The Waiting is the Hardest Part

Published in Paris in April of 1918 when masses of American troops were beginning to arrive in France and prepare for battle, Songs from the Trenches: The Soul of the A.E.F. (edited by Herbert Adams Gibbons) was a collection of poems chosen from the thousands submitted to the New York Herald's Literary Competition.  The foreword of the book asserts that the poems were "a message from the American soldiers abroad to the home folks....Each writer speaks for thousands of his fellows."  

The Boys Who Live in the Ground

Some sing the glory of the war,
Of the heroes who die in the fight,
Of the shock of battle, the roar of guns,
When armies clash by night.

Some mourn the savagery of war,
The shame and the waste of it all,
And they pity the sinfulness of men
Who heard not the Master's call.

They may be right and they may be wrong,
But what I'm going to sing
Is not the glory nor sin of war,
But the weariness of the thing.

For most of the time there's nothing to do
But to sit and think of the past,
And one day comes and slowly dies
Exactly like the last.

It's the waiting that's seldom talked about;

Oh, it's very rarely told
That most of the bravery at the front
Is just waiting in the cold.

It is not the dread of the shrapnel's whine
That sickens a fighting soul,
But the beast in us comes out sometimes
When we're waiting in a hole.


Just sitting and waiting and thinking,
As the dreary days go by,
Takes a different kind of courage
From marching out to die.  

And I often think when the thing is done,
And the praises are all passed around, 
If, with all their words, they'll say enough 
For the boys who lived in the ground. 
     --Donald Sherman White

It doesn't matter whether the war is gloriously heroic or savagely misguided and meaningless. Instead, the poem sings "of the weariness of the thing," the numbing tedium of warfare and perhaps life itself, in all its stasis, boredom, and enforced inactivity.   

In an instant, the boredom vanishes?

The poem whispers a seldom talked of truth:  mastering one's mind when "the beast comes out sometimes" demands a "different kind of courage" than the bravery needed to charge enemy lines.  This poem isn't concerned with the soldiers who leap "over the top," but instead with the much more real "boys who live in the ground." Their enemy is not only the Germans, but the damp, the rats, and the endless circle of their own thoughts.  

What "sickens a fighting soul" isn't the whine of the shrapnel – death is ever present and these are men who have literally and repeatedly stared death in the face.  What saps their spirits is the paralysis that has been imposed on them: every man has surrendered control of himself to a larger force that demands endurance more often than gallantry.  

Ironically, although many of the boys will die far too young, the poem says that these soldiers are plagued with far too much time, time given to recrimination and regret as they contemplate the past.  Waiting diminishes the men.  They are literally buried alive, asked to live a half-life of repeated postponements while they wait for the order to challenge death.  Advertisements of the time promised to alleviate the boredom: the portable gramophone was offered as an answer to life's existential question.  

Bowdoin Bugle, 1916

Donald S. White graduated from Bowdoin College in May of of 1916. He did not wait for the United States to enter the war; early in 1917, he joined the American Field Service (AFS) as an ambulance driver attached to the French army.  When America declared war later that year, White resigned from his position with the AFS, enlisted in the American army, and served as a pilot on the Western Front with the 20^th Air Squadron; two of his brothers also served in France with the A.E.F.* Lieutenant White was cited for “exceptional devotion to duty” as a bombing aviator; an article in the Bowdoin university magazine reported that “he had served in a day-bombing squadron in every raid since the squadron had been called into active work during the severe fighting in the Argonne.” The article went on to say that of the American aviators who flew over enemy lines in the war, “only fifteen percent … were left after the signing of the armistice.”**  Donald S. White survived the war. 

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 *“Three White’s in France,” Bowdoin Orient, vol. 48, no. 11, 29 Oct. 1918, p. 107.

 **“Lieut. Donald S. White, ’16, Cited,” Bowdoin Orient, vol. 48, no. 18, 14 Jan. 1919, p. 176.