Part 1
SONNETS FROM A PRISON CAMP
SONNETS FROM A PRISON CAMP
BY ARCHIBALD ALLAN BOWMAN
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, W. NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMXIX
_Printed in Great Britain by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh_
FOREWORD
For allowing this slight volume to see the light of day I have but one excuse to offer. The situation to which these verses are the emotional reaction represents a very real and serious piece of experience. It is no mere poetical exaggeration to say that in the first days of captivity at least, the writing of the sonnets was a labour that “stood between my soul and madness,” and I cannot help feeling that what, under one of the heaviest blows that can befall a soldier, has meant so much to me, may have in it something that will raise it at times above the personal to the level of general human interest.
It ought to be a pleasure to acknowledge generosity in an enemy; and I wish to express my indebtedness to Captain Hohnholz, Commandant of the Prison-Camp at Hesepe, to whose kindness I owe it that I am able to offer the sonnets as they stand for publication.
Offizier--Gefangenenlager HESEPE, _17th August 1918_
PROEM
He who hath never from behind toothed wire Glimpsed, helpless, freedom’s waiting amplitude, Hath never watched, fast rooted where he stood The embers of another day expire In glory welling westward, like the pyre Of some spent viking whom the Atlantic flood Bears dwindling into that infinitude That great souls end in; then around the fire Of his own musings, lodering through the bars Of a shrunk life, hath sought awhile to limn His lost felicity--can ne’er divine The vastness of the common things that line Life’s banked horizon, nor hath learned to rim Infinity with galaxies of stars.
RASTATT, _26th April 1918_
CONTENTS
PAGE
IN THE FIELD 1
THE NADIR 19
ON THE MARCH 23
RASTATT 33
HESEPE 45
THOUGHTS OF HOME 55
INFLUENCES 63
WATCHWORDS AND MAXIMS 91
ENGLAND AND OXFORD 107
HOME THOUGHTS ONCE MORE 117
INTERLUDE 123
ENGLAND 129
SONNETS FROM A PRISON CAMP
IN THE FIELD
I
Two hours before the mist of morning paled Beneath a sun that never showed his flame, And spectral day stole on the world with shame, Into the night unsentinelled there sailed The whistling murder, sudden. Sudden wailed Shrapnel, and breaking cloud, began to claim Window and tile down clattering from the frame Into the littered causeway. Dreamers quailed, And propped themselves to listen, or rising, crept From corridors by fitful candle; then Gathered scared children down the winding stair, And only whispers passed where no one slept. And thought drew rein, surmising wildly, when The guns spoke murder over doomed Estaires.
RASTATT, _27th April_
II
“Stand to!” The warning word was hardly said, And had not moved a man, when round and round Forthwith the steaming kettles came to ground, And the men swarmed to dip their hasty bread, A soldier’s morning bite. Still overhead Murder flew hurtling, shell by shell, and found Earth in some rearward purlieu, quenched in sound. Breakfast began, but not a man was fed Ere the growled “Fall in” menacingly proved The dog’s bone kinsman to a soldier’s meal. We mustered, lowering, hungry. The ranks grew; And it was seen the world again had moved, As at the impulse of a groaning wheel, Unto some issue, from that first “Stand to!”
RASTATT, _27th April_
III
Unto some issue, Whither? No one dreamed What menace crouched behind that bankèd mist, Massing to bear down on us. No one wist What power that shrapnel covered as it screamed Futilely overhead. Scarce more it seemed Than many a day had happed, of trials the least, Vexatious interruption of a feast, A broken night, a day spoiled ere it gleamed. But still the thickening barrage combed the air; Still whistling shrapnel sputtered into smoke; And momently the cobbled roadway shook With sickening thud where freighted monsters took The earth with double thunder. Here and there Blood trickled into hollows. No one spoke.
RASTATT, _27th April_
IV
The bridge across the Lys! A slender thread To bind or bar thy holders to their own; But one span, small and narrow, lightly thrown Over these sullen waters, lightly shed. Upon thy planks the heavy-booted tread Of men who seemed with sudden trouble grown Haggard. “What are you?” “Durhams.” “What is known?” “Our billet down, our officers are dead. We seek a new position further on.” Position! Little recked they then how steep The way, how sure the ending. They were gone, And the keen harvester prepared to reap In fresh fields. The mourne blanket of the dawn Gathered the Durhams to eternal sleep.
RASTATT, _28th April_
V
The Church of Nouveau Monde! Lead on. ’Tis there We concentrate. There hung in the void street A local silence, which our sudden feet With lesser clangour startled in its lair, While, strangely, not the brood that racked the air Could break the boding hush of that retreat. So in a thunder-storm the quickened beat Of one’s own startled pulses may impair The silence of a room which the onfall Of shafted noise o’erhead left deadly still. Perchance the mind doth place as on some plan The figured sounds which figured space do fill, Far or more near. ’Tis sure the hodding van Broke forward into silence virginal.
RASTATT, _29th April_
VI
Waiting! A soldier’s sacrament of strain, The eager cup of poising destiny, That may not pass from him till it is dry, And Death with peace, or Life unveils with pain. Full many in this demented play must drain That cup but once. Full many a soul must try Its sharpness, till numbed sense hath lost the lie Of a life’s landscape, smitten from the brain. Then in a falling twilight of the mind Their way into that temple oft they grope, Where from the true, strong human hand doth slip Life’s vesture of live colours, meaning, hope, Purpose and fear, leaving dumb wont behind, While the word “Fate” drops dreaming from the lip.
RASTATT, _29th April_
VII
What of our comrades in the forward post? The fog of war but deepened with the day. We knew that in that troubled ocean lay Uncharted shoals, blind rocks, and treacherous coast. And what of yonder never-ending host Of wan, unwounded Portuguese? Ah, stay, Pale sergeant. Do you bleed? You came that way? What is the tidings? Is the front line lost? “Nothing is known of posts that lie before Laventie. At the cross-roads hellish fire Has cut them off who shouldered the first load.” Can they live through it? “They can not retire, Nor can you reinforce. I know no more But this. No living thing comes down that road.”
RASTATT, _30th April_
VIII
Still waiting! And the oozing hours have crept The morning out in vapour shot with fire, That struck now here now there in random ire Bloodily something human down, yet kept Alone stagnation at arm’s length. Men leapt Suddenly to their feet, smit with a dire Surmise, collapsed, and huddled in the mire. No whisper passed. Some seemed as though they slept. Only the stolid bearers wound about, Shouldering their still and dabbled burdens white; Or sharply a familiar voice rang out, Comfortingly peremptory: “All right? Then keep together. Lie low. Do not doubt. The hour will surely come when we shall fight.”
RASTATT, _29th April_
IX
Does the first softening of the season break The winter of Glenogle? Do the sighs Of wooing spring bid curling brackens rise On hillsides out of nothing for love’s sake? How sweet it is to think that harebells shake Over Green Lowther, where the shadow lies Far in the Enterkin, beneath blue skies; In trance to see the catkined willows quake, Where April stirs along Loch Lomond side; To watch the sands of Morar gently take The Atlantic swell that softly combs the Isles; And through the gorgeous portals of the Clyde To hear at dawn the thudding paddle wake The ever-brooding silence of the Kyles.
RASTATT, _29th April_
X
There is a stillness in the heart of sound, How dire soever, if unloosed too long. There is a time for pause in every song, And in the whirling cyclone’s heady round A core of peace. So the taut soul is bound With iron girdle, and with leathern thong To the acute wheel of the sense’s wrong Only until the creaking spring is wound. Then softening come sweet phantoms of far things, Peopling the vacancy with joys unspent, And visions of fair spaces left behind, As if the genius of the place had wings, And in the migratory hour were sent To haunt awhile the silence of the mind.
RASTATT, _30th April_
XI
Back from it, back! The quelling mandate rang, As the mad moment swooped upon the dream. Straight heathered hillside, mountain, loch, and stream Flashed out of sight, and but the shrapnel sang, And greater guns with stunning double clang Rocked the earth under us. It well might seem All hell was in the air--not without gleam Of hope, the worst might prove the final pang. Men crouched together, shaken as they took That presence far too massive for their fear, A quivering sense that something tidal welled Over their perfect helplessness, and shook The core of being; yet that being held. We knew a limber clattered to the rear.
RASTATT, _30th April_
XII
’Twixt Nouveau Monde and Laventie there lies A breastwork, where the clearing tempest found Tossed remnants of the cyclone come to ground, Part English, Portuguese in part. The skies Brightened, the housing spirit to entice Into the air; the string its length unwound, And nightmare, having pinioned, now unbound Our helplessness. The hour had come to rise. Alas, the lifting battle-fog proclaimed The line was gone, with those who bore the brunt. Our comrades, whom the fierce Valkyries claimed, Closing upon them in the bloody hunt; And Verey lights at hand too well explained The long and boding silence of the front.
RASTATT, _30th April_
XIII
Gray figures stealing, and a headlong dash From hedge to house, from house again to hedge, And fifty rifles levelled on the ledge! One instant on the aim, and then, the crash! He went to earth, and vanished in a flash. And there once more was house, and there was hedge, With sprouting field, and farm, and ditch with sedge, And crop-head pollard row and leafless ash-- A cheerless landscape gray, and the profound Loneliness of the battlefield. The next Moment trench-mortar shells were on our head; Another, and the day was sealed and fixed On front and flank. Among the stricken dead, One in the skull, behind, his summons found.
RASTATT, _1st May_
XIV
--Found it behind, while yet his soul was set And his eyes eager with the death he planned For his foe forward, where he stood and manned His gun upon the roaring parapet. We knew the sign, the closing of the net, The baying of the pack on every hand, Terror of isolation. Still it fanned Some flame within. We were not conquered yet. Circled with unseen fire, we only heard The bullets whistle round us, only saw The solitude of battle. Nothing stirred. And yet, unseen, we felt his forces draw Upon us, earthed at length where earth had lured Treacherously to cover. We endured.
RASTATT, _1st May_
XV
A man dashed in among us and caught breath. A sergeant, resolute and silent, one That we who knew him trusted. He had run As men run only in the face of death, Yet had not fled. What is it that he saith? “The game is all but up, the end begun. Live men we shall not see another sun. Laventie North has fallen, a feast of death. ’Tis your turn, sir. Your left is in the air, And through the breach, five hundred yards away, His fours have marched on Sailly and Estaires.” Column of fours? No! Then God save the day! These breastwork trenches!--’Twas as if there snapped Some devilish mechanism on us--trapped!
RASTATT, _30th April_
XVI
How it befel?--The overreaching arm, Bombs; and he was among us. In his plan Surprise completed what surprise began. The treacherous shelter of a too-near farm, A ditch along a road, a false alarm, Thirty yards of the open; in the van A desperado running--How he ran!-- And the pack had us. Hands up and disarm! --It is the end of all, the bitter end, The unpardonable, though ineluctable, A breach in life no living now will mend; The sin that sinned not; fell not, yet a fall. One thought burned in the brain: How dear it cost England to gain what I this day have lost!
RASTATT, _1st May_
THE NADIR
I
There is no moment in the life of man More potent to subdue the stuff that binds His manhood into one than that which finds The work the founders of his race began, And centuries enlarged, until its span Encompasses a nation, bodies, minds And institutions, scattered to the winds Out of his life, of which it held the plan. And with the sense of something sacred sold, His heritage, and branded with the crime Against the ages, from the lowest pit, Gathered for judgment meet, his eyes behold, Tier after tier upon the banks of time, The generations of his fathers sit.
RASTATT, _1st May_
II
One moment and his reeling world has rolled Back into ages now no longer fit For human dwelling. Here exalted sit The cruel strong, and, with the cunning bold, Possess the meek’s inheritance, and hold The good man in subjection--ages knit With blood and iron, and with arson lit, Crusted with murder, wanton, fierce and cold. And England, who so mightily championeth That freedom forced from us (our guards were met, And we went, speechless--to a living death) --England--a new light breaking on me, set My brain aworking--England lives! The breath That moment spared I hold for England yet!
RASTATT, _1st May_
ON THE MARCH
I
Never wound cortège more exceeding slow, Nor mourners to more melancholy tones, Than that wan wending, musicked by the moans Of wounded men, whom pity bade us show That much of tenderness. Nor friend nor foe Spoke in the heavy language of these groans, But stark mankind, whose utter anguish owns A common nature, in a common woe. Full many a mile of weary footing sore, By miry side tracks, not unkindly led; And each unwounded man his burden bore On stretcher or in blanket, ransacked bed, Duck-board uprooted, hand-cart, unhinged door. We left behind the dying and the dead.
RASTATT, _2nd May_
II
Hour followed hour, and slowly on we wound, Till wan day turned to front the gradual west; And with day’s waning waned the dream of rest For the worn bearers, whom the twilight found Voyaging no-man’s gray, wide-watered ground, Their shoulders bowed and aching backs distressed; Isthmused between deep pools, and sorely pressed To foot the flanks of many a slippery mound; While floundering convoys, till the light was gone, Across the perilous space their drivers nurse, Limber and gun, by frighted horses drawn, Whose plunging swerve that bogged their burdens worse, Provoked Teutonic fury, well laid on With sounding whipcord and sonorous curse.
RASTATT, _2nd May_
III
And darkness fell, and a great void of space, As if to bar our further going on, Unfeatured, huge, gloomed o’er us. No light shone. Strength, too, scarce held sufficient now to trace The squalid reaches of this dismal place; And silence settled near and far upon That vacancy at length--our last guide gone. Night hid each from his comrade, face from face. As is a voyage through the uncharted waste Of seas, unpiloted by any star, Alone, unmooned, uncomforted, unplanned; So forward still in silent pain we paced, Nor light of moon nor pharos gleamed from far Across the boding gloom of that lost land.
RASTATT, _3rd May_
IV
We came to Aubers at the dead of night, And found the semblance of that circled hell, Which Dante once, damnation’s pains to tell, Paced out in darkness, agony and fright. In that blank lazarette no kindly light On bending form of nurse or surgeon fell, But darkness and barred doors proclaimed too well The piteous end of long-endured plight. No room was there in stable or in stall, Nor roof to shelter cattle while they eat, Where wounded men could shelter from the blight Of the foul dew that drizzling covered all. But in the open and the squelching street We left them to endure the drenching night.
RASTATT, _3rd May_
V
There is a garden where the whispering breeze Perchance has wooed the lilacs in the spring, Where still perchance at dawn a few birds sing, And love goes nesting in the willow-trees. But night’s ear now caught other sounds than these, And darkness, bending, shrouded with his wing What from an iceberg scalding tears might wring, The glowing core of any furnace freeze. Thick as the crimsoned leaves of autumn fall, And crimsoned, too, and torn, and crushed as they (’Twas the wet hand that told it) over all, Moaning and writhing in their pain they lay; And none to turn their faces to the wall, And none to close their eyes, and none to pray.
RASTATT, _4th May_
VI
So where the wide and shallow beaches bound The ceaseless moiling of the North Sea hoar, And on the sands the rounding billows pour Their majesty of waters to the ground; As one by one the rising breakers pound The beaten salt sands of the yeasty shore, Their bursting charges’ momentary roar Dies in a background of prevailing sound-- Thus hour by hour the moaning did prevail Over night’s stillness, rose, and swelled, and died In the sad level of a murmuring wail, Like ocean’s moan with voices multiplied Along the reaches of the sounding graile, The west wind wrestling with the flowing tide.
RASTATT, _5th May_
VII
The last march opened with the sudden blaze Of howitzers upon the face of night, Waving us onward ere the laggard light Of morning broke down transport-crowded ways. Next to the first was this the bitterest phase Of our humiliation. Yet ’tis right To chronicle some kindness, and requite Our armed custodians with this word of praise. By Fournes, by Haubourdin, the endless reel Of marching men ran out its windings slow, Till near day’s end, nigh broken on the wheel Of hunger, and scarce longer fit to go, Within the moated Citadel of Lille The sharper pang gave place to deeper woe.
RASTATT, _5th May_
VIII
--The deep woe of the mind when prison walls First darken it with shadow, throbbing hot To meet the outrage, as the bolts are shot, The locks ground home, and the long silence falls. And next a settling helplessness appals The sinking soul, as if that hour should blot One’s name out of the Book, as if one caught Of life’s retreat the hurrying last footfalls. Where once a vision smiled of rankèd days Drawn on life’s vista’d curtain rich and vast, Only a gulf now yawns. Of all the plays Played out in visions, we have played the last. The future bankrupt, ’tis the present pays; And of life’s triple span, remains--the Past.
RASTATT, _5th May_
RASTATT
I
Yet morning comes with pageantry of fire, And evening falls with majesty of flame, And every hour hath something to reclaim The waste of life, slow wilting behind wire. It were a doleful dungeon that could tire Nature’s incessant carefulness to shame Sheer stalemate from each thing that lives, and claim All motion for her universal choir. Thus day by dreary day the chargèd hours Pass influence from the sweetness of the hills Across these cages, and the scent of flowers Is wafted, and the fragrant dew distils, And unimaginable stir of powers From the deep sense of woods divinely thrills.
RASTATT, _7th May_
II
Two silent influences mainly move The captive’s mind, not wholly sunk in sloth, Nor lost in carnal craving--dangers both That to the core the sterling manhood prove. One is the sense of shrinkage, of the groove In which the soul enshuttled--O how loth!-- Feels stoppage of life’s pulse, arrested growth, Heart-sickness which no medicine can remove. The other wakens when departing night Throws up the windows of the spacious morn Upon a new day pulsing with new light; And from the hill the hunter with his horn Sends down imagined valleys strains that smite The spirit with the sense of something born.
RASTATT, _7th May_
III
Within these cages day by day we pace The bitter shortness of the meted span; And this and that way variously we plan Our poor excursions over the poor place, Cribbed to extinction. Yet remains one grace. For neither bars nor tented wire can ban Full many a roving glance that dares to scan The roomy hill, and wanders into space. Yea, and remains for ever unrepealed And unimpaired the free impetuous quest Of the mind’s soaring eye, at length unsealed To the full measure of a life possessed Awhile, but never counted, now revealed Inestimable, wonderful, unguessed.
RASTATT, _7th May_
IV
The long day waned beneath refulgent skies, And evening sunshine bathed the hilltops round, Where on the sudden from the level ground Pine-vestured, solemn, summit by summit rise The tops of the Black Forest. Wistful eyes Wandered from peak to peak, as if to sound Their mystery, if perchance there might be found Some healing essence there, some glad surprise. Long strove the puzzled spirit, vainly yearned Into that alien soul to force its way; When suddenly--the mystic rune was learned! And in an upland glen remote and gray There moved a presence known and last discerned In Glendaruel on a morn of May.
RASTATT, _7th May_
V
O May! O month of months divinely dear, Which severest, amidst the toil and strife Of Nature’s round, as with a glittering knife, A perfect segment from the varying year! Month of entrancing spaces, wide and clear, Calling us to the open, thick with life, All leaf and lamb and freshness, welling, rife With blossom--can it be that thou art here? O that it were in some sweet Scottish strath, Backed by the mountains, watered, green and wide, Where the Tay laves in shallow crystal bath His pebbles, or the Forth’s meandering tide Receives Dumyat’s shadow o’er his path, And young light breaks down Ochill’s mottled side.
RASTATT, _8th May_
VI