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- Herausgeber: e-artnow
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
This carefully crafted ebook: "THE YOUNG GUARD – World War I Poems & Author's War Memoirs" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents: Poems Consecration Lord's Leave Last Post The Old Boys Ruddy Young Ginger The Ballad of Ensign Joy Bond and Free Shell-Shock in Arras The Big Thing Forerunners Uppingham Song Wooden Crosses Memoir Notes of a Camp Follower on the Western Front E. W. Hornung (1866–1921) was an English author and a war poet and also brother-in-law to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Hornung is known for writing the A. J. Raffles series about a gentleman thief based on a deliberate inversion of the Sherlock Holmes series. Hornung dedicated his creation as a form of flattery to Doyle. Hornung's works are also remembered for giving insight into the social mores of late 19th and early 20th century British society.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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THE YOUNG GUARD – World War I Poems & Author’s War Memoirs
Table of Contents
Poems
Table of Contents
Consecration
Children we deemed you all the daysWe vexed you with our care:But in a Universe ablaze,What was your childish share?To rush upon the flames of Hell,To quench them with your blood!To be of England's flower that fellEre yet it brake the bud!
And we who wither where we grew.And never shed but tears,As children now would follow youThrough the remaining years;Tread in the steps we thought to guide,As firmly as you trod;And keep the name you glorifiedClean before man and God.
Lord’s Leave
(1915)
No Lord's this year: no silken lawn on which A dignified and dainty throng meanders. The Schools take guard upon a fierier pitch Somewhere in Flanders.
Bigger the cricket here; yet some who tried In vain to earn a Colour while at Eton Have found a place upon an England side That can't be beaten!
A demon bowler's bowling with his head— His heart's as black as skins in Carolina! Either he breaks, or shoots almost as dead As Anne Regina;
While the deep-field-gun, trained upon your stumps, From concrete grand-stand far beyond the bound'ry, Lifts up his ugly mouth and fairly pumps Shells from Krupp's foundry.
But like the time the game is out of joint— No screen, and too much mud for cricket lover; Both legs go slip, and there's sufficient point In extra cover!
Cricket? 'Tis Sanscrit to the super-Hun— Cheap cross between Caligula and Cassius, To whom speech, prayer, and warfare are all one— Equally gaseous!
Playing a game's beyond him and his hordes; Theirs but to play the snake or wolf or vulture: Better one sporting lesson learnt at Lord's Than all their Kultur. . . .
Sinks a torpedoed Phoebus from our sight; Over the field of play see darkness stealing; Only in this one game, against the light There's no appealing.
Now for their flares . . . and now at last the stars . . . Only the stars now, in their heavenly million,
Last Post
(1915)
Last summer, centuries ago, I watched the postman's lantern glow, As night by night on leaden feet He twinkled down our darkened street.
So welcome on his beaten track, The bent man with the bulging sack! But dread of every sleepless couch, A whistling imp with leathern pouch!
And now I meet him in the way, And earth is Heaven, night is Day, For oh! there shines before his lamp An envelope without a stamp!
Address in pencil; overhead, The Censor's triangle in red. Indoors and up the stair I bound: "One from the boy, still safe, still sound!
"Still merry in a dubious trench They've taken over from the French; Still making light of duty done; Still full of Tommy, Fritz, and fun!
"Still finding War of games the cream, And his platoon a priceless team— Still running it by sportsman's rule, Just as he ran his house at school.
"Still wild about the 'bombing stunt' He makes his hobby at the front. Still trustful of his wondrous luck— Prepared to take on old man Kluck! "
Awed only in the peaceful spells, And only scornful of their shells, His beaming eye yet found delight In ruins lit by flares at night,
In clover field and hedgerow green, Apart from cover or a screen, In Nature spurting spick-and-span For all the devilries of Man.
He said those weeks of blood and tears Were worth his score of radiant years. He said he had not lived before— Our boy who never dreamt of War!
He gave us of his own dear glow, Last summer, centuries ago. Bronzed leaves still cling to every bough. I don't waylay the postman now.
The Old Boys
(1917)
"Who is the one with the empty sleeve?" "Some sport who was in the swim." "And the one with the ribbon who's home on leave?" "Good Lord! I remember him! A hulking fool, low down in the school, And no good at games was he— All fingers and thumbs—and very few chums. (I wish he'd shake hands with me!) "
"Who is the one with the heavy stick, Who seems to walk from the shoulder?" "Why, many's the goal you have watched him kick!" "He's looking a lifetime older. Who is the one that's so full of fun— I never beheld a blither— Yet his eyes are fixt as the furrow betwixt?" "He cannot see out of either."
"Who are the ones that we cannot see, Though we feel them as near as near? In Chapel one felt them bend the knee, At the match one felt them cheer. In the deep still shade of the Colonnade, In the ringing quad's full light, They are laughing here, they are chaffing there, Yet never in sound or sight."
"Oh, those are the ones who never shall leave, As they once were afraid they would! They marched away from the school at eve, But at dawn came back for good, With deathless blooms from uncoffin'd tombs To lay at our Founder's shrine. As many are they as ourselves to-day, And their place is yours and mine."
"But who are the ones they can help or harm?" "Each small boy, never so new, Has an Elder Brother to take his arm, And show him the thing to do—
Ruddy Young Ginger
(1915)
Ruddy young Ginger was somewhere in camp, War broke it up in a day, Packing cadets of the steadier stamp Home with the smallest delay. Ginger braves town in his O.T.C. rags — Beards a Staff Marquis — the limb! Saying, " Your son, Sir, is one of my fags," Gets a Commission through him. Then to his tailor's for khaki complet; Then to Pall Mall for a sword; Lastly, a wire to his people to say, "Left school — joined the Line — are you bored? "
And it was a bit cool (A term's fees in the pool By a rule of the school). There were those who said " Fool! " Of young Ginger.
Ruddy young Ginger! Who gave him that name? Tommies who had his own nerve! "Into 'im, Ginger!" was heard in a game With a neighbouring Special Reserve. Blushing and grinning and looking fifteen, Ginger, with howitzer punt, Bags his man's wind as succinctly and clean As he hopes to bag Huns at the front. Death on recruits who fall out by the way, Sentries who yawn at their post, Yet he sang such a song at the Y.M.C.A. That the C.O. turned green as a ghost!
Less the song than the stance, And the dissolute dance, Drew a glance so askance That . . . they packed him to France, Little Ginger.
Next month, to the haunts of fine Ladies and Lords I ventured, in Grosvenor Square: The stateliest chambers were hospital wards— And ruddy young Ginger was there. In spite of his hurts he looked never so red, Nor ever less shy or sedate, Though his hair had been cropped (by machine- gun, he said) And bandages turbaned his pate.
He was mostly in holes—but his cheek was intact! I could not but notice, with joy, The loveliest Sisters had most to transact With ruddy young Ginger—some boy!
Slaying Huns by the tons, With a smile like a nun's—
The Ballad of Ensign Joy
(1917)
Solomon cited wonders three;One was the way of a ship at sea,One was the way of a mighty bird,And the way of a serpent was the third.But Solomon (since he was in the trade)Appended the way of a man with a maid:And Solomon (still in the flesh) might addThe way of a maid with a soldier lad.
This is the story of Ensign Joy (And the obsolete rank withal That I love for each gentle English boy Who jumped to his country's call. By their fire and fun, and the deeds they've done,I would gazette them Second to none Who faces a gun in Gaul!)
It is also the story of Ermyntrude (A less appropriate name For an idealistic Academy prude; But under it, all the same, The usual consanguineous squad Had made her an honest child of God, And cannot be held to blame).
It was just when the grind of the Special Reserves, Employed upon Coast Defence, Was getting on every Ensign's nerves— Sick-keen to be drafted hence— That they met and played tennis and danced and sang, The lad with the laugh and the schoolboy slang, The girl with the eyes intense.
Yet it wasn't for him that she languished and sighed, But for all of our dear doomed youth; And it wasn't for her, but her sex, that he cried, If he could but have probed the truth. Did she? She would none of his hot young heart; As khaki escort he's tall and smart, As lover a shade uncouth.
He went with his draft. She returned to her craft. He wrote in his merry vein; She read him aloud, and the Studio laughed! (Ermyntrude bore the strain.) He was full of gay bloodshed and Old Man Fritz His flippancy sent her friends into fits. (Ermyntrude frowned with pain.)
His tales of the Sergeant who swore so hard Left Ermyntrude cold and prim; The tactless truth of the picture jarred, And some of his jokes were grim. Yet, let him but skate upon tender ice, And he had to write to her twice or thrice Before she would answer him.
(Yet once she sent him a fairy's box, And her pocket felt the brunt Of tinned contraptions and books and socks— Which he hailed as " a sporting stunt!" She slaved at his muffler none the less, And still took pleasure in murmuring, " Yes— For a friend of mine at the Front")
One fine morning his name appears— Looking so pretty in print! "Wounded!" she warbles in tragedy tears— And pictures the reddening lint, The drawn damp face and the draggled hair . . . But she found him blooming in Belgrave Square, With a punctured shin in a splint.
It wasn't a haunt of Ermyntrude's, That grandiose urban pile; Like starlight in arctic altitudes Was the stately Sister's smile. Tropical sunshine was Ensign Joy— In his golden greeting no least alloy— In his beaming eyes no guile.
He showed her the bullet that did the trick— He showed her the trick, X-ray'd; He showed her a table timed to a tick, And a map that an airman made. He spoke of a shell that caused grievous loss— But he never mentioned a certain Cross For his part in the camisade.
She saw it herself in a list next day, And it brought her back to his bed With a number of beautiful things to say, Which were mostly over his head. Turned pink as his own pyjamas' stripe, To her mind he ceased to embody a type— Sank into her heart instead.
"I wonder that all of you didn't retire!" "My blighters were not that kind." "But it says you —' advanced under murderous fire, Machine-gun and shell combined '—" "Oh, that's the regular War Office wheeze! " "'Advanced '—with that leg!—' on his hands and knees'!" "I couldn't leave it behind."
He was soon trick-driving an invalid chair, And dancing about on a crutch. The haute noblesse still in Belgrave Square Were moved to oblige as such. They sent him for many a motor-whirl— With the wistful, willowy, wisp of a girl Who never again lost touch.
Their people were most of them dead and gone, 'They had only themselves to please. His pay was enough to marry upon, As every Ensign sees. They would muddle along as others did, On vast supplies of the tertium quid One brackets with bread and cheese.
They gave him some leave after Belgrave Square— And bang went a month on banns; For Ermyntrude had a natural flair For the least unusual plans. Her heaviest uncle came down well, And entertained, at a fair hotel, The dregs of the coupled clans.
A certain number of cheques accrued To keep the wolf from the door: The economical Ermyntrude Had charge of the dwindling store, When a Board reported her bridegroom fit As—some expression she didn't permit . . . And he left for the Front once more.
His crowd had been climbing the jaws of hell: He found them in death's dog-teeth, With little to show but a deal to tell In their fissure of smoking heath. There were changes—of course—but the change in him Was the ribbon that showed on his tunic trim And the tumult hidden beneath!
For all he had suffered and seen before Seemed nought to a husband's care; And the Chinese puzzle of modern war For subtlety couldn't compare With the delicate springs of the complex life To be led with a highly sensitised wife In a slightly rarefied air!
Yet it's good to be back with the old platoon— And some of the same old men; Each cheery dog is a henchman boon— Especially Sergeant Wren! Ermyntrude couldn't endure his name— Considered bad language no claim to fame, Yet it's good to—hear it again!
(Better to feel the Sergeant's grip, Though your fingers ache to the bone! Better to take the Sergeant's tip Than to make up your mind alone.
