War Poetry

What the Orderly Dog Saw

A Winter Landscape
To Mrs. Percy Jackson

I
The seven white peacocks against the castle wall
In the high trees and the dusk are like tapestry;
The sky being orange, the high wall a purple barrier,
The canal dead silver in the dusk:
And you are far away.

Yet I see infinite miles of mountains,
Little lights shining in rows in the dark of them—
Infinite miles of marshes;
Thin wisps of mist, shimmering like blue webs
Over the dusk of them.

Great curves and horns of sea,
And dusk and dusk, and the little village;
And you, sitting in the firelight.

II
Around me are the two hundred and forty men of B Company,
Mud-colored;
Going about their avocations,
Resting between their practice of the art
Of killing men;
As I too rest between my practice
Of the art of killing men.
Their pipes glow over the mud and their mud-color, moving like fireflies beneath the trees—
I too being mud-colored—
Beneath the trees and the peacocks.
When they come up to me in the dusk
They start, stiffen and salute, almost invisibly.
And the forty-two prisoners from the battalion guard-room
Crouch over the tea-cans in the shadow of the wall.
And the bread hunks glimmer, beneath the peacocks—
And you are far away.

III
Presently I shall go in.
I shall write down the names of the forty-two
Prisoners in the battalion guard-room
On fair white foolscap:
Their names, rank and regimental numbers;
Corps, Companies, Punishments and Offences,
Remarks, and By whom confined.
Yet in spite of all I shall see only
The infinite miles of dark mountain,
The infinite miles of dark marshland,
Great curves and horns of sea,
The little village;
And you,
Sitting in the firelight.

By Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford)

In October 1914 [Antwerp]

I
Gloom!
An October like November;
August a hundred thousand hours,
And all September,
A hundred thousand, dragging sunlit days,
And half October like a thousand years . . .
And doom!
That then was Antwerp. . .
In the name of God,
How could they do it?
Those souls that usually dived
Into the dirty caverns of mines;
Who usually hived
In whitened hovels; under ragged poplars;
Who dragged muddy shovels, over the grassy mud,
Lumbering to work over the greasy sods. . .
Those men there, with the appearance of clods
Were the bravest men that a usually listless priest of God
Ever shrived. . .
And it is not for us to make them an anthem.
If we found words there would come no wind that would fan them
To a tune that the trumpets might blow it,
Shrill through the heaven that's ours or yet Allah's,
Or the wide halls of any Valhallas.
We can make no such anthem. So that all that is ours
For inditing in sonnets, pantoums, elegiacs, or lays
Is this:
“In the name of God, how could they do it?”


II
( For there is no new thing under the sun... )

By Ford Madox Ford

Antwerp capitulated on October 10, 1914