The Glory of the Trenches

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Glory of the Trenches, by
Coningsby Dawson
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.
Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how
the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since
1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of
Volunteers!*****
Title: The Glory of the Trenches
Author: Coningsby Dawson
Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7515]
[This file was first
posted on May 13, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO Latin-1
0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE GLORY

OF THE TRENCHES ***
Tiffany Vergon, Brendan Lane, Edward Johnson, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team
THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES
AN INTERPRETATION
by
CONINGSBY DAWSON
Author of "CARRY ON: LETTERS IN WARTIME," etc.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HIS FATHER, W. J. DAWSON
"The glory is all in the souls of the men--it's nothing external." --From
"Carry On"
1917
[Illustration: LIEUTENANT CONINGSBY DAWSON]
TO YOU AT HOME
Each night we panted till the runners came,
Bearing your letters
through the battle-smoke.
Their path lay up Death Valley spouting
flame,
Across the ridge where the Hun's anger spoke
In bursting
shells and cataracts of pain;
Then down the road where no one goes
by day,
And so into the tortured, pockmarked plain
Where dead
men clasp their wounds and point the way.
Here gas lurks
treacherously and the wire
Of old defences tangles up the feet;

Faces and hands strain upward through the mire,
Speaking the
anguish of the Hun's retreat.
Sometimes no letters came; the evening
hate
Dragged on till dawn. The ridge in flying spray
Of hissing
shrapnel told the runners' fate;
We knew we should not hear from you
that day--
From you, who from the trenches of the mind
Hurl back

despair, smiling with sobbing breath,
Writing your souls on paper to
be kind,
That you for us may take the sting from Death.
CONTENTS
TO YOU AT HOME. (Poem)
HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN
IN HOSPITAL. (Poem)
THE ROAD TO BLIGHTY
THE LADS AWAY. (Poem)
THE GROWING OF THE VISION
THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES. (Poem)
GOD AS WE SEE HIM
HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN
In my book, The Father of a Soldier, I have already stated the
conditions under which this book of my son's was produced.
He was wounded in the end of June, 1917, in the fierce struggle before
Lens. He was at once removed to a base-hospital, and later on to a
military hospital in London. There was grave danger of amputation of
the right arm, but this was happily avoided. As soon as he could use his
hand he was commandeered by the Lord High Commissioner of
Canada to write an important paper, detailing the history of the
Canadian forces in France and Flanders. This task kept him busy until
the end of August, when he obtained a leave of two months to come
home. He arrived in New York in September, and returned again to
London in the end of October.
The plan of the book grew out of his conversations with us and the
three public addresses which he made. The idea had already been

suggested to him by his London publisher, Mr. John Lane. He had
written a few hundred words, but had no very keen sense of the value
of the experiences he had been invited to relate. He had not even read
his own published letters in Carry On. He said he had begun to read
them when the book reached him in the trenches, but they made him
homesick, and he was also afraid that his own estimate of their value
might not coincide with ours, or with the verdict which the public has
since passed upon them. He regarded his own experiences, which we
found so thrilling, in the same spirit of modest depreciation. They were
the commonplaces of the life which he had led, and he was sensitive
lest they should be regarded as improperly heroic. No one was more
astonished than he when he found great throngs eager to hear him
speak. The people assembled an hour before the advertised time, they
stormed the building as soon as the doors were open, and when every
inch of room was packed they found a way in by