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. 

Returning Soldiers

Unidentified African American soldier
Library of Congress, 2021653121

When American entered the Great War, many African Americans supported the war effort and joined the US Army, believing that military service would help them to gain them full citizenship rights, including both social and political equality. Yet African-American soldiers returned home to heightened racial tensions and an increase in mob violence. Social and political unrest exploded in the “Red Summer” of 1919. A report prepared for the U.S. Congress identified 38 race riots in towns and cities across America in the nine-month period from January through October,* and “at least sixteen veterans were lynched between November 1918 and the end of 1920, some of them still in uniform.”**

W.E.B. DuBois’s editorial “Returning Soldiers,” appeared in The Crisis in May of 1919. He reminded readers of the sacrifice that black troops had made in fighting “for America and her highest ideals,” but lamented the violence and degradation of on-going racism: 

This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land. It lynches. And lynching is barbarism of a degree of contemptible nastiness unparalleled in human history. Yet for fifty years we have lynched two Negroes a week, and we have kept this up right through the war.***

“Sam Smiley,” published in 1932 nearly fifteen years after end of the First World War, protests the violence that African Americans continued to experience. The poem works “to make a case for civil rights…. in effect to protest lynching by portraying lynching.”†

Sam Smiley

          I
The whites had taught him how to rip
    A Nordic belly with a thrust
Of bayonet, had taught him how
    To transmute Nordic flesh to dust. 

Unidentified African American soldier with rifle
Library of Congress, 2017648680 

And a surprising face had made
    Belated impress on his mind:
That shrapnel bursts and poison gas
    Were inexplicably color blind.

He picked up, from the difficult
    But striking lessons of the war,
Some truths that he could not forget,
    Though inconceivable before.

And through the lengthy vigils, stuck
    In never-drying stinking mud,
He was held up by dreams of one
    Chockfull of laughter, hot of blood.

          II

On the return Sam Smiley cheered
    The dirty steerage with his dance,
Hot-stepping boy! Soon he would see
    The girl who beat all girls in France.

He stopped buckdancing when he reached
    The shanties at his journey’s end;
He found his sweetheart in the jail,
    And took white lightning for his friend.

One night the woman whose full voice
    Had chortled so, was put away
Into a narrow gaping hole;
    Sam sat beside till break of day.

He had been told what man it was
    Whose child the girl had had to kill,
Who best knew why her laugh was dumb,
    Who best knew why her blood was still.

And he remembered France, and how
    A human life was dunghill cheap,
And so he sent a rich white man
    His woman’s company to keep. 

Julius Bloch, "Lynching"
Woodmere Art Museum

          III

The mob was in fine fettle, yet 
   The dogs were stupid-nosed, and day
Was far spent when the men drew round
    The scrawny woods where Smiley lay.

The oaken leaves drowsed prettily,
    The moon shone down benignly there;
And big Sam Smiley, King Buckdancer,
   Buckdanced on the midnight air.
—Sterling A. Brown

The poem’s author, Sterling A. Brown, was too young to serve in the war. He entered Williams College in the fall of 1918 on a minority student scholarship and went on to complete a MA in English from Harvard in 1923.†† Southern Road (1932), his first collection of poetry, includes Brown’s first ballad, “Sam Smiley.” Biographer John Edgar Tidwell notes, “Brown's poetry received its motivation from a need to reveal the humanity that lies below the surface racial stereotypes only skim.”†††
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*“For Action on Race Riot Peril,” New York Times, 5 Oct. 1919, p. 10. 
**Mark Whalen, The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro, University Press of Florida, 2008, p. 12. 
*** W.E.B. DuBois, “Returning Soldiers,” The Crisis, May 1919, pp. 13-14.
† David A. Davis, “Not Only War Is Hell: World War I and African American Lynching Narratives,” African American Review, vol. 42, no. 3/4, 2008, pp. 477, 479. 
†† John Edgar Tidwell, “Sterling A. Brown,” Oxford Companion to African American Literature, Oxford UP, 1997, p. 105.
††† Tidwell, “Sterling A. Brown,” p. 105.

"My good lady, go home and sit still"

Mary HJ Henderson, 1917

In spring of 1918, Mary H.J.  Henderson published a small collection of poetry, In War and Peace, Songs of a Scotswoman. A London Times review noted that the author possessed "an accomplished gift of expression," and the forward to the book was written by John Oxenham, one of the most popular contemporary poets of the war. Oxenham provided a brief context for the poems, explaining that the author, Mary Henderson, “has had experiences beyond most, even for one living in these chaotic times.”* 

Henderson’s experiences were truly extraordinary, for she assisted Dr. Elsie Inglis in founding the Scottish Women’s Hospitals of the First World War, serving in hospitals in Russia and Rumania. Oxenham relates that at one point Henderson was nearly captured as a prisoner of war,  and he describes the dangers she encountered in her war-time service, as well as her dedication: 

In Russia she saw more than enough of the revolution—saw the victims being buried in scarlet coffins—and met the glorious Women’s Battalion of Death. Those quiet fearless eyes of hers have seen many grim sights—have looked Death in the face, and have not shrunk before the horrors of modern warfare. And yet, withal, she is a very woman, large-hearted, deep and high thoughted, sweet-voiced, full of tenderness for all humanity. Very restful too; yet full of Scottish grit and grip a great organiser, and one who sees things through. A dominant feature of her character is her strong civic conscience. She is a devoted upholder of Woman’s Suffrage, has a passion for Race-Welfare, and the care of the child is her speciality.... All her life her very best has been freely given for others. She is selfless to an extraordinary degree…. Her poetry is the joyous expression of her real self—the spontaneous outgiving of a soul that loves to sing, and instinct with higher things. She sings because she must.** 

Henderson’s poem “The Young Serbian” was anthologized in Catherine Reilly’s Scars upon My Heart (titled “An Incident”), and many of Henderson’s works describe the suffering of those in her care (such as “Rumania” and “A Russian Soldier”). But the first three poems in her collection are written for the women who gave so much, for those whose “path of duty still leads to the grave.”***  

Scottish Women's Hospital Royaumont staff

Henderson writes of the women setting out for overseas medical service who “laughed above the lurking submarine, / Clothing Death’s terrors in a happy sheen / Of debonair lightheartedness.” She dedicates her poem “Like That” to “The Rank and File of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals,” as she honors the women who guided stretcher-bearers “over shell-marked ground,” 

Elsie Inglis by Lady Francis Balflour
Creative Commons Wellcome Collection

Dauntless, clear-eyed, strong-handed, even when
        The bullets flung the dust up from the road
        By which you bore your anguished, helpless load.****

But the poem that most captures my imagination is that written in memory of Elsie Maude Inglis, the Scottish surgeon and suffragette, who upon volunteering to organize war hospitals and donate her services as a physician was told by the British War Office, “my good lady, go home and sit still.”†



In Memoriam
Elsie Maude Inglis

Scotland has gathered you, dear daughter, to her breast;
Beneath the shadow of the Castle Rock you passed to rest.
Yet we who followed in that long, long line
Of those who came to honour at the shrine
Of one who held her life a little thing,
Loving her country and her country’s king,
Her country’s honour, and her country’s name,
Loving its glory, bitter for what shame
Might blur the brightness of Great Britain’s fame—
We know you are not dead.

The hands, indeed,
So quick to minister where there was need,
The hands we loved, may not touch ours again,
May not alleviate our mortal pain;
They lie quiescent in the hands of God.
Yet we who followed when your footsteps trod
Beyond our Island shores, who knew your quick
Instinctive action for the helpless sick,
Your clear-voiced answer when there came the call
For succor from a nation like to fall,
Who saw that undulled radiance in your eyes
Given to those with whom “The Vision” lies—
We know that in that Flag-protected cask
Lies but the weariness of her whose Task,
Grown greater than her tired mortal frame,
Bears her beyond to greater strength and fame.
            —Mary H. J. Henderson

Born in India in 1864, Inglis and her family returned to Scotland when she was fourteen. She trained as a physician and surgeon in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and in 1904 she established a hospital staffed entirely by women that provided maternity care for the poor in Edinburgh. 

Elsie and some of her sisters by Ethel Moir
Creative Commons

Although she turned fifty just days after Britain declared war on Germany in 1914, Inglis was determined to assist in providing medical care for wounded and refugees and was instrumental in founding the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH). The Scottish Red Cross denied Inglis’s request for funds, explaining that given their partnership with the British War Office, they were unable to support “a hospital staffed by women.”†† 

However, despite repeated obstacles, Inglis and the Scottish Women’s Hospital raised funds sufficient to send fourteen hospital teams to Belgium, France, Serbia, and Russia. Inglis spent much of her overseas service in Serbia, guiding her medical teams through typhus epidemics and desperately overcrowded conditions (at one point, seven physicians were treating 11,000 wounded). Inglis and her staff repatriated the wounded, gave aid to refugees, and even survived capture by enemy troops. There are numerous memorials to her still in Serbia, where she is perhaps better known than in Great Britain. 

Dr. Elsie Maude Inglis died on Nov. 26, 1917, a day after her return to Britain due to failing health exacerbated by the grueling conditions she endured in her unfailing dedication to others. Henderson's 1918 volume of poetry was published "In aid of the Dr. Elsie Inglis Memorial Fund." The story of these women and others like them is integral to the full history of the First World War and deserves a wider audience. 
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*John Oxenham, forward to In War and Peace: Songs of a Scotswoman, by Mary H.J. Henderson, Erskine Macdonald, 1918, pp. 5–6.
**Oxenham, In War and Peace, pp. 6–7.
***Mary H.J. Henderson, “A Grave in France,” In War and Peace: Songs of a Scotswoman, Erskine Macdonald, 1918, p. 11.
****Henderson, “Like That,” p. 12.
† Steven Brocklehurst, “The female war medic who refused to ‘go home and sit still,’” BBC Scotland News, 26 Nov. 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-42096350.
†† Margot Lawrence, A Shadow of Swords: A Biography of Elsie Inglis, Michael Joseph, 1971, p. 99. 

Life weeps and shreds her garments

Harvard's First World War memorial 

In May of 1917, shortly after the United States declared war on Germany, French general Joseph Joffre visited America with his entourage. Joffre had served as France’s Commander-in-Chief on the Western Front from the start of the war until the end of 1916. He was well-known in America, remembered by his nickname, the “Rock of the Marne.” 

In the spring of 1917, Joffre’s mission was to ensure that American troops would be sent to the Western Front as quickly as possible, and that American military supplies would accompany the troops who would be trained by the French. Historian J.A. Almstrom writes, 

Because her own troops would tolerate no more offensives, France needed the Americans as surrogate soldiers for her generals’ strategic appetites. In order to survive, the French would attempt no less than to capture the soul of an army. As a result of the Joffre visit, and possibly encouraged by his insistence that trench warfare required little training, the War Department decided to dispatch to France a regular division.*

Along with an estimated 22,000 others, American writer Amy Lowell was present at Joffre’s visit to Harvard (her brother was the president of the university). Local newspapers describe the hero’s welcome that was given to Joffre: a chorus of over 1,000 school children sang “The Marseilles”; Boy Scouts accompanied the procession from Cambridge to Harvard; the President of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, conferred upon Joffre the honorary degree of doctor of laws, and the university’s young recruits showed off their military bearing and discipline in an exhibition of marching and drills.**

Amy Lowell’s description of the event distances itself from the patriotic fervor that thrilled the crowds. Lowell's poem “In the Stadium” highlights the immense gap between parades and combat, between generals who command and young men who are sent to die, “Heaped like sandbags / Against the German guns.” 

In the Stadium
Marshall Joffre Reviewing The Harvard Regiment, May 12, 1917

A little old man
Huddled up in a corner of a carriage,
Rapidly driven in front of throngs of people
With his hand held to a perpetual salute.
The people cheer,
But he has heard so much cheering.
On his breast is a row of decorations.
He feels his body recoil before attacks of pain.

They are all like this:
Napoleon,
Hannibal,
Great Caesar even,
But that he died out of time.
Sick old men,
Driving rapidly before a concourse of people,
Gay with decorations,
Crumpled with pain.

The drum-major lifts his silver-headed stick,
And the silver trumpets and tubas,
The great round drums,
Each with an H on them,
Crash out martial music.
Heavily rhythmed march music
For the stepping of a regiment.

Parade to War, an Allegory
John S. Curry, Cummer Museum of Art 

Slant lines of rifles,
A twinkle of stepping,
The regiment comes.
The young regiment,
Boys in khaki
With slanted rifles.

The young bodies of boys
Bulwarked in front of us.
The white bodies of young men
Heaped like sandbags
Against the German guns.

This is war:
Boys flung into a breach
Like shoveled earth;
And old men,
Broken,
Driving rapidly before crowds of people
In a glitter of silly decorations.

Behind the boys
And the old men,
Life weeps,
And shreds her garments
To the blowing winds.
—Amy Lowell 

Three-hundred and seventy-three Harvard students, alumni, faculty, and staff died in the war.  

Although she was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926, Lowell’s writing is frequently overlooked by contemporary readers, and few know of her war poetry. In 1917, Amy Lowell wrote, “It is impossible for any one writing to-day not to be affected by the war. It has overwhelmed us like a tidal wave. It is the equinoctial storm which bounds a period.”*** What readers are more familiar with today are her contemporaries’ dismissive remarks that seem designed to counteract the creativity and influence of Lowell and her poetry: she was accused of appropriating Imagism and reformulating it as “Amygism”; T.S. Eliot denigrated her use of personal wealth to promote contemporary literature, calling her the “demon saleswoman” of modern poetry°; and the writer Witter Bynner sneered that she was a “hippopoetess,” an insult repeated and popularized by Ezra Pound. 

In the preface to her collection of literary essays Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917), Lowell writes of poets who go unrecognized: “Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.”°°
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* John Albin Almstrom, Learning to Live: Tactical Training for the AEF, 1917–1918, Master’s thesis, Rice U, 1972, p. 32.
** Cambridge Chronicle, 19 May 1917 and Harvard Crimson, 15 May 1917.
*** Amy Lowell, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, 1917, Macmillan, p. v.
° T. S. Eliot, qtd in A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode by David Perkins,
°° Lowell, Tendencies, p. xi. 

Let us forget

The Deluge (1920) by Winifred Knights
The Tate Museum, T05532

Over a century after the end of the First World War, “Lest We Forget” is an often-repeated phrase, urging that the tragedies of war be remembered in commemoration*. But during the war itself, both those on the fields of battle and on the home front often wrote of their deliberate efforts to forget. 

British soldier Ivor Gurney writes in “To His Love” “Cover him, cover him soon! / And with thick-set / Masses of memoried flowers— / Hide that red wet / Thing I must somehow forget,” while the last stanza of Rose Macaulay’s  “Picnic July 1917” describes civilians’ efforts to block thoughts of the conflict:   

Oh, we’ll lie quite still, not listen nor look,
While the earth’s bounds reel and shake,
Lest, battered too long, our walls and we
Should break … .should break….

Mental disassociation from the trauma of war was critical to emotional stability—dwelling on the realities of war could lead to madness.   

Less than one month before peace was declared, American writer Sara Teasdale composed a poem that she never published. “Autumn Night 1918,” dated September 13, 1918, is recorded in Teasdale’s notebooks, now part of the Sara Teasdale collection at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.**

Autumn Night 1918

Encounter in the Darkness (1919), Claggett Wilson
Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1981.163.5

Let us forget! The night smells fresh,
The park is quiet, the stars are white—
They are fighting, the youth of the world are dying—

Let us forget! Kiss me to-night,
It is autumn now the whole world over,
Run down this path with me, let us forget!
Over the sea they are dying—kiss me,
Never mind if my lashes are wet.

In the lamp-light see two scarlet branches!
What is that ghostly thing under the tree?
Only a wild white aster stirring
In a wind blown westward over the sea.

Listen, the wind is moaning in trouble,
It brings what dying soldiers say,
Crying out from the bloody stubble
To women three thousand miles away.
—Sara Teasdale

The speaker’s repetition of “let us forget” signals that this is impossible. Neither a lover’s kisses nor flight down a forested path can erase the news of the war and its millions of dead. Humans have destroyed their connection with the natural world, and the comforts of the pastoral are meaningless in the face of industrial war. Trees, flowers, and the wind itself offer only traitorous reminders of corpses, bloody fields, and dying men’s moans. 

“Autumn Night 1918” offers a fascinating contrast with Teasdale’s better-known poem “There Will Come Soft Rains.” In the latter, the natural world is indifferent to humans, not caring nor deigning to remember whether “mankind perished utterly.” Yet in “Autumn Night 1918,” while the natural world appears to conspire in reminding men and women of the costs of war, an underlying message of the poem suggests that although nature may forget the war, people are incapable of doing so, especially when this is what is most vehemently desired. 

Distance from the battlefield does not protect civilians from the consequences and horrors of the war, and survivors are never discharged from the duty of bearing the burden of loss. 

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* "Lest We Forget" was first used in Rudyard Kipling's 1897 poem "Recessional."
** This post is deeply indebted to Melissa Girard’s research on Teasdale’s First World War poetry. Girard’s compelling scholarship deserves a much wider audience; her essay “‘How Autocratic Our Country Is Becoming’: The Sentimental Poetess at War” can be read online. It is drawn from her dissertation Lines of Feeling: Modernist Women’s Poetry and the Limits of Sentimentality (U of Illinois, 2009). 

Youth was in our hands

Rupert Brooke, 1913, by Sherril Schell
National Portrait Gallery NPG P101

In August of 1915, just months after Rupert Brooke’s death, his friend and literary executor Edward Marsh wrote a memoir, intending to publish it with Brooke’s collected poems. Marsh wrote that “Circumstances prevented this,” and Rupert Brooke: A Memoir wasn’t published until 1918. The delay allowed Marsh to include excerpts from Brooke’s letters. 

Aboard a troopship bound for Gallipoli, shortly before his death from “acute blood poisoning,”* Brooke wrote to his friend and fellow poet Lascelles Abercrombie:

I know now what a campaign is .... It is continual crossing from one place to another, and back, over dreamlike seas: anchoring, or halting, in the oddest places, for no one knows or quite cares how long: drifting on, at last, to some other equally unexpected, equally out of the way, equally odd spot: for all the world like a bottle in some corner of the bay at a seaside resort. Somewhere, sometimes, there is fighting. Not for us. In the end, no doubt, our apparently aimless course will drift us through, or anchor us in, a blaze of war, quite suddenly; and as suddenly swirl us out again .... One just hasn’t, though, the time and detachment  to write, I find. But I’ve been collecting a few words, detaching lines from the ambient air, collaring one or two of the golden phrases that a certain wind blows from (will the Censor let me say?) Olympus, across the purple seas.**

Noel Olivier,  Maitland Radford,
Virginia Woolf (née Stephen),
and  Rupert Brooke
Aug 1911 (unknown photographer)
NPG x13124)

Marsh’s memoir includes several of the words, lines, and “golden phrases” that Brooke recorded in his notebook. These fragments of half-finished poems offer enigmatic hints of what could have been. The following is from Brooke's draft of a sonnet:

The poor scrap of a song that some man tried
Down in the troop-decks forrard, brought again
The day you sang it first, on a hill-side,
With April in the wind and in the brain.
And the woods were gold; and youth was in our hands. 

Brooke died on the island of Skyros on April 23, 1915; the news appeared in the London Times on April 26th, and Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty of the British Navy, praised the young poet and his “simple force of genius” that communicated “the sorrow of youth about to die, and the sure triumphant consolations of a sincere and valiant spirit.” Churchill wrote, “The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes and memory remain; but they will linger.”***

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*From Marsh’s memoir; other contemporary accounts attribute his death to sunstroke. Modern historians believe he died of septicemia from an infected mosquito bite.

** Rupert Brooke, in Rupert Brooke: A Memoir, by Edward Marsh, Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1918, pp. 173–174. 

***Winston Churchill, “Death of Mr. Rupert Brooke: Sunstroke at Lemnos,” London Times, 26 April 1915. 

 

Impotent clamour

Richard Aldington, image mypoeticside.com 

 
In 1923, the American editor of Poetry magazine wrote of a trip to London and her encounter with one of the best-known poets of the First World War at that time:

A big fellow is Aldington, looking more like a football-player than a poet—one’s imagination has to leap to connect him with the delicate handwriting so long familiar, and the even more delicate poems. We lunched at the Cheshire Cheese, still haunted by Dr. Johnson’s bellowing voice, and explored St. Paul’s and the Temple through persistent rain, talking meanwhile of ten years of war and poetry.* 

Just four years earlier, Aldington had published his second book of poetry, a volume that recounted his experiences of battle on the Western Front. Images of War was illustrated by war artist Paul Nash. Aldington’s “In the Trenches” appeared in that volume. 

In the Trenches

I.
Not that we are weary,
Not that we fear,
Not that we are lonely
Though never alone—
Not these, not these destroy us;
But that each rush and crash
Of mortar and shell,
Each cruel bitter shriek of bullet
That tears the wind like a blade,
Each wound on the breast of earth,
Of Demeter, our Mother,
Wounds us also,
Severs and rends the fine fabric
Of the wings of our frail souls,
Scatters into dust the bright wings
Of Psyche!

II.
Impotent,
How impotent is all this clamour,
This destruction and contest…

Night after night comes the moon
Haughty and perfect;
Night after night the Pleiades sing
And Orion swings his belt across the sky.
Night after night the frost
Crumbles the hard earth.

Soon the spring will drop flowers
And patient, creeping stalk and leaf
Along these barren lines
Where the huge rats scuttle
And the hawk shrieks to the carrion crow.

Can you stay them with your noise?
Then kill winter with your cannon,
Hold back Orion with your bayonets
And crush the spring leaf with your armies!
    —Richard Aldington

Frail souls, the impotent din of the shells, and the haughty, knowing gaze of a moon that shines down upon the barrenness of battle—Aldington contrasts the chaotic noise of war with the stolid endurance and quietude of nature. The poem rhetorically asks if even the fiercest bombardment of the war can silence the rats, hawks, and carrion crows that shriek across the lines of battle. Despite the terrific destructive power of industrial war, humans will never be capable of killing winter, corralling the stars, or crushing the spring.

Together with his wife HD (Hilda Doolittle), Aldington was a leader of the Imagist movement, writers who crafted short poems that used concrete language and formal elements to suggest a moment in time, a mood, an experience. Josie Holford’s blog post “Richard Aldington and Paul Nash: Images of War” includes a rich discussion of the volume and its images, and Vivian Whelpton’s biography Richard Aldington: Poet, Soldier and Lover 1911 – 1929 (Lutterworth Press, 2014) attempts to unravel the complexities of Aldington’s life. As the author of A Century Back writes, “Richard Aldington is neither my favorite writer nor an altogether terrific soldier/husband/human being (and yes, those two judgments shouldn’t influence each other, yet they do), but his poetry is… interesting.”**
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* Harriet Monroe, “The Editor in England,” Poetry, vol. 23, no. 1, October 1923, pp. 32–45.
** “Richard Aldington’s Prayers and Fantasies,” A Century Back, 1 Nov. 2018, https://www.acenturyback.com/2018/11/01/richard-aldingtons-prayers-and-fantasies-rowland-feilding-in-the-chateau-sapper-martin-suspects-the-flags/.