CONSCRIPTS
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Fall in, that awkward squad, and strike no more"Attractive attitudes! Dress by the right!"The luminous rich colours that you wore"Have changed to hueless khaki in the night."Magic? What's magic got to do with you?"There's no such thing! Blood's red and skies are blue." They gasped and sweated, marching up and down.I drilled them till they cursed my raucous shout.Love chucked his lute away and dropped his crown.Rhyme got sore heels and wanted to fall out."Left, right! Press on your butts!" They looked at meReproachful; how I longed to set them free! I gave them lectures on Defence, Attack;They fidgeted and shuffled, yawned and sighed,And boggled at my questions. Joy was slack,And Wisdom gnawed his fingers, gloomy-eyed.Young Fancy--how I loved him all the while--Stared at his note-book with a rueful smile. Their training done, I shipped them all to France.Where most of those I'd loved too well got killed.Rapture and pale Enchantment and Romance,And many a sickly, slender lord who'd filledMy soul long since with litanies of sin.Went home, because they couldn't stand the din. But the kind, common ones that I despised,(Hardly a man of them I'd count as friend),What stubborn-hearted virtues they disguised!They stood and played the hero to the end,Won gold and silver medals bright with bars,And marched resplendent home with crowns and stars. This book (in consequence almost wholly of thesebitter poems) enjoyed a remarkable success with thesoldiers fighting in France. One met it everywhere."Hello, you know Siegfried Sassoon then, do you?Well, tell him from me that the more he lays it on thickto those who don't realize the war the better. That'sthe stuff we want. We're fed up with the old men'sdeath-or-glory stunt." In 1918 appeared 'Countermans'Attack': here there is hardly a trace of the 'paradise'feeling. You can't even think of paradise when you'rein hell. For Sassoon was now well along the way ofthorns. How many lives had he not seen spilled apparentlyto no purpose? Did not the fact of war archhim in like a dirty blood-red sky? He breaks out,almost like a mad man, into imprecations, intovehement tirades, into sarcasms, ironies, the hellishlaughters that arise from a heart that is not brokenonce for all but that is newly broken every day whilethe Monster that devours the lives of the youngcontinues its ravages. Take, for instance, the magnificent'To Any Dead Officer', written just before Americaentered the war. Many reading this poem would thinkGreat Britain was going to cease fighting. But nothingof the sort. One must always remember that bitteras these imprecations are against those who mismanagedcertain episodes in the war, the ultimate foeis not they but the German Junkers who planned thiswar for forty years, who have given the lovely earthover to hideous defilement and the youths of all nationsto carnage... Sometimes in this book Sassoon fails to express himselfproperly. This fact is, I think, a tribute to hissincerity. For his earlier work very clearly displayshis technical proficiency. But here what can he do?Indignation chokes and strangles him. He claws oftenenough at unsatisfactory words, dislocates hissentences, tumbles out his images as if he would pulp themakers of war beneath them. Very rarely does heattain to the poignant simplicity of 'The HawthornTree' or the detached irony of 'Does it Matter?' Can he then see nothing else in war? I rememberhim once turning to me and saying suddenly aproposof certain exalté poems in my 'Ardours andEndurances': 'Yes, I see all that and I agree withyou, Robert. War has made me. I think I am a man nowas well as a poet. You have said the things wellenough. Now let us nevermore say another word ofwhatever little may be good in war for the individualwho has a heart to be steeled.' I remember I nodded, for further acquaintance withwar inclines me to his opinion. 'Let no one ever,' he continued, 'from henceforthsay a word in any way countenancing war. It is dangerouseven to speak of how here and there the individualmay gain some hardship of soul by it. For waris hell and those who institute it are criminals. Werethere anything to say for it, it should not be said forits spiritual disasters far outweigh any of its advantages.' For myself this is the truth. War doesn't ennoble:it degrades. The words of Barbusse placed at the beginningof this book should be engraved over the doorsof every war office of every State in the world. While war is a possibility man is little better thana savage and civilisation the mere moments of restbetween a succession of nightmares. It is to help toend this horror that Siegfried Sassoon and the manyothers who feel like him have continued to fight asafter the publication of this book he fought in Palestineand in France. You civilized persons who read this book not only asa poet but as a soldier I beg of you not to turn from it.Read it again and again till its words become part ofyour consciousness. It was written by a man for mankind'ssake, that 'that which is humane' might no more be anempty phrase, that the words of Blake might blossomto a new meaning-- Thou art a man, God is no more,Thine own humanity learn to adore. New York City,Nov. 20th-23rd.ROBERT NICHOLS. PRELUDE: THE TROOPS Dim, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloomShudders to drizzling daybreak that revealsDisconsolate men who stamp their sodden bootsAnd turn dulled, sunken faces to the skyHaggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten downThe stale despair of night, must now renewTheir desolation in the truce of dawn,Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace. Yet these, who cling to life with stubborn hands,Can grin through storms of death and find a gapIn the clawed, cruel tangles of his defence.They march from safety, and the bird-sung joyOf grass-green thickets, to the land where allIs ruin, and nothing blossoms but the skyThat hastens over them where they endureSad, smoking, flat horizons, reeking woods,And foundered trench-lines volleying doom for doom. O my brave brown companions, when your soulsFlock silently away, and the eyeless deadShame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,Death will stand grieving in that field of warSince your unvanquished hardihood is spent.And through some mooned Valhalla there will passBattalions and battalions, scarred from hell;The unreturning army that was youth;The legions who have suffered and are dust.
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