21 quotes
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom.
Everyone Sang (1919)
Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Collected Poems (1949)
Let no one ever, from henceforth say one word in any way countenancing war.
Robert Nichols in his introduction to The Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.
Collected Poems (1949)
Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land,
Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
The Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
The Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)
"Be reasonable, Master. Isn't the world round, and we all on it?"
Sherston's Progress (1936)
O martyred youth and manhood overthrown,
The burden of your wrongs is on my head.
The Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.
The Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)
Selfless and ardent, resolute and gay,
So in this hour, in strange survival stands
Your ghost, whom I am powerless to repay.
Collected Poems (1949)
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.
The Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)
Mud and rain and wretchedness and blood.
Why should jolly soldier-boys complain?
God made these before the roofless Flood -
Mud and rain.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.
I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.
A Soldier's Declaration (1917)
The visionless officialized fatuity
That once kept Europe safe for Perpetuity.
If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line of death.
The Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)
Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride
'Their name liveth for evermore' the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.
Collected Poems (1949)
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.
The Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)
I'd say — "I used to know his father well;
Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap."
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I'd toddle safely home and die — in bed.
The Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)
I must add that in the light of subsequent events it is difficult to believe that a Peace negotiated in 1917 would have been permanent. I share the general opinion that nothing on earth would have prevented a recurrence of Teutonic aggressiveness.