Counter-Attack and Other Poems | Page 3

cease fighting. But nothing
of the
sort. One must always remember that bitter
as these imprecations are
against those who mismanaged
certain episodes in the war, the
ultimate foe
is not they but the German Junkers who planned this

war for forty years, who have given the lovely earth
over to hideous
defilement and the youths of all nations
to carnage...
Sometimes in this book Sassoon fails to express himself
properly.
This fact is, I think, a tribute to his
sincerity. For his earlier work very
clearly displays
his technical proficiency. But here what can he do?

Indignation chokes and strangles him. He claws often
enough at
unsatisfactory words, dislocates his
sentences, tumbles out his images
as if he would pulp the
makers of war beneath them. Very rarely does
he
attain to the poignant simplicity of 'The Hawthorn
Tree' or the
detached irony of 'Does it Matter?'
Can he then see nothing else in war? I remember

him once turning to
me and saying suddenly apropos
of certain exalté poems in my

'Ardours and
Endurances': 'Yes, I see all that and I agree with
you,
Robert. War has made me. I think I am a man now
as well as a poet.
You have said the things well
enough. Now let us nevermore say
another word of
whatever little may be good in war for the individual

who has a heart to be steeled.'
I remember I nodded, for further acquaintance with
war inclines me
to his opinion.
'Let no one ever,' he continued, 'from henceforth
say a word in any
way countenancing war. It is dangerous
even to speak of how here
and there the individual
may gain some hardship of soul by it. For
war
is hell and those who institute it are criminals. Were
there
anything to say for it, it should not be said for
its 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 beginning
of this book should be
engraved over the doors
of every war office of every State in the
world.
While war is a possibility man is little better than
a savage and
civilisation the mere moments of rest
between a succession of
nightmares. It is to help to
end this horror that Siegfried Sassoon and
the many
others who feel like him have continued to fight as
after
the publication of this book he fought in Palestine
and in France.
You civilized persons who read this book not only as
a poet but as a
soldier I beg of you not to turn from it.
Read it again and again till its
words become part of
your consciousness. It was written by a man for
mankind's
sake, that 'that which is humane' might no more be an

empty phrase, that the words of Blake might blossom
to 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 gloom
Shudders to drizzling
daybreak that reveals
Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden
boots
And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky
Haggard and
hopeless. They, who have beaten down
The stale despair of night,
must now renew
Their 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 gap
In the clawed, cruel tangles of his
defence.
They march from safety, and the bird-sung joy
Of
grass-green thickets, to the land where all
Is ruin, and nothing
blossoms but the sky
That hastens over them where they endure

Sad, smoking, flat horizons, reeking woods,
And foundered
trench-lines volleying doom for doom.
O my brave brown companions, when your souls
Flock silently away,
and the eyeless dead
Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,

Death will stand grieving in that field of war
Since your
unvanquished hardihood is spent.
And through some mooned
Valhalla there will pass
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;

The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have
suffered and are dust.
COUNTER-ATTACK
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