From Robert's collection "Swallows in Storm and Sunlight" published by Chapman and Hall, London, 1917.
The Song of Sheffield
Written in March 1916 in the Trenches near Bertrancourt.
Shells, shells, shells!
The song of the city of steel;
Hammer and turn, and file,
Furnace, and latahe, and wheel.
Tireless machinery,
Man’s ingenuity,
Making a way for the martial devil’s meal.
Shells, shells, shells,
Out of the furnace blaze;
Roll, roll, roll,
Into the workshop’s maze.
Ruthless machinery
Boring eternally,
Boring a hole for the shattering charge that
stays.
Shells, shells, shells!
The song of the city of steel;
List to the devil’s mirth,
Hark to their laughters’ peal:
Sheffield’s machinery
Crushing humanity
Neath devil-ridden death’s impassive heel.
No Man’s Land
Written after reading a Battalion Order a week before his death -
‘A Patrol will leave tonight to examine gap in German wire…’
Nine-Thirty o’clock? Then over the top,
And mind to keep down when you see the flare
Of Very pistol searching the air.
Now, over you get; look out for the wire
In the borrow pit, and the empty tins,
They are meant for the Hun to bark his shins.
So keep well down and reserve your fire –
All over?
Right : there’s a gap just here
In the corkscrew wire, so just follow me;
If you keep well down there’s nothing to fear.
. .
. . .
. . . .
Then out we creep thro’ the gathering gloom
Of NO MAN’S LAND, while the big guns boom
Right over our heads, and the rapid crack
Of the Lewis guns is answered back
By the German barking the same refrain
Of crack, crack, crack, all over again.
To the wistful eye from the parapet,
In the smiling sun of a summer’s day,
‘Twere a sin to believe that a bloody death
In those waving grasses lurking lay.
But now, ‘neath the Very’s fitful flares
“Keep still, my lads, and freeze like hares; -
All right, carry on, for we’re out to enquire
If our friend the Hun’s got a gap in his wire;
And he hasn’t invited us out, you see,
So lift up your feet and follow me.”
. .
. . .
. . . .
Then, silent, we press with a noiseless tread
Thro’ no man’s land, but the sightless dead;
Aye, muffle your footsteps, well ye may,
For the mouldering corpses here decay
Whom no man owns but the King abhorred,
Grim Pluto, Stygia’s over-lord.
Oh breathe a prayer for the sightless Dead
Who have bitten the dust ‘neath the biting lead
Of the pitiless hail of the Maxim’s fire,
‘Neath the wash of shell in the well trod mire.
Ah well!
But we’ve, too, got a job to be done,
For we’ve come to the wire of our friend, the
Hun.
“Now, keep well down, lads; can you see any gap?”
. .
. . .
. . . .
Not much, well the reference is wrong in the
map”
So homeward we go thro’ the friendly night.
That covers the NO MAN’S LAND from sight,
As muttering a noiseless prayer of praise,
We drop from the parapet into the bays.
Note: The
MAXIM machine gun or ‘recoil operated’ gun was invented in 1883 by Sir Hiram
Stevens Maxim, a naturalised British (1900), American-born inventor.
VERY Lights were flares, fired from a pistol
and sent up at night to show the way.
Invented by Edward Wilson Very, an American naval officer.
Billets
Written on 14th August 1916
Green fields that are scented and sweet,
God’s sunshine, the air, and the trees,
Thy beauties we knew not before,
They were there, and who doubts them that sees?
But we, who bereft for a space
Of the joys that God meant us to share,
Have been living ‘mid sandbags, and scorched
Without shade from the sun’s ceaseless glare.
Great God!
How to welcome the day
When the Trenches are left, and the trees
Promise hopes of a respite from heat,
And from breath-stifling odours release.
For how long?
Just four days is the span:
And how fleeting yet heav’n born it seems –
Then again to the Trenches, our goal
And to plan for the Peace of our dreams.
