Lecture
Six
War
Poetry
We d gained our first objective hours
before
While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,
Pallid, unshaved and thirsty, blind with smoke.
Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,
With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed,
And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.
The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.
And then the rain began,— the jolly old rain!
A yawning soldier knelt against the bank,
Staring across the morning blear with fog;
He wondered when the Allemands would get busy;
And then, of course, they started with five-nines
Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud.
Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst
Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell,
While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke.
He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear,
Sick for escape,— loathing the strangled horror
And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.
An officer came blundering down the trench:
Stand-to and man the fire-step! On he went...
Gasping and bawling, Fire- step...counter-attack!
Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right
Down the old sap: machine- guns on the left;
And stumbling figures looming out in front.
O Christ, they re coming at us! Bullets spat,
And he remembered his rifle...rapid fire...
And started blazing wildly...then a bang
Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out
To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked
And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,
Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans...
Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,
Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.
1929. Sassoon, the English novelist and
poet who, after serving as an officer in World War I, expressed his conviction
of the brutality and waste of war in his grim, forceful, realistic verse. He is
also known for his three-volume fictional autobiography, at first published
anonymously under the title The Memoirs of George Sherston. Memoirs of a Fox
Hunting Man is the first volume in the trilogy and gives a particularly vivid
evocation of the life of the English country gentry before World War I.
Contents: Early Days; The Flower Show Match; A Fresh Start; A Day with the
Potford; At the Rectory; The Colonel s Cup; Denis Milden as Master; Migration
to the Midlands; In the Army; and At the Front. See other titles by this author
available from Kessinger Publishing.
About the Author
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC (8
September 1886 - 1 September 1967) was an English poet and author. He became
known as a writer of satirical anti-war verse during World War I. He later won
acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised
autobiography, collectively known as the "Sherston Trilogy". --This
text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
The
book Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried Sassoon
(author) is published or distributed by Obscure Press [1846641136,
9781846641138]. This particular edition was published on or around 2006-01-31
date. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man has Paperback binding and this format has
396 number of pages of content for use. This book by Siegfried Sassoon,
Siegfried Sassoon is written in English language.