The Glory of the Trenches E-Book

Coningsby Dawson

• Herausgeber: World War Classics
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

In 1914, Coningsby Dawson went to Ottawa, saw Sir Sam Hughes, and was offered a commission in the Canadian Field Artillery on the completion of his training at the Royal Military College of Canada, at Kingston, Ontario. "His long training at Kingston had been very severe. It included besides the various classes which he attended a great deal of hard exercise, long rides or foot marches over frozen roads before breakfast, and so forth." In July 1916 he was selected, with twenty-four other officers, for immediate service in France. His younger brothers enlisted in the Naval Patrol, then being recruited in Canada by Commander Armstrong.Lieutenant Coningsby Dawson joined the Canadian Army at the front in 1916, and continued in service until the end of World War I. He served in the Somme battlefield at Albert, at Thiepval, at Courcelette, and at the taking of the Regina trench. After having been wounded he came twice to the United States (1917, 1918) on lecture tours. In 1918, he investigated for the British Ministry of Information, American military preparedness in France.The Glory of the Trenches is a record of things deeply felt, seen and experienced—this, first of all and chiefly. The lesson of what is recorded is incidental and implicit. It is left to the discovery of the reader, and yet is so plainly indicated that he cannot fail to discover it. We shall all see this war quite wrongly, and shall interpret it by imperfect and base equivalents, if we see it only as a human struggle for human ends. We shall err yet more miserably if all our thoughts and sensations about it are drawn from its physical horror, "the deformations of our common manhood" on the battlefield, the hopeless waste and havoc of it all. We shall only view it in its real perspective when we recognise the spiritual impulses which direct it, and the strange spiritual efficacy that is in it to burn out the deep-fibred cancer of doubt and decadence which has long threatened civilisation with a slow corrupt death.

Leseprobe

Coningsby Dawson

The Glory of the Trenches

UUID: 20c661e0-114f-11e8-97cc-17532927e555

This ebook was created with StreetLib Writehttp://write.streetlib.com

Table of contents

TO YOU AT HOME

HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN

IN HOSPITAL

I. THE ROAD TO BLIGHTY

THE LADS AWAY

II. THE GROWING OF THE VISION

THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES

III. GOD AS WE SEE HIM

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.

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.