The Pageant of War

Parade to War, Allegory by John Steuart Curry (1938)

 In 1916, British author Margaret Sackville published a collection of poems titled The Pageant of War. The 180-line title poem begins, 

Shrilly, exultant, from afar
I heard, and rushing down
Beheld amazed,
The pageant of triumphant War
Come trampling through the town. 

The poem describes a vast parade “Of a million and a million feet” that are led by War, “sitting astride / A pale and neighing horse.” The self-satisfied, glutted leader of the parade wears a mask, for if anyone were to view “That obscene countenance too near,” they would “shrink in loathing and in fear, / And turn upon this thing and slay it there.” But disguising himself, War proudly leads the millions who march. 

Following him  are “The pitiful bright army of the dead,” mourning mothers, war profiteers carrying their bags of gold, and emissaries of peace, all cheered on by a vast crowd of onlookers. 

Yet beneath the feet of those who follow War, the road gleams strangely white, and the poem’s narrator finally realizes why:

I looked again at the white stones;
I saw.
        The dust was trampled bones.

’Twas they that made the road so white.

There were bones of children, bones of men,
Trampled in since the world began.
Road of triumph—road of glory!—
This road conceived by men and then
Built from the ruins of man.
Road which every land has trod
Since the beginning of its story,
And called in turn the road of God;
Road of myriads vowed to rape,
Destruction, mutilation, wrath,
Since there was no escape
And this road was their only path!

Behold! since the world began,
This shining road—man’s gift to man.

The bones which make it are so light
(Children’s bones weigh very little)
You would think the surface of this white
Shining road must be too brittle
To bear the heavy loads which go
Trampling upon it to and fro;
But no—
These bones are ground to such fine dust,
So fine, so firm they form a crust
As firm, as thick as the earth’s crust,
Which all who will may safely tread.
They have no ghosts, these dead!
They are but children, peasants of the soil,
And women—ravished, torn
And murdered at their toil.

It is for this that they were born. 

Bethlehem Steel Parade, 1916
Bill Weiner collection

Since the crowd shouts in its delight
To see along the road so white
The pageant pass in the sunlight.

I will forget the road, the stones
Are less than nothing—dust and bones:
And what has life to do with bones?

Unless they should rise up, these bones!

Meanwhile
They are silent—let them so remain,
These very humble folk, these quiet slain,
And let the living smile—
Until they too shall suffer the same pain.

Whilst the long pageant stretches mile on mile—
As though these innocents had died in vain.

Shrilly, exultant, from afar
I heard, and rushing down
Beheld amazed,
The pageant of triumphant War
Come trampling through the town. 
—Margaret Sackville 

Sackville’s poem can be seen as a companion piece to one of the most famous poems of the First World War: Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Both poems caution against glorified idealizations of war; Owen focuses on the sufferings of soldiers, and Sackville highlights the torment and trauma of noncombatants.

Owen and Sackville warn that children are too often the victims of war, both those who have been told “the old lie” and those whose light bones are ground into dust by the passing Pageant of War.  Sadly and ironically, Sackville's poem ends exactly as it begins, with no alteration in the pace of the marching throng or in the cheers of the crowd that urges them forward.