HIGH WOOD
by Philip Johnston (1918) Ladies and gentlemen, this is High Wood,   
Called by the French, Bois des Furneaux,   
The famous spot which in Nineteen-Sixteen,   
July, August and September was the scene   
Of long and bitterly contested strife,   
By reason of its High commanding site.   
Observe the effect of shell-fire in the trees   
Standing and fallen; here is wire; this trench   
For months inhabited, twelve times changed hands;   
(They soon fall in), used later as a grave.   
It has been said on good authority   
That in the fighting for this patch of wood   
Were killed somewhere above eight thousand men,   
Of whom the greater part were buried here,   
This mound on which you stand being.... Madame, please,   
You are requested kindly not to touch   
Or take away the Company's property   
As souvenirs; you'll find we have on sale   
A large variety, all guaranteed.   
As I was saying, all is as it was,   
This is an unknown British officer,   
The tunic having lately rotted off.   
Please follow me - this way ..... the path, sir, please,   
The ground which was secured at great expense   
The Company keeps absolutely untouched,   
And in that dug-out (genuine) we provide   
Refreshments at a reasonable rate.   
You are requested not to leave about   
Paper, or ginger-beer bottles, or orange peel,   
There are waste-paper baskets at the gate ARGUMENT Herbert Read In the early days of November 1918, the Allied Forces had for some days been advancing in pursuit of the retreating German Army. The advance was being carried out according to a schedule. Each division was given a line to which it must attain before nightfall; and this meant that each battalion in a division had to reach a certain point by a certain time. The schedule was in general being well adhered to, but the opposition encountered varied considerably at different points. On November 10th, a certain English battalion had been continuously harassed by machine-gun fire, and late in the afternoon was still far from its objective. Advancing under cover, it reached the edge of a plantation from which stretched a wide open space of cultivated land, with a village in front about 500 yards away. The officer in charge of the scouts was sent ahead with a corporal and two men to reconnoitre, and this little party reached the outskirts of the village without observing any signs of occupation. At the entrance of the village, propped against a tree, they found a German officer, wounded severely in the thigh. He was quite conscious and looked up calmly at Lieut. S------ approached him. He spoke English, and when questioned, intimated that the village had been evacuated by the Germans two hours before. Thereupon Lieut. S------ signalled back to the battalion, who then advanced along the road in marching formation. It was nearly dusk when they reached the small place in front of the church, and there they were halted. Immediately from several points, but chiefly from the tower of the church, a number of machine-guns opened fire on the massed men. A wild cry went up, and the men fled in rage and terror to the shelter of the houses, leaving a hundred of their companions and five officers dead or dying on the pavement. In the houses and the church they routed out the ambushed Germans and mercilessly bayoneted them. The corporal who had been with Lieut. S------ ran to the entrance of the village, to settle with the wounded officer who had betrayed them. The German seemed to be expecting him; his face did not flinch as the bayonet descended. When the wounded had been attended to, and the dead gathered together, the remaining men retired to the schoolhouse to rest for the night. The officers went to the chateau of the village, and there in a gardener’s cottage, searching for fuel, the corporal already mentioned found a naked body of a young girl. Both legs were severed, and one severed arm was found in another room. The body itself was covered with bayonet wounds. When the discovery was reported to Lieut. S------, he went to verify the strange crime, but there was nothing to be done; he was, moreover, sick and tired. He found a bed in another cottage near the chateau, where some old peasants were still cowering behind a screen. He fell into a deep sleep, and did not wake until the next morning, the 11th of November 1918 The Great War by Vernon Scannell (b.1922) Whenever war is spoken of
I find
The war that was called Great invades the mind:
The grey militia marches over land
A darker mood of grey
Where fractured tree-trunks stand
And shells, exploding, open sudden fans
Of smoke and earth.
Blind murders scythe
The deathscape where the iron brambles writhe;
The sky at night
Is honoured with rosettes of fire,
Flares that define the corpses on the wire
As terror ticks on wrists at zero hour.
These things I see,
But they are only part
Of what it is that slyly probes the heart:
Less vivid images and words excite
The sensuous memory
And, even as I write,
Fear and a kind of love collaborate
To call each simple conscript up
For quick inspection:
Trenches' parapets
Paunchy with sandbags; bandoliers, tin-hats.
Candles in dugouts,
Duckboards, mud and rats.
Then, like patrols, tunes creep into the mind:
A long, long trail, The Rose of No-Man's Land,
Home Fire and Tipperary:
And through the misty keening of a band
Of Scottish pipes the proper names are heard
Like fateful commentary of distant guns:
Passchendaele, Bapaume, and Loos, and Mons.
And now,
Whenever the November sky
Quivers with a bugle's hoarse, sweet cry,
The reason darkens; in its evening gleam
Crosses and flares, tormented wire, grey earth
Splattered with crimson flowers,
And I remember,
Not the war I fought in
But the one called Great
Which ended in a sepia November
Four years before my birth.