curve of the wide sand
Is flecked with hard black shadows,, heightening
The fairy mountains left there in their play
By little weary waves which slid away
To slumber, cradled by the green-haired rocks.
Through the still water star-reflections deck
The red anemones with diadems.
This cosmic peace the owl and I have shared
For a whole moon of deep experience.

Tonight the moonbeams break on bayonets
Sharpened and gleaming in hot eager hands.
Tonight the swift low rush of battleships
Throbs up and down the bay, waking the waves.
Tonight my sleep in challenged in my tent
By martial voices backed by gleaming steel.
Tonight young men from cities meet the stars
When scanning the horizon for their foes.
Tonight there thrills all round our peaceful shores.

The pulsing chain of men who wait on war.
And War, insensate, drills its brutal way
Through quivering hearts and sets men’s pulses mad
With burning rage to rend the strong and fair,
If only they were born on other shores.

And yet – tonight – our young men from the town
Sleep under the high arches of the stars
And keep their watch in crystal, moonlit air,
Perforce within God’s presence ,too.

Marie Carmichael Stopes

The Convalescent - Cicily Fox Smith

We've billiards, bowls an' tennis courts, we've teas an' motor-rides;
We've concerts nearly every night, an' 'eaps o' things besides;
We've all the best of everything as much as we can eat —
But my 'eart — my 'eart's at 'ome in 'Enry Street.

I'm askin' Sister every day when I'll be fit to go;
'We must 'ave used you bad ' (she says) ' you want
to leave us so';
I says, 'I beg your pardon, Nurse, the place is 'ard to beat,
But my 'eart — my 'eart's at 'ome in 'Enry Street.'

The sheffoneer we saved 'to buy, the clock upon the wall,
The pictures an' the almanac, the china dogs an' all,
I've thought about it many a time, my little 'ome complete,
When in Flanders, far away from 'Enry Street.

It's 'elped me through the toughest times — an' some was middlin' tough —
The 'ardest march was not so 'ard, the roughest not so rough;
It's 'elped me keep my pecker up in victory an' defeat,
Just to think about my 'ome in 'Enry Street.

There's several things I'd like to 'ave which 'ere I never see,
I'd like some chipped potatoes an' a kipper to my tea;
But most of all I'd like to feel the stones beneath my feet.
Of the road that takes me 'ome to 'Enry Street.

They'll 'ave a little flag 'ung out — they'll 'ave the parlour gay
With crinkled paper all about, the same as Christmas Day,
An' out of all the neighbours' doors the 'eads'll pop to greet
Me comin' wounded 'ome to 'Enry Street.

My missis — well, she'll cry a bit, an' laugh a bit between;
My kids'll climb upon my knees — there's one I've never seen;
An' of all the days which I 'ave known there won't be one so sweet
As the one when I go 'ome to 'Enry Street.

Cicily Fox Smith

The Dancers (During a Great Battle, 1916) - Edith Sitwell

The floors are slippery with blood:
The world gyrates too. God is good
That while His wind blows out the light
For those who hourly die for is –
We still can dance each night.

The music has grown numb with death –
But we will suck their dying breath,
The whispered name they breathed to chance,
To swell our music, make it loud
That we may dance, - may dance.

We are the dull blind carrion-fly
That dance and batten. Though God die
Mad from the horror of the light –
The light is mad, too, flecked with blood, -
We dance, we dance, each night.

Edith Sitwell

Field Ambulance in Retreat - May Sinclair

Via Dolorosa, Via Sacra 

I 
A straight flagged road, laid on the rough earth, 
A causeway of stone from beautiful city to city, 
Between the tall trees, the slender, delicate trees, 
Through the flat green land, by plots of flowers, by black canals thick with heat. 

II 
The road-makers made it well 
Of fine stone, strong for the feet of the oxen and of the great Flemish horses, 
And for the high wagons piled with corn from the harvest. 
And the laborers are few; 
They and their quiet oxen stand aside and wait 
By the long road loud with the passing of the guns, the rush of armored cars and the tramp of an army on the march forward to battle; 
And, where the piled corn-wagons went, our dripping Ambulance carries home 
Its red and white harvest from the fields. 

III 
The straight flagged road breaks into dust, into a thin white cloud, 
About the feet of a regiment driven back league by league, 
Rifles at trail, and standards wrapped in black funeral cloths. Unhasting, proud in retreat, 
They smile as the Red Cross Ambulance rushes by. 
(You know nothing of beauty and of desolation who have not seen 
That smile of an army in retreat.) 
They go: and our shining, beckoning danger goes with them, 
And our joy in the harvests that we gathered in at nightfall in the fields; 
And like an unloved hand laid on a beating heart 
Our safety weighs us down. 
Safety hard and strange; stranger and yet more hard 
As, league after dying league, the beautiful, desolate Land 
Falls back from the intolerable speed of an Ambulance in retreat 
On the sacred, dolorous Way.

May Sinclair

July 1st, 1916 - Aimee Byng Scott

A soft grey mist,
Poppies flamed brilliant where the woodlands bend
Or straggling in amongst the ripening corn,
                Green grass dew kist;
While distantly a lark’s pure notes ascend,
                                Greeting the morn.

A shuddering night;
Flames, not of poppies, cleave the quivering air,
The corn is razed, the twisted trees are dead;
War in his might
Has passed; Nature lies prostrate there
Stunned by his tread.

Aimee Byng Scott

Sacrament - Margaret Sackville

Before the Altar of the world in flower,
Upon whose steps thy creatures kneel in line,
We do beseech Thee in this wild Spring hour,
Grant us, O Lord, thy wine. But not this wine.

Helpless, we, praying by Thy shimmering seas,
Beside Thy fields, whence all the world is fed,
Thy little children clinging about Thy knees,
Cry: 'Grant us, Lord, Thy bread!' But not this bread.

This wine of awful sacrifice outpoured;
This bread of life — of human lives. The Press
Is overflowing, the Wine-Press of the Lord! . .
Yet doth he tread the foamings no less.

These stricken lands! The green time of the year
Has found them wasted by a purple flood,
Sodden and wasted everywhere, everywhere; —
Not all our tears may cleanse them from that blood.

Margaret Sackville

A Memory - Margaret Sackville

There was no sound at all, no crying in the village,
Nothing you would count as sound, that is, after the shells;
Only behind a wall the low sobbing of women, 
The creaking of a door, a lost dog-nothing else.
Silence which might be felt, no pity in the silence, 
Horrible, soft like blood, down all the blood-stained ways;
In the middle of the street two corpses lie unburied, 
And a bayoneted woman stares in the market-place.
Humble and ruined folk-for these no pride of conquest, 
Their only prayer: "O Lord, give us our daily bread!"
Not by the battle fires, the shrapnel are we haunted; 
Who shall deliver us from the memory of these dead?

Margaret Sackville