The Children's Book

52

Philip Warren was still in Purchase House. The gardener and the handyman had gone to the war, and there were weeds in the drive and the grass was wild in the orchard. Seraphita sat in semi-darkness, semiconscious, and waited for the day to end, coming briefly to life in the early evening, when safe sleep was on the horizon. Pomona had surprised both of them by going into Rye and volunteering to become a nurse. She was in a hospital in Hythe, changing dressings, emptying bedpans, smoothing sheets, which she did well. She turned out to be good at calming the dying, answering what they said, nonsense, rage, fear, calls for mothers, with a grave, gentle respect that was mostly helpful. She was good also with the bereaved, or about-to-be bereaved. She slipped dreamily around and yet made things temporarily clean and wholesome. She said to Philip, when she came home for a day, and lay, physically exhausted, in the orchard wilderness, that she felt useful, and needed, for the first time in her life.

“It’s unbelievably disgusting and when you can do it you feel—oh, I expect, like nuns used to feel, when they deliberately did horrible things. I’ve got good at knowing which muscles to lift things with.”

She hesitated.

“You know, Philip—this house—my funny family—they feel like a dream and I’ve woken up. No, they feel like two dreams—one full of beautiful things—pots and paintings and tapestries and embroideries, and flowers and apples in the orchard—you know—and one full of interminable boredom and waste, and—things that were not right but were all that happened—I know you know. I’ve stopped asking you to marry me. I’ve woken up.”

Philip thought that among her wounded men she might find someone to love her. Because she made his bed more comfortable, and cleaned his body.

It was not because of Pomona that Philip decided to volunteer for the army. He thought about it. He looked at his work, at his drawings, at his jars and vessels, shining quietly. He had, over time, found many of Benedict Fludd’s secret caches of receipts for glazes, in holes in the wall, interleaved in books, Palissy’s memoir, Ruskin’s Modern Painters. He had mixed them, tried them, varied them, adjusted them. It was long, and slow, work, it was patient and sometimes frustrating, but he was a man who knew something, a man with a craft, a man who had wanted something single-mindedly and had got it. There were not so many men in the world who could say that.

He was thirty-five. He was not an eager boy. He came from a class which was cautious. He knew there was a good chance of his dying, and the pots dying with him.

He went, he thought, because the world had become a world in which his work was no longer possible. This thing had to be shared and sorted out and finished. It was something he appeared to have no real choice about being part of. He did not—after all his reflections and searchings—really know why. That was how it was.

He went to see Elsie and Ann.

“I thought you would,” said Elsie, when he told her. “You might go and see Mrs. Fludd, now and then.”

“She doesn’t know who’s there and who isn’t. But I will.”

Philip’s medical was satisfactory. He went to training camp in Lydd, and in the autumn of 1915, went out to Belgium and the battlefield.

In the autumn of 1915 the two Robins were in trenches on what had become a static front line around the Ypres salient. Ypres was shattered; its houses burning, its ancient Cloth Hall in ruins. The grand attempts to advance on the enemy had given way to a life in dugouts and foxholes. Shells came over, woolly bears and black crumps made craters and changed the earth from minute to minute. Fighting was mostly raids on the enemy trenches, from which many men did not return. They crept and flitted across No Man’s Land, and were spotted by machine-guns and picked off. At night in No Man’s Land, stretcher-bearers, including Charles/Karl, looked for the living in the sweet stink of the dead, and stumbled amongst severed hands, legs, heads and bloody innards. The living often begged to be put out of their pain, and Charles/Karl for the first time considered killing, and once, as a head with no face screamed weakly at him, did shoot.

The Robins were nimble at raiding and had a good company commander whom they trusted. They sat in the door of the dugout and ate Maconochies, a mixture of tinned meat and vegetables. They scratched; they were infested with lice; everyone was infested with lice. There was a smell of old exploded shells, and a smell of death, and a smell of the unwashed, and a sweet smell of dispersed lethal gas, British gas which had floated back to its source when the wind changed. The Robins opened letters from home, from Marian Oakeshott, and Phyllis, and from Humphry, who sent gossip about Lloyd George and best wishes to Robin Oakeshott, if they were still together. Robin Oakeshott said casually

“He visited us a lot, in Puxty. He used to laugh and laugh with Mother.”

Robin Wellwood said “He’s a good man, in his way.” He added casually “Randy, though.”

“I think he was—that is, I think he is—my father,” said Robin Oakeshott.

“So do I.”

They considered each other, with mutual relief and embarrassment. Robin Wellwood went into the shelter, to fetch cigarettes. There was a singing howl, and a shell exploded in the trench. A splinter of it took off most of Robin Oakeshott’s head. Robin Wellwood took one look, and vomited. Men came running, stretcher-bearers, men with a blanket to cover up what they could, men with buckets and mops to cleanse the dugout. Robin Wellwood sat and shook. And shook.

He developed a permanent tremor down the right side of his face, in his neck, along his arm. His hand shook as he cleaned his gun. The commanding officer considered sending him back behind the line, to recover. Robin said tersely, in an unrecognisable voice, out of a constricted throat, that he was fine, thank you.

Two days later he stood up, in his new-fangled tin hat, which like most of the men he wore at odd angles, on the back of his head, like a halo. He was not the first, or the last, to be killed by the very skilful German sniper behind the stump of a ruined tree.

Later in the war, it was decided that brothers should not serve together, just as all the men of one village should not serve together.

Marian Oakeshott came again—by train and fly, this time—to see Olive Wellwood. Olive made tea. Tea for survivors who were not surviving well. Both of them thought, but neither of them could say, that grief felt different when it had to be shared not only with each other, but with mothers all over Britain. Marian Oakeshott had gone to see Frank Mallett, with the telegram in her hand. “The English don’t howl,” she said to Frank Mallett. “Maybe they should,” said Frank Mallett. So Marian Oakeshott cried out, at the top of her voice “My son, my son, my son,” and the church echoed it. Then, a little rigid, she went back to being a kindly schoolmistress. She went to visit Olive, but hoped to see Humphry. Humphry was shut in his study. Olive said “My letter says he was killed instantly.”

“So does mine. So do they all.”

And indeed, their letters turned out to be identical, with the same phrases of admiration, affection, for their boy, of sorrow and regret for his death.

“Go and talk to him,” Olive said to Marian.

Marian stood outside the study door. From inside came sounds of sobbing. Marian tried the door, which was locked.

Harry Wellwood was twenty in 1915. His reaction to Robin’s death was to say that he must join up. Olive, who had not wept for Tom, who had not wept for Robin, suddenly began to weep with extraordinary violence. She repeated two words. “No” and “Why?” Over and over. Harry, a gentle creature, scholarly and, since Tom’s death, rather silent, said that everyone was joining up, he felt horrid sitting at home. Humphry, who had gathered himself together enough to go back to writing articles on the conduct and misconduct of the war, gave his son some figures. British casualties were so great that it seemed likely that conscription would be introduced, probably early in 1916. Harry would have to go then. He could wait. “Your mother needs you,” he said, looking at Olive’s wet, mottled red face. Harry did not reply “My country needs me,” though the Kitchener posters were everywhere. He said “People look at me. People who have lost their sons. It doesn’t feel right to stay here and be comfortable.” Humphry said almost viciously that winning the war would solve none of the political problems of Europe and thousands and tens of thousands had already given their lives for no advantage. Harry said “There are no men my age in the village or in the town. I need to join.” Humphry said “There are no individuals. There are just herds and flocks. It takes courage not to run with the herd.” Harry smiled icily. “More courage than I’ve got.”

He joined up. In 1916 he was sent, with the fresh conscripts and the middle-aged reservists, with the British Third Army to the hills and woods and pretty villages of the Somme. It was calm there. They were known as the Deathless Army. Harry practised his French, and once, in Albert, collecting provisions, he ran into Julian Cain, who was in the trenches opposite Thiepval. He told Julian that the Robins were dead—“killed instantly, within two days of each other,” he said. Julian smiled benignly. “Keep an eye out, young Hal,” he said. He did not say, though they all knew it, that they were building up to an important attack. They were constructing railroads and communication trenches, with good revetments and duckboards to walk on. They were practising communication by field telephone and signals. They were exercising their bodies, to make them hard and healthy. They would flow out of the trenches, over No Man’s Land, and take the Germans by surprise, driving them back, and then there would be real warfare again, with marching and galloping armies, charges and feints and acts of courage, the generals believed.

Julian had taken to writing poetry. It was not poetry of despair, nor yet—not yet—savage poetry of anger. It was not poetry about the glorious hour, the glorious dead, and the high calling, either of perfect gallantry or of bugles and fifes. It was poetry about trench names, which in themselves were poetry.

Harry’s battalion was part of III Corps which, in the small hours of July 1st got ready to attack. The British bombardment of the German positions in the villages of Ovillers and La Boisselle had been loud and heavy. The plan was to make a breakthrough in the German defences through which the Cavalry would sweep forward. The gunners of III Corps were cautious about their wire-cutting. They could not cut distant wire, and had not enough ammunition to be sure of cutting what was nearer. Nevertheless, before the attack, the artillery gave up on the wire, and began shelling more distant Germans, which was part of their plan to make way for the Cavalry. Nevertheless the brigades moved forwards. Between the two villages ran Mash Valley, which was No Man’s Land. It was wide. It was eighty yards wide. A mine which was intended to bury the Germans in their dugouts and confuse their response to the attack had been discovered by the Germans, and the miners captured.

Harry waited. He was standing next to an old corporal, Corporal Crowe. Harry thought in bursts, and between the bursts was numb and placid, as though nothing was real. He did not think about the King or the Flag though he did briefly think of the quiet North Downs. He thought: I am young and full of life. His teeth chattered. Corporal Crowe patted his shoulder, which he did not like, and said everyone was frit, no exception. Very brave men, he said, had filled their trousers, a miserable thought which had not occurred to Harry and added to his alarm. I am young and full of life. I have a gun and a knife and must fight. Corporal Crowe handed him a water bottle which turned out to be full of rum, and told him to take a swig. Harry didn’t like rum. It upset his stomach. But he drank quite a lot, and felt vaguer, and giddier, and sick.

They were told to advance. The German shelling was precise. Hundreds of men died behind their own front line, or struggled back to the medical post. Harry got out of the trench in one piece and so did Corporal Crowe. They started to walk forward towards the black stumps of a wood on the skyline. There was noise. Not only shells and bullets, whistling and exploding, but men screaming. They stumbled over the dead and wounded, over men, and pieces of men, and were reduced to crawling, so mashed and messed was the earth and the flesh mashed into it. After a brief time, Harry felt a thump, and found his tunic damp, and then soaked, with his blood. He tried to crawl on, and could not, and other men crawled past him and sprawled in the mud. He bled. He lay still. He knew in the abstract that stomach wounds were nasty. His head churned. He wished he had not had the rum. He wished he could die quickly. He did not. Men crawled round and over him and he came in and out of consciousness. He noticed when there were no more men, and he noticed nightfall, unless the dark was death. It was not. But he was dead by the time he was found by the stretcher-bearers, so they took his identity-tag, and looked in his bloody pockets for letters or photos—there was a publicity photograph of Olive, looking wise and gentle. Then they left him.

Corporal Crowe made it to the German wire, which was uncut. He was caught up in it, as they shot him, and he hung like a beast on a gamekeeper’s gibbet and died very slowly. In this attack three thousand men were casualties.

The 2 Middlesex Battalion had 92.5 per cent casualties. On that first day over forty thousand men were killed or wounded. General Haig remarked that this “cannot be considered severe in view of numbers engaged.”

The Todefright Wellwoods received another telegram. Humphry said “It is bad news” and Olive said “What do you think I thought it was?” She sat in an armchair and simply stared. Humphry said “My dear?” She simply stared. After a time, she heard Humphry, in his study, weeping. It was a strange, childlike, whimpering sobbing, as though he meant to conceal it. She stood up, heavily, and went, and stroked his hair as he sobbed, with his head on his desk.

“It’s like a knife. Cutting the world up, as though it was a cheese. Or butcher’s meat, that’s a better figure of speech. I do love you, Humph, whatever that means. If it helps. It may not. There isn’t much help.”

“I love you, too, if it helps.”

Tragedy had become so commonplace that it was impolite to mention it, or grieve in the open. Olive had the useless thought that she should have protected them, that she had thought of Tom, and taken her attention from these boys, and lost them.

Julian Cain was in the fighting round Thiepval and Thiepval Wood in July 1916. It was a pretty wood before the battle. It was a hopeless place to attack through and men went wild and mad and were lost there. There was a pretty château, which the shells pounded, and there were trenches whose parapets were reinforced with the deliberately built-in bodies of the dead. Julian was blown backwards by the explosion of a shell and lost consciousness, lost his mind, he thought, when he found himself lying on the earth near a field ambulance and could not remember who he was, or how he had come there. He had a shallow wound across his skull, and scattered shrapnel embedded in his flesh. He said, when they came to dress his wound, “Who am I?” and the orderly went through his pockets and told him he was Lieutenant Julian Cain.

He remembered, for some reason, very clearly, the Wood in Through the Looking-Glass, where things have no names, neither trees, nor creatures, nor Alice herself. He lay there, swimming in morphine, and thought about names. The dead who were buried had their names on temporary grave-markers, which were often blown to bits in the endless gunfire. Their name liveth after them for evermore. He had a drugged vision of names, like scurrying rats searching the battlefield for the flesh they had been attached to, like the prophet Ezekiel’s valley of bones. You thought a name had a life but men you met in the trenches were not solid enough to have a named life that went before and after in what they had always thought was a normal manner. Men and their names were provisional: he realised he learned their names with a kind of dull grief, because there were already so many he did not need, any longer, to recall, because they could not be recalled, they were spattered and scattered in the churned-up mire that had been green fields and woodland. You could write poems about vanishing names. He did not want to write poems about beauty, or sorrow, or high resolve. He would—if his wits held and he did not stop one—try to write a grim little poem or two about naming parts, and naming the battlefield. Thinking of Alice, some book lover had named trenches for the stories: there were Walrus Trench, Gimble Trench, Mimsy Trench, Borogrove, Dum and Dee. There was Image wood somewhere. Where had that come from? He had seen Peter Pan Trench, Hook Copse and Wendy Cottage. They were some other joker’s poetry but he could weave them into cat’s-cradles of his own, these ephemeral words in a world where nothing held its shape in the blast. You built your hiding-hole out of blocked dead men, and you called it End Trench, or Dead Man’s Bottom, Incomplete Trench, Inconsistent Trench, Not Trench, Omit Trench, or Hemlock Trench. The medical orderly came past and said they were taking him to a field hospital. Was he trying to say something, perhaps. Names, said Julian. Names. Names are getting away from things. They don’t hold together.

They gave him morphine. He wondered, as he drowned, if there was a morphine trench.

There was so much, so much of what was his life, that he wanted neither to name, nor to remember. Waking, he forced it down. In sleep, it rose, like a floodwave of dead and dying flesh, to suffocate him.

• • •

In the field hospital Julian thought from time to time about the English language. He thought about the songs the men sang, grim and gleeful. We’re ’ere because we’re ’ere because we’re ’ere because we’re ’ere.

Far, far from Wipers I long to be

Where German snipers can’t snipe at me.

Damp is my dugout

Cold are my feet

Waiting for the whizz-bangs

To send me to sleep.

I had a comrade

None better could you find

The drum called us to battle

He marched by my side.

Poetry, Julian thought, was something forced out of men by death, or the presence of death, or the fear of death, or the deaths of others.

He started making a list of words that could no longer be used. Honour. Glory. Heritage. Joy.

He asked other men for names of trenches. They came up with Rats Alley, Income Tax, Dead Cow, Dead Dog, Dead Hun, Carrion Trench, Skull Farm, Paradise Copse, Judas Trench, Iscariot Trench and many religious trenches: Paul, Tarsus, Luke, Miracle. Many trenches were named for London’s streets and theatres, and many more for women—Flirt Trench, Fluffy Trench, Corset Trench. Julian collected them in a notebook, and started stringing them together, but his head ached. They naturally formed into parodies of jingles

Numskull, rumskull

Hear the bullet hum skull

Now I’ve got my bum full

Of shrapnel tiddly um.

That was no good. But in that direction was something that could still be done. Rupert Brooke was gone, dead of an infected spot on his lip, in Greece, a year ago. He had written about Dining-Room Tea and about honey or some such thing in Grantchester, unimaginable now, and about war as a release from the life of half-men and dirty songs and dreary, and fighting as “swimmers into cleanness leaping.” These children, Julian thought, had been charmed and bamboozled as though some Pied Piper played his tune and they all followed him, docile, under the earth. The Germans had sunk the liner Lusitania, and Charles Froh-man, the impresario who had staged Peter Pan, had drowned with gallant dignity, apparently reciting the immortal line which had been judiciously cut from wartime performances: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”

Writing about mud and cold and sleet and lice and rats appealed to the real genius of the English language. It would be good to include shit and fuck and words current at schools and repressed in the unimaginable social life of respectable England. Maggot was a good English word. Someone contributed “ Bully craters.”

He recovered, and went back to his regiment. They went to take over the captured Schwaben Redout. Here were the deep German dugouts and the powerful fortifications, Schwaben Redout, Leipzig, Stuff and Goat (Feste Staufen and Feste Zollern) and the Wonder Work, or Wunderwerk, about which poems should be written. Julian went underground, and found, on a lower level, a little door in a wall, which led to dark galleries, packed with boxes of shells and equipment, and beyond that a way to two well-shafts, with windlasses and buckets, whose depths could not be gauged by the eye, and seemed to go down and down interminably. Julian walked through storerooms full of piled bombs and tins of meat, of black and gold helmets and leather mask respirators: he was briefly reminded of the storerooms under the South Kensington Museum, with their order and disorder.

He came to a spacious hole which was lined with gilt-framed mirrors and full of heaps of the thick grey overcoats whose stuffy smell was part of the pervasive smell of these trenches. The mirrors must be booty from the now-crumbled château. There were, in this room, books, stacked in upright crates as a bookcase. Julian took a copy of the Grimms’ Märchen, for Griselda, who would like to hear that he found it in an underground hall of mirrors. He caught sight of someone else, standing quietly in a corner, a thin, grim-looking, middle-aged man with a scarred face and weary eyes. He raised his hand to greet him, and saw, as the other raised his hand, also, that he had failed to recognise himself. He found another way out, opened the door, and found that it was largely blocked by the bundled body of a very dead and decomposing German. He retreated, and found his way up to the air.

A few days later, he was sent out at night, with a patrol to attack a German strongpoint. As they lay in a crater under a steady thumping of bombs, he felt his leg crack. When he stood up, he could not. His men dragged him, limping and falling, back to another crater, and eventually to their own dugout.

This time he had a “Blighty one.” He was invalided back to England, among the walking wounded. The bones in his feet were crushed, which he had not immediately felt, because of the cracking of his tibia. In the end, the British surgeons could not save his foot, and took it off. Months later, he limped into the house in Chelsea, where the two little girls were running to the door, and nearly brought him down. He was rather upset when both Imogen and Florence began to weep wildly. There were delicious smells—toast, roasting coffee, a bowl of lilies, lavender and, as he bent awkwardly to kiss his half-sister and niece, the smell of clean flesh, and washed hair.

He dreamed he was being buried alive in a dugout, and could not free himself from the weight of earth, steadily increasing. He dreamed of things he had packed away and forbidden himself to remember. Florence made him hot apricot tarts and Chinese tea, with jasmine and its own pale, mysterious, clean smell, in Chinese porcelain cups. They sat him in a chair with a footstool to rest his leg, and their eyes were always just brimming over.

Alone of Todefright’s bright boys, Florian returned from the fighting. Phyllis prepared his favourite food, herb sausages and mashed potatoes, and a Queen of Puddings. Olive told herself that she must love him, steadily and well, because he was alive, and her sons were not. She faced, she thought, the fact that she might resent the survival of this one who was not her own, and put the idea resolutely away. She had a small glass of whisky before the fly came in from the station.

Florian was walking. His appearance was shocking. He was gaunt, and limped heavily, and his skin was puckered and stained and scarred all over. One of his eyelids drooped. His golden curls, which had been shaved off for the draft, were growing back only sparsely and in tufts, and what there was of them looked ersatz, artificial. Worst of all, he emitted a heavy, painful, wheezing sound, having briefly breathed in blown-back English gas.

Phyllis and Olive made themselves kiss him. He recoiled very slightly. Humphry put a hand on his shoulder, and said “Come in, old chap, you’re home.”

He had really nothing to say to them. He sat for hours in the window seat, staring out at the garden. Phyllis tried very hard to love him. They were Violet’s children, and shared an unspoken anger that Violet’s death had been so little marked, had been swallowed up in grief for Tom, as her life had been swallowed up in Olive’s. Neither of them was comfortable discussing this. Neither of them had ever discussed feelings. When Phyllis tried—falling awkwardly over whether to say “Violet” or “our mother”—Florian did show signs of feeling. It was an impatient, sullen rage. She made him little presents of cakes and sweet things, which he ate greedily.

In the day he sat and sat. At night he walked. He could be heard, his limping leg thumping, his wheezing a steady, sinister sound, on stairs and in corridors.

Olive woke one night as he passed the door and felt pure hatred. It was like living with a monster, a changeling, a demon. Then she hated herself, worse than she hated him. Then she went to find the whisky, avoiding the returned soldier because it was so easy to hear where he was wandering.

They noticed he was cutting advertisements out of the newspaper. One day he said he had accepted a post as a teaching assistant at Bedales school. He was, he said, with a sad, grim little smile, good at making camps and things like that.

They said they would see him in the holidays, and he said, “Yes, probably.”

Phyllis wondered why she didn’t go too. She thought, perhaps she would. Perhaps.

From

ROLL CAN AND OTHER POEMS,

by Julian Cain

THE WOODS

When Alice stepped through liquid glass

The world before her was deployed

In ordered squares of summer grass

And beasts, and flowers, and gnats enjoyed

The power of speech and argument.

Logic is fine-chopped, roses and eggs

Insult each other; legs of lamb resent

Imputed insults. Peppers and salts have legs.

Clouds scud above, and flying queens

Like startled birds, and sleeping kings

Snore unperturbed in serious dreams

Of knights and dinners—serious things

That come and go amongst the roots

Of little lines of sportive wood

Run wild, where no one ever shoots

To kill or maim, and beasts are good.

Alice skips serious from square to square

Hedges and ditches hold their form

And make a chequered order there.

No creature comes to serious harm.

Our English Alice, always calm

Interrogates both gnats and knights,

Reasons away her mild alarm

At bellicose infants and their fights.

The foolish armies do not die

They fall upon their stubborn heads

And struggle up and fall again

And when night comes, rest in their beds.

Reds clash with whites in the great game.

Their fights are dusty but have rules

And always end with cakes and jam

And Providence is kind to fools.

The woods are dangerous. You lose your way.

The sky may darken and the Crow

Make black the treetops, dim the day

Shatter the branches, blow by blow.

Crump of a tea tray, rat tat tat

Of nice new rattle on tin hat

Saucepan and scuttle flat in mud

As fire flings past and black smokes scud

And no shapes hold. I watched a wood

Mix the four elements so air was flame

And earth was liquid: nothing stood

Trees were wild matchsticks, wild fire came and came

Bursting your ears and eyes. And men were mud.

Were severed fingers, bleeding stumps between

The leafless prongs that had been trees. And blood

Seeped up where feet sank. Helplessly we trod

On dying faces, aimlessly we fell

On men atop of men ground into clods

Of flesh and wood and metal. Nothing held.

There was no light, no skyline, up and down

Were all the same. Our lifeblood welled

Out of our mouths and nostrils.

In another wood

Alice walked with a fawn. They had no name.

Nor girl, nor beast, nor growing things. Plants stood

Things flew and rustled. They were all the same.

Quiet was there, indifferent, good,

Stupidly good, like that disguised Snake

In the First Garden, where the First Man named

The creatures, and knew Sin, and was ashamed.

In Thiepval, for a time, and in a space

Extreme of noise made silence. Too much pain

Took pain away. I too was given grace

To know unknowing. I knew not my name

No name of any thing in that dark place.

I stared indifferent at the stumps of wood

And stumps of flesh and metal. All was one.

The man beside me rattled in his blood.

He coughed and died. And I knew I was done.

CALLING NAMES

Little scrubbed boys stand stiff. Their names

Are called. Archer and Bates. Castle and Church.

Adsum they pipe. Adsum. Adsunt. Young Field

Stands next to Devon Minor, Green, and Hill,

Meadows and Nuttall. They smell clean,

Soapy and damp, through ink and chalk and dust,

And polish. Outside English sun

Muffled in English cloud, rests on the panes

Of mud-smeared English windows. So to the end.

Waterstone. Wellwood. Scrape of chairs. They sit.

Scratch with their pens the tale of Agincourt.

The leering lords who promulgate the laws

Of arcane study secrets, call names too.

Answer, what are you? Boy, get your names right

Or you’ll be beaten. Say, what are you, boy?

If you don’t answer you’ll be beaten worse.

A worm, a maggot? Those were last week, boy.

A smell, a scapegoat, a smashed snail, a toad

A broken teacup? Now I’ll beat you, boy.

You still know nothing, get it wrong, you cur

You bumboy. Drop your trousers, bend

Over this chair, and whilst I slash the rod,

Say after me I’m null. I’m nothing. I’m

Zilch, nichts, don’t wince, but bear it like a man.

And now, in a French field, the bugle sounds.

Shaven and scrubbed and polished, they salute

The First Eleven and the First Fifteen.

Lined neatly up for battle, hear their names,

Answer the roll call. All these were my men.

Smiling gold Fletcher, eager Billy Gunn,

Knight with long shanks and curly-headed Smith

Shone, full of purpose, and marched out to fight.

What are they now? Names on a marble slab

In a school chapel. Names on double disks,^*

One red for bleeding flesh, one green for earth

In which the flesh is scattered, smeared and mixed

With other flesh, and lost. Names written out

On telegrams and letters, which strike at

The hearts of waiting women, hearing fists

Knock on the door they daren’t unlock but must.

I learned them all with gladness, at the start.

I knew them all, the fearful and the bright

Impulsive boys and canny men I knew

And named and named. My head is packed with names.

Names of dead men. I cannot learn the live

Names that come late, boys to replace the boys

Who marched away.

They come, they go, they smile, they frown. I guard

My mind’s door. Today they stand and smile

Numbered and nameless. And they march away.

And I count up more boys and send them on.

TRENCH NAMES

The column, like a snake, winds through the fields,

Scoring the grass with wheels, with heavy wheels

And hooves, and boots. The grass smiles in the sun

Quite helpless. Orchard and copse are Paradise

Where flowers and fruits grow leisurely, and birds

Rise in the blue, and sing, and sink again

And rest. The woods are ancient. They have names

Thiepval, deep vale, La Boisselle, Aubépines,

Named long ago by dead men. And their sons

Know trees and creatures, earth and sky, the same.

We gouge out tunnels in the sleeping fields.

We turn the clay and slice the turf, and make

A scheme of cross-roads, orderly and mad

Under and through, like moles, like monstrous worms.

Dig out our dens, like cicatrices scored

Into the face of earth. And we give names

To our vast network in the roots, imposed

Imperious, desperate to hide, to hurt.

The sunken roads were numbered at the start.

A chequer board. But men are poets, and names

Are Adam’s heritage, and English men

Imposed a ghostly English map on French,

Crushed ruined harvests and polluted streams.

So here run Piccadilly, Regent Street

Oxford Street, Bond Street, Tothill Fields, Tower Bridge

And Kentish places, Dover, Tunbridge Wells

Entering wider hauntings, resonant,

The Boggart Hole, Bleak House, Deep Doom and Gloom.

Remembering boyhood, soldier poets recall

The desperate deeds of Lost Boys, Peter Pan,

Hook Copse, and Wendy Cottage. Horrors lurk

In Jekyll Copse and Hyde Copse. Nonsense smiles

As shells and flares disorder tidy lines

In Walrus, Gimble, Mimsy, Borogrove

Which lead to Dum and Dee and to that Wood

Where fury lurked, and blackness, and that Crow.

There’s Dead Man’s Dump, Bone Trench and Carrion Trench

Cemetery Alley, Skull Farm, Suicide Road

Abuse Trench and Abyss Trench, Cesspool, Sticky Trench,

Slither Trench, Slimy Trench, Slum Trench, Bloody Farm.

Worm Trench, Louse Post, Bug Alley, Old Boot Street.

Gas Alley, Gangrene Alley, Gory Trench.

Dreary, Dredge, Dregs, Drench, Drizzle, Drivel, Bog.

Some frame the names of runs for frames of mind.

Tremble Copse, Wrath Copse, Anxious Crossroads, Howl

Doleful and Crazy Trenches, Folly Lane,

Ominous Alley, Worry Trench, Mad Point

Lunatic Sap, and then Unbearable

Trench, next to Fun Trench, Dismal Trench, Hope Trench

And Happy Alley.

How they swarm, the rats.

Fat beasts and frisking, yellow teeth and tails

Twitching and slippery. Here they are at home

As gaunt and haunted men are not. For rats

Grow plump in rat-holes and are not afraid,

Resourceful little beggars, said Tom Thinn,

The day they ate his dinner, as he died.

Their names are legion. Rathole,

Rat Farm, Rat Pit, Rat Post, Fat Rat, Rats’ Alley, Dead Rats’ Drain,

Rat Heap, Flat Rat, the Better ’Ole, King Rat.

They will outlast us. This is their domain.

And when I die, my spirit will pass by

Through Sulphur Avenue and Devil’s Wood

To Jacob’s Ladder along Pilgrim’s Way

To Eden Trench, through Orchard, through the gate

To Nameless Trench and Nameless Wood, and rest.

*These coloured identity disks are worn by the Australian soldiers who fought at Thiepval.