Some poems seem more
like stories, and Arthur Graeme West’s “Night Patrol” reads almost as if it were an
account found in a diary or memoir. West,
a man whose friends described him as “quiet, tranquil, and unassuming,” enlisted in
January of 1915, arriving at France's Western Front in November of that
year.
In February of 1916,
he wrote in a letter to a friend, “Also I had rather an exciting time myself with two other
men on a patrol in the “no man’s land” between the lines. A dangerous business, and most repulsive on
account of the smells and appearance of the heaps of dead men that lie unburied
there as they fell, on some attack or other, about four months ago. I found myself much as I had expected in the
face of these happenings: more interested than afraid, but more careful for my
own life than anxious to approve any new martial ardour….For the Hun I feel
nothing but a spirit of amiable fraternity that the poor man has to sit just
like us and do all the horrible and useless things that we do, when he might be
at home with his wife or his books” (Powell’s A Deep Cry).
Here is his poetic description of that "exciting time":
Here is his poetic description of that "exciting time":
Night Patrol
France, March
1916
by Arthur Graeme
West
Over the top!
The wire’s thin here, unbarbed
Plain rusty
coils, not staked, and low enough:
Full of old
tins, though—“When you’re through, all three,
Aim quarter left
for fifty yards or so,
Then straight
for that new piece of German wire;
See if it’s
thick, and listen for a while
For sounds of
working; don’t run any risks;
About an hour;
now, over!”
And we placed
Our hands on the
topmost sand-bags, leapt, and stood
A second with
curved backs, then crept to the wire,
Wormed ourselves
tinkling through, glanced back, and dropped.
The sodden
ground was splashed with shallow pools,
And tufts of
crackling cornstalks, two years old,
No man had
reaped, and patches of spring grass.
Half-seen, as
rose and sank the flares, were strewn
With the wrecks of
our attack: the bandoliers,
Packs, rifles,
bayonets, belts, and haversacks,
Shell fragments,
and the huge whole forms of shells
Shot
fruitlessly—and everywhere the dead.
Only the dead
were always present—present
As a vile sickly
smell of rottenness;
The rustling
stubble and the early grass,
The slimy pools
— the dead men stank through all,
Pungent and
sharp; as bodies loomed before,
And as we
passed, they stank: then dulled away
To that vague fœtor,
all encompassing,
Infecting earth
and air. They lay, all clothed,
Each in some new
and piteous attitude
That we well
marked to guide us back: as he,
Outside our
wire, that lay on his back and crossed
His legs
Crusader-wise; I smiled at that,
And thought on
Elia and his Temple Church.
From him, at
quarter left, lay a small corpse,
Down in a
hollow, huddled as in bed,
That one of us
put his hand on unawares.
Next was a bunch
of half a dozen men
All blown to
bits, an archipelago
Of corrupt
fragments, vexing to us three,
On such a trail,
so lit, for ninety yards
We crawled on
belly and elbows, till we saw,
Instead of
lumpish dead before our eyes,
The stakes and
crosslines of the German wire.
We lay in shelter
of the last dead man,
Ourselves as
dead, and heard their shovels ring
Turning the
earth, then talk and cough at times.
A sentry fired
and a machine-gun spat;
They shot a flare above us, when it fell
And spluttered
out in the pools of No Man’s Land,
We turned and
crawled past the remembered dead:
Past him and
him, and them and him, until,
For he lay some
way apart, we caught the scent
Of the Crusader
and slid past his legs,
And through the
wire and home, and got our rum.
The poem--like the men it describes-- begins with a leap into action: “Over the top!” In a pitch-black night, the soldiers are given
orders to advance across No Man’s Land to scout the German trenches. They stand, leap, creep, and worm their way
forward, quickly encountering the litter of the battles that have been fought over this ground: bandoliers (shoulder belts
that carry bullets), bayonets, packs, guns -- and the bodies of the unburied
dead who couldn’t be retrieved.
Abandoned equipment, abandoned men.
In a ghastly
twist on the fairy tale story of “Hansel and Gretel,” the men of the night
patrol navigate not by tracking a trail of breadcrumbs, but by following a trail of
corpses. Closest to their own lines is the
nicknamed “Crusader” who resembles a medieval tomb effigy as he lies on his
back with his legs crossed. The men on patrol next
encounter a small man curled in a fetal position, “huddled as in a bed”; then
the scattered remains of the six men blown to pieces, resembling an archipelago
of decaying body parts; and finally the man who died almost at the parapet of the
German trenches, whose body shelters those who have crept forward to spy.
Contrasting with
the “lumpish dead” who stink horribly, “infecting earth and air,” the German
soldiers, unaware of the enemy night patrol, are alive with noise and
movement. They shovel earth, talk,
cough, spit, and fire their guns.
The soldiers on patrol observe the inconsequential activities of the enemy, and then must make the hazardous return journey back to their own trenches, “Past him and him, and
them and him” – using the dead as landmarks, the men who were comrades in arms before the war transformed them into signposts of No
Man’s Land.
Arthur Graeme West |
During his time in the trenches, Arthur Graeme
West grew increasingly disillusioned with the war, at one point considering desertion
or suicide as preferable to returning to the Western Front. In September of 1916, he wrote, “There was
but one way for me, and I have seen it only when it was too late to pursue
it. To defy the whole system, to refuse
to be an instrument of it – this I should have done.” He was killed by a sniper’s bullet at morning
“stand-to” on April 3, 1917.
While recalling in sound, smell and vision, just one of those scenes and experiences that etched themselves into his mind and imagination, A.G. West's words continue alienating and harrowing their reader one hundred years on, regardless of the time and circumstances from which they sprang.
ReplyDeleteIt is utterly inconceivable, but it must have been so very real, that the dead in the postures in which they are lying, peppering the No Man's Land all over, are serving as signposts to those who are barely alive still.
All that useless wastage of life...
Beautifully said, Chris.
DeleteWhile recalling in sound, smell and vision, just one of those scenes and experiences that etched themselves into his mind and imagination, A.G. West's words continue alienating and harrowing their reader one hundred years on, regardless of the time and circumstances from which they sprang.
ReplyDeleteIt is utterly inconceivable, but it must have been so very real, that the dead in the postures in which they are lying, peppering the No Man's Land all over, are serving as signposts to those who are barely alive still.
All that useless wastage of life...
The imagery here is intense and evocative... Arthur's words send a shiver down my spine as I read. We can but only begin to imagine how utterly awful this whole war must've been, for those who experienced it. I also liked the line in your commentary, Connie, "...using the dead as landmarks, the men who were comrades in arms before the war transformed them into signposts of No Man’s Land." It's just inconceivable...
ReplyDeleteLeighton (Wiltshire at War)
Inconceivable - and yet there it is, preserved in a poem that is so powerful that, as you said, Leighton, it gives one shivers. Thanks for reading and commenting.
DeleteThe dead mock the idea that men still quick should be enemies
ReplyDelete".. an archipelago of corrupt fragments .." - what a horrifying but brilliant line
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ReplyDelete