Sunday Poetry - WWI & Easter

I'm still reading the poetry of WWI but, as it's Easter Sunday, I've chosen two poems written at Easter. The first is by Edward Thomas & is called In Memoriam (Easter 1915). This title was given to the poem by an editor. The title on the manuscript was the less poetic 6.IV.15. You can read more about it here in a post by Tim Kendall, President of the War Poets Association.

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.

Edward Thomas was killed at Arras on Easter Monday 1917 & his friend, Eleanor Farjeon, wrote this poem, Easter Monday (In Memoriam E.T.).

In the last letter that I had from France
You thanked me for the silver Easter egg
Which I had hidden in the box of apples
You liked to munch beyond all other fruit.
You found the egg the Monday before Easter,
And said, 'I will praise Easter Monday now -
It was such a lovely morning.' Then you spoke
Of the coming battle and said, 'This is the eve,
Good-bye. And may I have a letter soon.'

That Easter Monday was a day for praise,
It was such a lovely morning. In our garden
We sowed our earliest seeds, and in the orchard
The apple-bud was ripe. It was the eve.
There are three letters that you will not get.

Sunday Poetry - Carola Oman

Still reading the poetry of WWI but this is from another anthology on my shelves, Voices of Silence : the alternative book of First World War poetry by Vivien Noakes. I've literally just picked it up from the shelf &, flicking through it, came across the name of Carola Oman. She was a friend of Georgette Heyer & I remembered reading about her in Jennifer Kloester's biography of Heyer last year. Carola Oman was a Red Cross nurse during both wars. This poem is called Night Duty in the Station. By the way, turkis in the last stanza is an obsolete form of turquoise. I looked it up as I'd never seen the word before.

I
Slowly out of the siding the troop train draws away,
Into the dark it passes, heavily straining.
Shattering on the points the engine stutters.
Fires burn in every truck. Rich shadows play
Over the vivid faces... bunched figures. Some one mutters
'Rainin' again... it's raining.'

Slammings - a few shouts - quicker
Each truck the same moves on.
Weary rain eddies after
Drifts where the deep fires flicker.
Into the dark with laughter
The last truck wags... it is gone.

II
Horns that sound in the night when very few are keeping
Unwilling vigil, and the moonlit air
Is chill, and everything around is sleeping - 
Horns that call on a long low note - ah, where
Were you calling me last?
The ghastly huntsman hunts no more, they say
The Arcadian fields are drugged with blood and clay.
And is Romance not past?

III
The station in this watch seems full of ghosts.
Above revolves an opalescent lift
Of smoke and moonlight in the roof. And hosts
Of pallid refugees and children, shift
About the barriers in a ceaseless drift.

Forms sleeping crowd beneath the rifle-rack,
Upon the bookstall, in the carts. They seem
All to be grey and burdened. Blue and black,
Khaki and red, are blended, as a dream
Into eternal grey, and from the back
They stagger from this darkness into light
And move and shout
And sing a little, and move on and out
Unready, and again, into the night.

IV
The windows in the Post Office are lit with olive gold.
Across the bridge serene and old
White barges beyond count
Lie down the cold canal
Where the lost shadows fall;
And a transparent city shines upon a magic mount.

Now fired with turkis blue and green
Where the first sunshine plays
The dawn tiptoes between
Waiting her signal from the woodland ways...

The Setons - O Douglas

Reading serendipity is a wonderful thing. I was halfway through reading The Setons by O Douglas (photo from here) when, into my inbox, popped a review of the book by heavenali. I hadn't realised that The Setons was one of the titles selected for the Librarything Great War theme read so there are probably quite a few bloggers reading it at the moment. Ali has written a lovely review which really says everything I wanted to say myself so I feel a little redundant. So, I'll just give a brief description of the plot & a few thoughts on the attractions of O Douglas's books for me.

The Setons are a manse family, living in Glasgow in 1913. James Seton is a well-loved minister to his congregation, a little remote but always practical & kind when help is needed. He's a widower & his daughter, Elizabeth, keeps house for him & his youngest son, David, known as Buff. Elizabeth has largely taken the place of her mother in the house & in the parish. She is attractive, kind, opinionated, funny & devoted to her father. There are two older brothers in India, Alan & Walter. The eldest son, Sandy, died while at Oxford & his mother followed him soon after. We meet Elizabeth's friends, the Thomsons & Kirsty Christie, also a daughter of the manse but less attractive than Elizabeth in looks or manners & less satisfied with her lot in life.

When Aunt Alice proposes that her husband's nephew, Arthur Townshend, should visit Glasgow, Elizabeth is dismayed by the prospect. She has missed meeting Arthur on the visits she made to her aunt & the picture she has of him is not an appealing one. She imagines him as very English, stuffy, self-important, used to the best of everything & likely to look down his nose at Glasgow & their family. Luckily, Arthur turns out to be a delightful man, interested in everything & everyone. He makes an immediate friend of Buff & is fascinated by manse life. He quickly becomes a close friend to Elizabeth &, by the time he leaves, their relationship has deepened into love, although unacknowledged. 

The story takes a serious turn in the final chapters as we reach 1914 & the outbreak of WWI. The Setons was published in 1917 so the outcome of the war was still unknown & this is evident in the apprehensive tone of the narrator. James Seton develops heart trouble & has to leave the ministry. The family moves to Etterick, their house in the country & they all adjust to a very different life. The book is very much of its time in the descriptions of young men going joyously to war in defence of their country. The constant fear & worry felt by those at home about loved ones serving in the war is beautifully described. These final chapters are very poignant & there is hope as well as sorrow as the book ends.

O Douglas was the sister of John Buchan. Her novels are all on similar themes - domestic stories about family & relationships with a lot of humour & always some gentle romance. Buff is another of the young boys who feature in all her novels & are based on a young brother who was killed in the war. Her books are comforting but not saccharine, always alive to the realities of life. O Douglas had very strong views on right & wrong, duty & responsibility & this is reflected in all her books as well as a melancholy that I find attractive. I love reading about a time & a place that seems so far away from our busy modern world yet is still recognisable, with characters who face the problems that everyone has to deal with, no matter where they live or at what time.

Dorothea's War - edited by Richard Crewdson

Dorothea Crewdson & her best friend, Christie, were newly trained Red Cross nurses when they joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment in 1915 & volunteered for active service overseas. They were posted to northern France & so began four years of hard work, dedication but also fun & adventure, all of which Dorothea recorded in her diaries.

Many diaries have been published by participants of WWI. I always find them moving & I'm always in awe of the dedication of the medical staff who endured extremes of heat & cold, often with inadequate supplies & sometimes practically at the front line & under shellfire. Their only consideration was their duty & the welfare of their patients. Dorothea is no exception to this. She was about 30 when the war began & she had grown up in a lively, affectionate family. Her younger brother, Alistair, (she called him Little A even though he was over six feet tall!) was in the Army & they are able to meet several times in France. Dorothea is often desperately homesick for her mother & sisters & agonizes about whether or not to sign on for another six months service. Her duty always wins out though & she served for nearly four years until after the end of the war.

The most important aspect of any diary is the writer's voice. Do we feel that we get to know the writer? Would we like to have tea & a chat with them? Dorothea's voice is warm, generous, compassionate & often amused. She was always interested & up for any expedition that was proposed. She was hard working & always ready to get along with her colleagues & superiors. From night duty to running the Mess, Dorothea found interest in any task & satisfaction in a job well done.

Her diaries are very detailed & filled with beautiful sketches (some of them are reproduced on the cover). These are the endpapers & you can see the actual diaries with the drawings.

I just want to quote a couple of passages to give the flavour of Dorothea's voice. When reviewing a diary or journal, I think that can be more interesting than describing where she served & how bad the conditions were. I've read a lot of WWI & WWII memoirs & diaries & I want something more than a recital of battles & places. Dorothea really made me feel that I was there with her, or at least, looking on from a warm, safe distance. The Parrot House mentioned in this entry was the name given to the tent where the nurses on night duty slept. There's an illustration of it above.

Well a day. here I am back on day duty again. Such startling changes have occurred since I was last writing my diary. Heard only yesterday morning after breakfast that we were to come off immediately and do no more night duty till perhaps February. It took us all very much by surprise. Parrot House was in great flutter... I didn't like the suddenness of changing. I would almost rather have had another night before coming off but I was still prepared to enjoy a day off duty with the rest of the Parrot House party. Wednesday 20th October 1915

Just into bed and quite glad to be there after a strenuous day. I find bed very comforting, even though it is getting rather shaky on its legs and descending gradually nearer and nearer to terra firma. Don't know what is to be done when it finally rests flat on the floor and I extend myself on a veritable stretcher. I have been next door in Malet's room, eating strawberries. First 'straws' I have tasted this year and very delicious, so have been having little galavant on my own account. Before that i went to Compline service at church, which I always like because of the peace and quiet it brings after an active day. Friday 26th May 1916

Valentine's Day! But not much Valentine to be got here. A military hospital of BEF is a very unromantic place and when a small affair does blaze out, it instantly becomes common property and discussed in and out till quite threadbare. Nothing can be done in camp that isn't immediately discovered, but all hospitals are alike I suppose, as there is so little outside to talk and think about except the everlasting topics of the war, leave and home. Anything out of the ordinary is welcomed with delight, as food for gossip. The latest is that today Sister Blandy received her marching orders. She was given half an hour's notice this afternoon. She had to come off duty, throw her things into boxes, and now she is gone from our ken. Perhaps I shall never see her again, but cannot say I am heartbroken. Such an odd world of rapid change this hospital is! Monday 14th February 1916

Dorothea's story had a sad ending. After serving until the end of the war, she stayed on nursing in France & was taken on a tour of the battlefields with other medical staff. She was looking forward to ending her service & returning home when she was suddenly taken ill & died of peritonitis after surgery in March 1919. The letter written by Matron McCord to Dorothea's mother is very moving. Shocked at the suddenness of Dorothea's illness & death, Matron writes eloquently of Dorothea's service & her valued contribution to the work of her colleagues all through the war.

The diaries have been edited by Dorothea's nephew, Richard, Little A's son. He knew nothing about them until after his father died when he came across them along with instructions that they should be donated to the Imperial War Museum. Richard Crewdson has written an informative & affectionate Introduction about the aunt he never knew & the privilege he feels it has been to get to know her now through her own words after so many years. I'm glad that he has published Dorothea's diaries so we can all get to know this remarkable woman.

Sunday Poetry - Eileen Newton

It's Remembrance Day tomorrow so this will be my last poem from the Virago anthology. There's no information about Eileen Newton in the Notes so all I know is that this poem, Last Leave (1918), was published in Lamps in the Valley in 1927.

Let us forget tomorrow! For tonight
At least, with curtains drawn, and driftwood piled
On our own hearthstone, we may rest, and see
The firelight flickering on familiar walls.
(How the blue flames leap when an ember falls!)
Peace, and content, and soul-security - 
These are within. Without, the waste is wild
With storm-clouds sweeping by in furious flight,
And ceaseless beating of autumnal rain
Upon our window pane.

The dusk grows deeper now, the flames are low:
We do not heed the shadows, you and I,
Nor fear the grey wings of encroaching gloom,
So softly they enfold us. One last gleam
Flashes and flits, elusive as a dream,
And then dies out upon the darkened room.
So, even so, our earthly fires must die;
Yet, in our hearts, love's flame shall leap and glow
When this dear night, with all it means to me,
Is but a memory!

When I first read this poem, I thought there might be a hopeful ending for this love story. I know the title is Last Leave & there's a melancholy feeling to it but it is 1918 & it's autumn so maybe it was the soldier's last leave because the war ended & he came home safely.

But then, I read the next poem, Revision (for November 11th), also published in 1927 & I'm afraid that the soldier never did come home. Although in this poem, it's April & springtime so maybe this was the last time of that leave not the last, last time? Maybe Last Leave was written in 1918 about an earlier time? I know poetry doesn't have to be autobiographical but all the poems in this anthology seem so very personal that I can't help drawing that conclusion even though I'm now quite confused. This is still a lovely poem about memory & loss, no matter the circumstances in which it was written.

In those two silent moments, when we stand,
To let the surging tide of memory fill
The mind's deep caverns with its mingled flood
Of joys and griefs, I shall not think again,
As I was wont, of the untimely slain,
Of poppies dipped and dyed in human blood,
Of the rude cross upon the ravaged hill,
And all the strife which scarred that lovely land.

My thoughts shall seek, instead, a hallowed place - 
The little, leafy wood where you and I
Spent the last hour together, while the breeze,
Lulled every nodding daffodil to rest;
And from the flaming ramparts of the west
Shone bars of gold between black stems of trees,
Till dusk crept softly down the April sky,
And Hesperus trembled in the sapphire space.

Remembering this, my heart, at length set free
From gyves of hate, its bitter passion shed,
May hear once more the low, caressing call
That so entranced it, seven sad years ago.
Then, in those poignant moments, I shall know
That pain and parting matter not at all,
Because your soul, long-risen from the dead,
Is crowned by Love's immortal constancy.

The Ashgrove - Diney Costeloe

'Who do you belong to, I wonder?' she asked aloud. There was nothing to indicate whom each tree commemorated... or that the place was a memorial at all. She moved from tree to tree until she had rested her hand on each trunk, and thought of all the young, fresh-faced men who had gone so jauntily to war, never to return to their homes here in Charlton Ambrose. Such high hopes they must have had. The adventure of fighting in a war, seeing a bit of the world, before settling down to their humdrum lives here in the country. Rachel thought of the pictures she had seen of the trenches in Flanders, the mud and the squalor, the cold and the rats. She shuddered, and drawing her coat more closely around her, walked out on the far side of the grove where the allotment hedge barred her way.

Rachel Elliot is a reporter working for the local Belcaster Chronicle. She has been sent to cover a meeting in the Charlton Ambrose village hall to discuss a proposed housing development. She expects it to be a routine assignment but it's the beginning of a quest that will lead her into the past & to discoveries about her own family history. The developers are brought up short when an elderly woman stands up & accuses them of planning to demolish the Ashgrove, a group of trees planted in 1921 as a memorial to the local men killed in WWI. Cecily Strong's brother, Will, was one of the men commemorated &, even though the metal plates have long since gone, there are still local people who know what the trees mean. Rachel is intrigued by this new angle on the story & visits Cecily to find out more.

Cecily's long term memory proves very helpful & a trawl through parish records & the newspaper archive fills in more of the gaps. Eight local men, including the Squire's son, Freddie, were killed. Squire Hurst paid for the trees & the metal plates but he died the same year & so the stones that were meant to replace the plates as a permanent memorial were never erected. There's also a mystery because there are nine trees, not eight, in the Ashgrove. The ninth tree was secretly planted soon after the dedication & the Rector, Henry Smalley, who had served at the Front, convinced the Squire to let it stand as a memorial to the Unknown Soldier. Rachel also discovers that the Squire's daughter, Sarah, went to France as a nurse & was killed when her hospital was shelled. She decides to try to trace the descendants of the other soldiers to see if they can convince the developers to find some other way to build the access road they need & plans a series of articles for the newspaper on the Ashgrove & the men who died.

Rachel is surprised to discover a personal link with Charlton Ambrose when she visits her grandmother, Rosemary, & hears that she lived in the village when she was a child. She was born illegitimate & her mother had been unwillingly forced to return to her parents.When Rosemary's mother died soon after, she lived with her grandparents for some years. Rosemary's mother's diary & a sealed packet of letters that she has never opened, take Rachel back to 1915.

Rosemary's mother, Molly, is a housemaid at the Manor. Sarah Hurst is determined to nurse in France & is desperate to overcome her father's disapproval. Sarah's aunt is a nun in a French convent hospital & reluctantly agrees that Sarah's help would be useful if she can get her father's approval. Sarah asks Molly to go with her &, because Molly is frightened of her abusive father who has insisted she leave service & work for higher wages in a munitions factory, she agrees. Molly's diary tells of their journey to France, their work at the hospital & her meeting with Tom Carter, a soldier who has been brought in with his best mate, Harry, who is Molly's cousin. Molly & Tom's friendship turns to love although their relationship must be kept secret from the disapproving nuns. Tom returns to the Front just before the Battle of the Somme in July 1916 &, although he survives the battle, the confusion afterwards & his desire to get back to St Croix to marry Molly, who has become pregnant, leads to tragedy & an injustice that has only been rectified in recent years.

The Ashgrove is such an involving story. I read it in two long evenings as I was totally caught up in both stories. Rachel's researches were fascinating (I can't resist a bit of digging in the archives) & her personal connection to the Ashgrove is very poignant. Sarah & Molly's story was also totally involving as they become friends rather than mistress & servant. Molly discovers her abilities as a nurse & Sarah is drawn more to the spiritual side of life at the convent which leads to tensions between the girls as Molly's relationship with Tom grows. I've read many WWI diaries & memoirs & I can see how much research has gone into creating this picture of a hospital under enormous pressure. Having recently read Emily Mayhew's Wounded, this novel was the perfect companion read as Diney Costeloe has brought the factual accounts to life in a very moving way.

I should declare a personal interest here as Diney is a friend & fellow member of my online reading group. She asked me if I would like to review The Ashgrove as she is hoping to give it a bit of a relaunch with Remembrance Day coming up. She kindly sent me e-copies of The Ashgrove & the sequel, Death's Dark Vale, which continues Sarah's story & takes us up to WWII. I'm looking forward to read it very much. Both books are available as paperbacks & Kindle editions.

Sunday Poetry - Eleanor Farjeon

Eleanor Farjeon (photo below from here) is well-known as a poet & as a writer of children's stories. However, one of the most profound relationships in her life was her friendship with the poet Edward Thomas. Eleanor was in love with Edward & he realised this but they were able to retain their deep friendship even though he didn't return her romantic feelings. Her letters were always important to him, especially when he was in France in 1917. Edward Thomas was killed at Arras on Easter Monday 1917 & Eleanor wrote this poem, Easter Monday (In Memoriam E.T.), in his memory.

In the last letter that I had from France
You thanked me for the silver Easter egg
Which I had hidden in the box of apples
You liked to munch beyond all other fruit.
You found the egg the Monday before Easter,
And said, 'I will praise Easter Monday now - 
It was such a lovely morning.' Then you spoke
Of the coming battle and said, 'This is the eve,
Good-bye. And may I have a letter soon.'

That Easter Monday was a day for praise,
It was such a lovely morning. In our garden
We sowed our earliest seeds, and in the orchard
The apple-bud was ripe. It was the eve.
There are three letters that you will not get.

Wounded : from Battlefield to Blighty 1914-1918 - Emily Mayhew

There will be hundreds of books published over the next few years to coincide with the centenary of WWI but I doubt there will be many more moving than Wounded by Emily Mayhew. Instead of descriptions of battles & politics, this is a book about the consequences of battle. It's about the wounded men of France & Flanders & of the men & women who cared for them. The nurses, doctors, orderlies, stretcher bearers & chaplains.

There are so many poignant, moving stories in this book but I'm just going to highlight a few. The overwhelming impression of reading these stories is of ordinary people thrown into unimaginable horror & doing the best they could. In the Introduction, Mayhew describes the book as a "continuous narrative" like a novel, rather than a conventional work of non-fiction.  The thoughts of the participants are presented in this way but every word is based on an interview or a written testimony from a library or an archive or another published source. I think this works well in integrating the voices & experiences of many people on a journey from the battlefield to England, where the lucky ones with Blighty wounds were sent. There's an extensive bibliographic essay at the end of the book incorporating background reading & the sources for each story as well as footnotes.

The story begins with Mickey Chater, wounded at Neuve Chapelle in 1915.  He is bumping around in the back of an ambulance on his way to a Casualty Clearing Station (CCS) after being hit in the face & shoulder. The ambulance driver doesn't know whether to drive fast (when he hits bumps in the road, the wounded are jolted so hard they hit the roof of the ambulance) or slowly (when they feel every little bump & the ambulance might get bogged). When they reach the CCS, Mickey is expected to die. His wounds are so severe that survival seems unlikely. However, he was lucky to be operated on by a pioneer of facial surgery, Charles Valadier, who put his face back together. Valadier even wrote an article on Mickey's case & a copy of this was found in Mickey's papers when he died in 1974. After the war, when Mickey Chater talked about his memories of the War, it was the kindness & dedication of the medical staff who saved his life that he always wanted to emphasize.

William Kelsey Fry was a Regimental Medical Officer with the 7th Division Royal Welsh Fusiliers. As well as medical duties, the RMO was responsible for keeping the men of his battalion healthy & the CCS supplied with fresh water, latrines & supplies. These duties could take up days of his time when there were no wounded to care for. The CCS was the first place that casualties were brought after a battle. Once the men were patched up, they were either sent back to the Front or behind the lines for further treatment & hopefully a trip home for the lucky ones. So, the work would come in waves. The CCS was also liable to be moved at a moment's notice as the battlelines moved. Then, the tasks of finding fresh water, digging latrines & training the stretcher bearer teams would begin all over again. Kelsey Fry & his bearers, Frank Pearce & George Sheasby, were regarded as one of the best teams at the Front. They could be so close to the fighting that they were within hearing of shellfire. Sometimes they worked so hard they didn't hear the shellfire any more. In August 1916, Kelsey Fry & his team found themselves at Guillemont Wood, working in an improvised CCS consisting of a hole hastily dug in the ground with a tarpaulin on top. A shell exploded near the post & both bearers & all the wounded men inside were killed. Kelsey Fry survived but never returned to the Front.

Winifred Kenyon wanted to nurse at the Front. She wanted to really work not just be a glorified housemaid, mopping floors. Her first posting was to the are behind Verdun in the summer of 1915. The CCS was in the middle of nowhere, rows of tents with nurses & orderlies running between them under the open sky. Winifred soon learned that the weather dominated life in the CCS. It was the first thing the nurses thought about when they woke in the morning. Wind, rain, heat, would it be a good day to get the patients' laundry done? Running between tents in the rain meant the possibility of falling in the mud & ruining a clean uniform. Winifred learnt quickly, surprised at how many wards were run by experienced nurses without doctors. She quickly discovered what the acronyms on a patient's ticket meant. The tickets were vital as they stayed with the patient all through his journey from the battlefield to England & allowed medical staff at each stage to quickly treat him without wasting precious time. SI (severely ill) & DI (dangerously ill) meant that the men had little hope of survival. ICT (I can't tell) meant a man was so badly injured that the MO couldn't work out what to treat first. the nurse was meant to clean him up & stabilise him until a surgeon with more time could come back & assess his condition.

Winifred learnt about all the non-nursing duties that were just as important to the patients - a friendly smile & a word of reassurance; being there when a patient came out of an anesthetic; making coffee & sandwiches for overworked colleagues because you happened to be free at that moment. Winifred and the other nurses found themselves acting as social workers to their patients as they recovered if they were distressed by news from home (or no news from home) & they kept themselves sane by walking in the nearby woods in their off-duty hours.

The most poignant stories for me were of the chaplains & padres. These men were not soldiers or medical staff &, on the face of it, they had little reason to be at the Front. However, they could make an extraordinary contribution to the physical as well as spiritual welfare of everyone they came into contact with. Some of the chaplains had quite extraordinary skills which they put to good use. Charles Doudney had worked as a missionary in the Australian outback & he was fascinated by radio technology. He had been constantly tinkering with a radio set in the outback, his only means of communication. Back in England, he soon decided to volunteer for frontline service when the War broke out. His skills in radiology soon made him chief repair man at the base hospital in Rouen & his soldering iron was soon employed in repairing X Ray machines. Soon he was receiving basic medical instruction, administering anesthetics & treating simple wounds without supervision when he was posted to a CCS near Poperinghe. He wrote home to his parishioners telling them of his experiences & asking them to send comforts for the patients like a gramophone. Only when the rush of work stopped could Doudeney resume his duties as a chaplain, although he always felt that he hadn't gone to the Front to preach sermons & hold the hands of dying men. On his way to conduct a burial service in October 1915, the truck he was in was hit by a shell, & Doudeney died on the operating table from his wounds.

There are stories of the courage of stretcher bearers crossing No Man's Land searching for the wounded & nurses on swaying ambulance trains heading for the coast. Too many stories to tell here. Wounded is a beautifully written account of a side of war that is often forgotten in accounts of the movements of armies & the machinations of politics.

I read Wounded courtesy of NetGalley.

Sunday Poetry - Eva Dobell

I've been reading Emily Mayhew's Wounded & WWI nurse Dorothea Crewdson's Diary, Dorothea's War, so this poem, Night Duty, by Eva Dobell struck a chord. Eva was the niece of the poet, Sydney Dobell. She volunteered as a nurse during WWI & died in her 90s in 1963.

The pain and laughter of the day are done,
So strangely hushed and still the long ward seems,
Only the Sister's candle softly beams.
Clear from the church near by the clock strikes 'one';
And all are wrapt away in secret sleep and dreams.

They bandied talk and jest from bed to bed;
Now sleep has touched them with a subtle change.
They lie here deep withdrawn, remote and strange;
A dimly outlined shape, a tumbled head.
Through what far lands do now their wand'ring spirits range?

Here one cries sudden on a sobbing breath,
Gripped in the clutch of some incarnate fear:
What terror through the darkness draweth near?
What memory of carnage and of death?
What vanished scenes of dread to his closed eyes appear?

And one laughs out with an exultant joy.
An athlete he - Maybe his young limbs strain
In some remembered game, and not in vain
To win his side the goal - Poor crippled boy,
Who in the waking world will never run again.

One murmurs soft and low a woman's name;
And here a vet'ran soldier, calm and still
As sculptured marble sleeps, and roams at will
Through eastern lands where sunbeams scorch like flame,
By rich bazaar and town, and wood-wrapt snow-crowned hill.

Through the wide open window one great star,
Swinging her lamp above the pear-tree high,
Looks in upon these dreaming forms that lie
So near in body, yet in soul so far
As those bright worlds thick strewn on that vast depth of sky.

Murder and Mendelssohn - Kerry Greenwood

Phryne Fisher is back with her 20th case. Obnoxious conductor Hedley Tregennis has been murdered. He was poisoned but was actually killed by suffocation - someone stuffed the score of Mendelssohn's Elijah down his throat. Tregennis was loathed by the members of his choir as he had a nasty habit of groping the sopranos & humiliating & bullying everyone else. Phryne is called in by Inspector Jack Robinson to help his investigations. He finds questioning the members of the choir as easy as herding cats & Phryne steps in to help as she is more on their wavelength. She soon discovers that two copies of the score are missing & that Tregennis had a secret visitor, a woman who brought him delicious, expensive meals. Discovering the mystery woman becomes vital but the post mortem reveals a surprise about the actual cause of death.

Phryne also runs into an old friend, Dr John Wilson. John & Phryne first met during the War on the Western Front. Phryne drove an ambulance & their brief relationship was a great comfort to them both, even though John is basically homosexual. Phryne saved John's life by driving her ambulance in the path of a sniper, leaving him badly wounded but alive. Now, John is in Melbourne with Rupert Sheffield, a mathematical genius lecturing on the science of deduction. Sheffield is an unpleasant man, arrogant & cold. John's unrequited love for Sheffield makes him unhappy but he needs someone to devote himself to. John is also concerned that someone is trying to kill Sheffield. There have been several accidents that could be more than that. Phryne & Sheffield dislike each other on sight & she agrees to investigate the attempted accidents for John's sake. This leads her back to the War again, as Sheffield was involved in Intelligence work in Greece & Phryne had also dabbled in Intelligence, working with novelist Compton Mackenzie. Her contacts lead her to the MI6 agent based in Melbourne as she tries to discover more about Sheffield & what he could be involved in.

Phryne investigates with all her usual aplomb & confidence. Assisted by her adopted daughters Jane & Ruth, Tinker & his dog, Molly, Dot Williams & Hugh Collins, Mr & Mrs Butler, the Hispano-Suiza, gorgeous clothes & delicious food. Phryne becomes a member of the choir & gets to know the impoverished students who put up with unpleasant conductors because of their love of music - & each other. There are several budding romances among the choristers & Phyrne observes everyone carefully while searching for a motive for murder more compelling than just hating the victim because he's an unpleasant person. When Hedley's replacement is also murdered horribly, the members of the choir come under even greater suspicion & Phryne has to decide whether she has one or two murderers to uncover.

The lingering effects of the War are everywhere in this book. Phryne & John still suffer from the after-effects of their war service & we learn more about Phryne's activities in Intelligence.  Echoes of Sherlock Holmes & Doctor Watson in the relationship between Sheffield & John & the characterisation of the choir are beautifully done. Kerry Greenwood has sung in choirs & she uses her intimate knowledge to great effect. The notes at the end of the book are fascinating as Greenwood discusses her inspirations for the plot & the themes of music, love, war & detection. I didn't expect it but Murder and Mendelssohn was an appropriate book to read in the weeks before Remembrance Day. As always, one book leads to another & I'm now reading Emily Mayhew's new book, Wounded, about the men wounded in action & the men & women who tried to put them back together again.

Sunday Poetry - Marion Allen

Another poem from Catherine Reilly's anthology. There's no information about Marian Allen in the biographical notes in the book so she remains elusive. This poem, The Wind on the Downs, was published in a collection of the same name in 1918. Maybe her poetry was an isolated response to her grief & she wrote nothing else. Or, maybe, she was unable to get anything else published. I like the expression of quiet melancholy & grief addressed to the loved one, it's very moving.

I like to think of you as brown and tall,
As strong and living as you used to be,
In khaki tunic, Sam Brown belt and all,
And standing there and laughing down at me,
Because they tell me, dear, that you are dead,
Because I can no longer see your face,
You have not died, it is not true, instead
You seek adventure in some other place.
That you are round about me, I believe;
I hear you laughing as you used to do,
Yet loving all the things I think of you;
And knowing you are happy, should I grieve?
You follow and are watchful where I go;
How should you leave me, having loved me so?

We walked along the tow-path, you and I,
Beside the sluggish-moving, still canal;
It seemed impossible that you should die;
I think of you the same and always shall.
We thought of many things and spoke of few,
and life lay all uncertainly before,
and now I walk alone and think of you,
And wonder what new kingdoms you explore.
Over the railway line, across the grass,
While up above the golden wings are spread,
Flying, ever flying overhead,
Here still I see your khaki figure pass,
And when I leave the meadow, almost wait
That you should open first the wooden gate.

Just borrowed

Another lovely pile of books (and a DVD) that have just arrived at my library. I want to read all of them but I'm not sure how long it will take. Some of them may go back to the library a few times before I finally get to them.

Six Against the Yard is another of the wonderful Detection Club compilations that have been reprinted in recent years. This one features six authors - Margery Allingham, Dorothy L Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Croft & Russell Thorndike - who each attempt to create an unsolvable murder. A real life policeman, ex-Superintendent Cornish of the CID, attempts to work out what happened in each case. There's also an essay by Agatha Christie about the unsolved Croydon mystery where several members of a family were poisoned with arsenic.

The Novel Cure : an A-Z of literary remedies by Ella Berthoud & Susan Elderkin - a book to dip in to as it has suggestions for what to read according to your mood. So, if you're a Daddy's girl, in need of a good cry, feeling tired & emotional, not taking enough risks or wishing you were a superhero, there's a book for you.

Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers by Alexander McCall Smith - the latest Scotland Street book. Lovely!

Dorothea's War by Dorothea Crewdson - the WWI diary of a nurse edited by her nephew. I'm looking forward to reading this for my Remembrance reading in November.

Bosworth : the birth of the Tudors by Chris Skidmore - I listened to a fascinating podcast from BBC History Magazine about this book. Skidmore actually ends with the battle, beginning his story with the birth of Henry Tudor & his life in exile. After reading Thomas Penn's excellent biography of Henry, The Winter King, I'm keen to read this. The account of the battle has also been informed by the recent discovery of Richard III's remains & the evidence of his final moments & burial. The discovery happened just as the author was completing his first draft.

Worlds of Arthur : facts and fictions of the Dark Ages by Guy Halsall - I find Arthur endlessly fascinating. Did he exist? What's the historical, archaeological & literary evidence? I'm always ready to read another theory.

Band of Angels : the forgotten world of early Christian women by Kate Cooper - I read a review of this book & was immediately interested as it's a subject & a period I know very little about. There were several women who were important in the spread of Christianity in the early years of the 1st & 2nd centuries. They were subsequently written out of the story as the Church become dominated by men although they are still there in the Gospels & other historical documents.

Now for the DVD. I love the 2004 adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South & not just because of Richard Armitage. However, I didn't know there'd been an earlier adaptation in the 1970s starring Patrick Stewart and Rosalind Shanks until I saw it listed as a forthcoming DVD release & naturally bought copies for my library. Doesn't he look brooding? I can't wait to watch this, does anyone remember it?

Letters from Skye - Jessica Brockmole

Elspeth Dunn is a poet & crofter living on Skye in 1913. She receives a fan letter from a young American medical student, David Graham, & they begin a correspondence. Davey is unhappy studying medicine, which was his father's choice. He longs to do something more creative & he pours out his thoughts & ambitions to Elspeth who he renames Sue. They learn about each other's lives - Elspeth is married to Iain & has never left Skye, mostly because she's afraid of the sea & boats. Her poetry is the most important thing in her life. Gradually their friendship deepens into love.

When war comes in 1914, Davey & his best friend Harry become ambulance drivers with the American Ambulance Field Service. Elspeth overcomes her fears & meets Davey in London where they become lovers. Elspeth's husband has joined up along with her brother, Finlay. Although her marriage was based on companionship more than passionate love, Elspeth feels guilty for betraying Iain & Finlay is so furious with her that he refuses to speak to her & their relationship is irrevocably damaged, especially after Iain is posted missing in action. When Davey's letters suddenly stop, Elspeth has no idea what has happened to him & she retreats to Skye.

In 1940, Elspeth is living in Edinburgh with her daughter, Margaret. Margaret is working as an evacuation officer, taking children to live in the country out of the danger of bombing raids. She is engaged to a pilot, Paul, who's stationed in southern England. After a raid one night, Margaret discovers a suitcase full of letters from Davey addressed to someone called Sue. Her mother is so upset by the discovery that she disappears, leaving Margaret desperate to find the key to the mystery of her mother's life. Margaret has no memories of Skye or her mother's Skye family & Elspeth has always refused to speak of the past. Margaret makes contact with her uncle Finlay, now living in Glasgow, &, after a frosty beginning, he begins to tell Margaret of Elspeth's early life. Margaret travels to Skye & finds her grandmother who explains a little more. Margaret's search for the story of her mother & Davey will finally explain the mysteries & silences of her mother's life.

Letters from Skye is written entirely in letters. Letters between Davey & Elspeth, Margaret & Paul, Margaret & Finlay. This can be a very successful way to tell a story - it's impossible not to be reminded of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer. The downside of the epistolary method is a kind of awkwardness that this book doesn't altogether avoid. The correspondents have to retell events at which they were present so that the reader gets the information, which can be clumsy. It can also be difficult to recreate a sense of place without the descriptive passages of a more conventional narrative. I also thought that a couple of the plot twists near the end of the story were a little far-fetched so I finished the book feeling slightly let down. I wanted to love this book & it didn't live up to my high expectations.  Maybe I was comparing it to another book about Skye & WWI that I absolutely loved, Linda Gillard's The Glass Guardian.

On the whole, though, Jessica Brockmole has written a tender, romantic story with some exceptional characters. I especially loved Elspeth's mother, who comes alive in the letters Margaret writes to Paul when she travels to Skye. Davey's experiences with the Ambulance brigade in France were also beautifully done. I'll be interested to see what she writes next.

I read Letters from Skye courtesy of NetGalley.

The Secret Rooms - Catherine Bailey

This is a wonderful book but I don't want to tell you anything about it! This could be my shortest ever review. The Secret Rooms is the non-fiction equivalent of A S Byatt's Possession. If you've read Possession you'll know how exciting it was to follow Maud & Roland's research as they pieced together the Victorian love story at the heart of the book. The Secret Rooms has the same feeling of excitement & anticipation as Catherine Bailey researches the mysteries at the heart of her research into a book she had no idea that she would write.

Catherine Bailey received permission to work in the archives at Belvoir Castle, the ancestral home of the Dukes of Rutland. The archives were kept in a series of rooms in the servant's quarters, known as the Muniment Rooms. The ninth duke, John Manners, who died in 1940, had dedicated himself to cataloguing & collecting the records, accounts, letters & diaries of his ancestors & his more immediate family. Bailey planned to write a book about the effect of WWI on the families who worked on the estates of the Duke of Rutland. The eighth Duke, Henry, had been instrumental in encouraging the men from his estates to join the battalions he raised & his son, John, had served with the North Midlands.

The first mystery that Bailey came across was the attitude of the guides & staff to the fact that she was in the Muniment Rooms at all. No one ever went in there, she was told. The ninth Duke died in those rooms in 1940 & they'd been shut up ever since. This was intriguing. Why had John Manners died in the cold, cramped conditions of the Muniment Rooms when he had a whole castle with his own suite of rooms to lie in? John had refused all medical advice, even from the King's own doctor, to leave. He had something he must finish.

Then, Bailey discovered that there were inexplicable gaps in the meticulously kept records. The most unexpected & devastating gap, from the point of view of her book, was that many of the family letters from the First World War were missing. Could they have been misfiled? No, after checking through hundreds of boxes & thousands of letters, the gap was still there. The lack of documentary evidence meant that Bailey was forced to reluctantly give up the book she had planned to write. However, she became fascinated with the life & death of John Manners, the ninth Duke, & this fascination led to the uncovering of family secrets that had lain dormant for over a century.

Bailey discovered two more gaps in the records of the family of Henry, the eighth Duke & his wife, Violet. Something had happened in 1894 & then again, there was a gap in 1909, when John was in Rome in the diplomatic service. The removal of material relating to these three gaps was meticulously done & Bailey comes to the inevitable conclusion that it was John who had removed the letters. Was this what he was doing in the final weeks of his life? Was he desperately trying to ensure that nothing remained to be found?

The Secret Rooms is as unputdownable as any mystery novel. I was enthralled from the very beginning & read 200 pages in a day. Bailey describes the steps of her research, the dead ends & the other archives & libraries she visits to try to fill in the gaps. Her research is frustrating but also immensely rewarding when she finds out another piece of the elaborate jigsaw. At the same time, she paints a fascinating picture of the privileged life of the aristocracy in the late Victorian & Edwardian period. The extreme wealth of the Rutlands couldn't make them a happy family but I can't say any more! You only have to look at the photos in the book to realise that there is some fundamental grief or unhappiness there. John never looks at the camera, always away to the side or down to the ground. All you need to know is that this is a beautifully written & researched book that will have you propping your eyes open so that you can read just one more chapter before you fall asleep. It's a desperately sad story, compellingly told.

Mr Standfast - John Buchan

Serendipity has led me to another book from the tbr shelves. I follow mystery writer Kerry Greenwood on Facebook & she mentioned that she thought John Buchan was an excellent novelist, much better than his contemporaries, & that Mr Standfast was the best war novel & The Three Hostages the best detective story. I have the Penguin Complete Richard Hannay on the tbr shelves so I immediately started reading Mr Standfast & it was certainly an exhilarating ride.

Richard Hannay - soldier, spy catcher, detective - is John Buchan's most famous character. He first appears in The Thirty-Nine Steps, a book that has been adapted for film & television many times since it was published in 1915. Most of the adaptations depart from the book quite a bit I've never understood why film makers do this. (Don't ever get me started on the latest Miss Marple travesties!) so I'd recommend that you read the book first so that at least you can see what they've changed. I've also read Greenmantle, the next Hannay adventure, & Mr Standfast is the third.

Mr Standfast was published in 1919 & the action takes place during WWI. Hannay has been serving with his regiment on the Western Front when he is suddenly summoned home by the War Office & given an important mission that will take him out of the front line for a while. He's not particularly happy about this & even less happy when he realises that his role will be as an anti-war peace activist. His old Intelligence boss, Bullivant, sends him off to stay at Fosse Manor near Isham to get a lead on a very dangerous man, Moxon Ivery - or at least, that's what he calls himself. Hannay has assumed his old alias, Cornelius Brand, & while at Fosse Manor, he meets Mary Lamington & falls instantly in love. Mary, however, isn't just the token love interest. She's part of Bullivant's intelligence network & is a bright, resourceful young woman who has a crucial part to play in the narrative.

Ivery is posing as one of the anti-war crowd but in reality he's a German spy sending intelligence back to Berlin through an elaborate network of informants & rendezvous in remote locations. I won't even try to describe Hannay's adventures which include dodging the police in the wilds of Scotland after getting himself involved with industrial politics in Glasgow, being trapped in a cage in an impregnable cellar in Switzerland (he shoots his way out of that one in a very surprising way) & trekking over an Alpine pass in the middle of winter in six hours. He even finds himself taking over as director of a war film & using his abilities as a commander of men to foil his pursuers. Every escapade is breathtaking & because the narrative is in the first person, we're right there with Hannay as he makes his discoveries & escapes from his enemies. In between, Hannay returns to his regiment in France & even comes across a lead on Moxon & his cronies at a chateau in Picardy.

Hannay's old friends from previous adventures are much in evidence. Blenkiron, the brash American engineer, is now high up in the Intelligence Service & he's the one who explains the background to Hannay & pulls strings for him. Peter Pienaar has joined the Royal Flying Corps & is having a wonderful time as a crack pilot until he is shot down, badly wounded & taken prisoner. The final confrontation between Hannay & Ivery (who reveals himself as the Graf von Schwabing) is a classic standoff between good & evil, highlighted by the fact that Ivery is also in love with Mary (who had been nursing in France) & planning to kidnap her & take her back to Germany. He hasn't counted on the resourcefulness of either Hannay or Mary & his eventual fate is poetic justice.

The title refers to a character in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress & the book is referred to many times by Hannay, Peter & Mary. Peter in particular becomes absorbed in Bunyan & the Bible during his imprisonment as he comes to terms with his injuries. His badly damaged leg means that he will never fly again. Peter is repatriated to Switzerland & that's where he meets up with Hannay. The scenes between the two old friends are very moving. I have to wonder though whether George Lucas had Peter in mind when he wrote the final scenes of the first Star Wars movie.  I was reminded of those scenes very strongly.  

Mr Standfast is the kind of novel that you race through without getting too bogged down in detail. So much happens so quickly that it's impossible to work it all out anyway. Buchan is always at home in Scotland & these scenes were the most vivid. The Scots characters like Andrew Amos & Geordie Hamilton just leap off the page with their humour & impenetrable dialect. I enjoyed reading Mr Standfast very much & I look forward to reading the last two Hannay novels, The Three Hostages & The Island of Sheep, very soon.

A Nurse at the Front - Edith Appleton

I usually read something connected with WWI around November & this year, it's been the diaries of WWI nurse, Edith Appleton. Her diaries have been transcribed by her great-niece & nephews & were originally available on this fascinating website. As well as the diaries, the family have included a brief biography of Edie, letters from & about her & a complete index of everyone mentioned in the diaries. More information about Edie, her colleagues & the men she nursed is being unearthed thanks to the website & the wonders of the internet. An edition of the diaries has now been published by the Imperial War Museum, edited by Ruth Cowan.

Edie was born in Kent in 1877 & by the time war broke out in 1914 had been nursing for over 10 years. She volunteered for Queen Alexandra's Imperial Nursing Service & spent the next five years nursing in France & Flanders. She kept a diary throughout her war service but, unfortunately, not all of it has survived. Hopefully they may still turn up somewhere. The diaries we do have begin in April 1915 & there's another long gap between November 1916 & June 1918. However, what we do have gives a fascinating picture of wartime nursing on the Western Front & a portrait of the dedication & courage of Edie & all the other medical staff who witnessed the horrors of war.

I've often wondered how nurses managed to keep going day after day as they saw endless convoys of wounded & dying men & struggled to help them. In Edie's case, I believe it was her love of nature & her determination to take advantage of any opportunity of getting away from the hospital in her precious time off. Wherever Edie is stationed, she swims, walks or goes for long drives alone or with her colleagues. she's interested in everything & everyone she meets.

Maxey, Truslove & I had a half day, so we walked to Bénouville in the rain and picked primroses that were hanging from the banks in yellow tufts. At Bénouville, we peeped into the church and found service in progress - so went to the café for tea of bloaters, boiled eggs, toast and tea. After tea the old woman showed us her old china and pewter. Such a nice little woman - her husband is away at the war and she was busy making herself a coat out of an old one of his. She turned the stuff and piped it with black velvet and made a strap for the waits and sleeves - very smart. March 20, 1916.

Much of Edie's work consisted of organization, routine & hard graft. She worked in Casualty Clearing Stations, mobile units that operated close to the Front & ministered to men who were brought by ambulance direct from the battlefield. Many were dead or dying by the time they arrived. They were all dirty, in pain & often in shock. Conditions & equipment were basic & often the men were on stretchers on the floor. The work could be dangerous too as troop movements were often sudden & the CCS could be ordered to move very quickly, taking wounded men with them. At other times, they were shelled by the enemy but kept working through the bombardment. Several times, staff were injured by shells & shrapnel. Once the emergency treatment was given, the men were put on convoys & sent by train and boat back to England.

Edie never knew from one day to the next how many convoys might arrive. Sometimes they were prepared for a great influx of wounded & nobody came. Other times, the wards were overflowing & the staff worked 20 hour shifts to tend to them all. If any nurses were off sick, everyone else just worked harder & longer. Sometimes it's not the demands of the war but of politics & PR that determined the workload.

We should have been taking in today, but after getting only a few ambulance-loads we were stopped - instead No 2 was taking in. This afternoon I heard why - the King is coming on Wednesday and will be taken to No 2 as it is the senior casualty clearance station here and they want to have plenty of patients in when he comes. October 25, 1915

Apart from Royal visits, the work went on. In 1918, Edie was transferred to no 3 General Hospital at Le Tréport. The hospital was in a large hotel on the coast so no more tents but the work was just as dispiriting at times.

My ward is rather a sad place just now - so full of extremely badly wounded. There is plenty of gas-gangrene and two fractured spines dying in a room which is difficult to ventilate. One feels the horrible smell in one's throat and nose all the time. Poor old things! One died yesterday - an Australian. His leg was very gangrenous and had to be taken off high up, but it was too far gone. His constant cry was to get up and go out - that he was quite all right - then about half an hour before he died he settled down and said 'I'm done. I'm dying fast.' And he was quite right. August 16, 1918

After the war, Edie was demobbed in 1919. She returned to nursing in England for a time. She & her sister bought a house on the Isle of Wight where they kept chickens & grew vegetables. Several of their siblings made their home with them. Edie married when she was 49. Her husband, Jack, was her sister's stepson & 10 years her junior. He died after only 10 years of marriage & Edie died at the age of 80 in 1958.

Edie's diary is an invaluable record of nursing in WWI. Her good humour, efficiency & dedication must have made her a valuable part of the team at all her postings. I've just finished reading Virginia Nicholson's book about women in WWII, Millions Like Us. Virginia Nicholson notes that almost all the women she interviewed, when asked why they had joined up or how they coped with the privations of war, said "We just got on with it." I think Edie's response would have been the same. She was trained to do an important job & she did it magnificently. How lucky we are to be able to read her diaries & honour her memory.

Sunday Poetry - Remembrance Day

A quiet, reflective poem for Remembrance Day. Futility by Wilfred Owen. Lest We Forget.

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds,—
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved—still warm—too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?

Sunday Poetry - Edward Thomas

One of the enduring images of WWI is the rain & mud of the trenches in France & Flanders. This poem by Edward Thomas (picture from here) isn't set in the trenches but it evokes that same feeling of desolation & loneliness. How many men & women must have lain awake in huts or tents or dugouts thinking of the possibility of their own death & hoping that their loved ones were safe?

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

Sunday Poetry - Thomas Hardy

I love this poem, Channel Firing, by Thomas Hardy (picture from here), written just months before the beginning of WWI. Hardy was in his 70s & had lived through many wars in his lifetime. He could see another war approaching & wanted to remind us that war is pointless. The perspective of a group of dead soldiers from some other war woken by gunnery practice shows that nothing ever changes. As God says, "The world is as it used to be". There's even a touch of Emily Dickinson in that opening image, "We thought it was the Judgment-Day / And sat upright." although I don't know if Hardy ever read her. And, of course, Hardy ends with references to Camelot & Stonehenge, that historical England that was so much a part of his artistic vision.

That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No;
It’s gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:

“All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

“That this is not the judgment-hour
For some of them’s a blessed thing,
For if it were they’d have to scour
Hell’s floor for so much threatening....

“Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).”

So down we lay again. “I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,”
Said one, “than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!”

And many a skeleton shook his head.
“Instead of preaching forty year,”
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
“I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

Sunday Poetry - Wilfred Owen

Remembrance Day is less than a month away & around this time of year I usually start planning some WWI reading. I thought it was time for Sunday Poetry to focus on WWI as well for the next few weeks. I've chosen one of Wilfred Owen's less well-known poems, Exposure, which describes the cold, wet, boring hell of war. Death is always a possibility but here at least, boredom & weariness is more of a problem.

Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us ...
Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent ...
Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient ...
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
But nothing happens.

Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire.
Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.
Northward incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,
Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war.
What are we doing here?

The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow ...
We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.
Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army
Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of gray,
But nothing happens.

Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.
Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow,
With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause and renew,
We watch them wandering up and down the wind's nonchalance,
But nothing happens.

II

Pale flakes with lingering stealth come feeling for our faces--
We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed,
Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,
Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.
Is it that we are dying?

Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires glozed
With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there;
For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;
Shutters and doors all closed: on us the doors are closed--
We turn back to our dying.

Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;
Now ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit.
For God's invincible spring our love is made afraid;
Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born,
For love of God seems dying.

To-night, His frost will fasten on this mud and us,
Shrivelling many hands and puckering foreheads crisp.
The burying-party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp,
Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,
But nothing happens.