Rembrance - Poppies and Pansies - A Triune of little -known War Poets

1. Siegfried Bassoon

Bassoon came from a moneyed Shropshire family. He went to St. Rogerer's College Cambridge where he studied English, concentrating on the Romance poets. He was a rugby and cricket blue. He joined up in 1914 having been admonished by the Master of St. Rogerer's for having been caught. This poem he sent to his friend Phil Butt from his trench in Slimy Ridge in the Pas de Calais.

The Impotence of War

He turned to me with sleepy gaze
And fresh face brightening to the grin
That sets my mind to summer days
A time when I'd have gladly buggered him

No Cambridge river bank no numb'ring chimes
No hiding place in shadowed porch
No cricket whites no hasty sweaty times
In changing room where we debauch

But now the tired army troop
Draped on parapets where poppies grow
Only disgust and make my old man droop
No summer doorway shadows, no cottage now

2. Lawrence Pinion

Pinion was an East-London boy, son of a coster monger who joined The Rifles in 1914 at the age of sixteen. He trained as a sniper having remarkable gifts with a gun obtained when he was a child shooting rats on the Thames embankments for which he got sixpence a tail. He is said to have written this, his only poem, in 1916, when camouflaged in a tree overlooking the British trenches just before a shell burst killed him. It was found in the pocket in the tattered battledress trousers on the only part of him they found, his left leg. Identified only by a tatoo, he was laid to rest at Thiepval and those who wish to pay homage will note it is a long thin grave just inside the gate. It is likely that Pinion had never before encountered "The Poetic Type" and this moved him to write the following lines.

A Bored Sniper takes Pot-shots at Pansies

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid time as ever.
Only a live thing leaps to view
In dawn-light sillouette above the trench
A queer sardonic rat scribbling in his book;
A pencil-mincing babbling Brooke
As I pull the scarlet poppy
To stick behind my ear,
I take a practised aim but do not squeeze
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Of your "cosmopolitain" tendencies
And what you get up to in a corner of a foreign field
But I won't, you're a good man when our backs are against the wall

3. Lce. Bombardier Vic Thicke

Of this triune Thicke is possibly the least known, having been one of our present contemporaries. He served in Coalition forces in Iraq before he was killed by motar fire when the military prison was bombarded. He had been facing a Court Martial for demoralisation of troops in the field but died the day before. If he had faced the court he would almost certainly have been shot anyway. He sent these to his Mother in Grimsby, explaining that it was written in memory of McRae, the WWI Canadian Army medic who wrote the famous "In Flanders Fields". He will go down as the rightful modern heir of Binyon, Sassoon, Brooke, Rosenberg and all the others. He is the modern protest poet.

McRae

Oh McRae, inspiration of remembrance and of peace,
One thing puzzles me at least.
Having seen so many dead upon the slab
Why did it take a best mate's death to stab,
To wake your pen, write poems in your bed
And write of Poppies Flag-waving Red?


Dolce et Gabanna est Pro Patria Mori

A poppy for remembering.
A cheap blood-red dead-leaved Novembering
Freezing one silent minute in my mind
Flailing hands that threw hope's torch
That we have left behind.

Because there is no ending;
No crooked-branch can straighten in the bending.
No to-end-all, no final " der'-des-der's."
Scarce-heard larks still sing bravely
Above the guns and flares.

In the torchlight all our hoping
Turns bitter, blind, to darkness and to groping
For weapons, sharper-sighted from the skies.
No brighter way for man to see
One pair of terrified eyes.

With such selective dismembering
Could optimistic larks above his embers sing?
Youth hides, in camouflage against a street-lamp tree.
In the modern urban jungle
Dolce et Gabbana est pro patria mori.

For an eternity we shall sing,
Remembrance will in the flint church ring.
In Him are met our fervent hopes and fears.
Memory ever-young in an eternity
Of ninety short still-killing years

Easy in peaceful times forgetting
Mud-pushing torment and camouflage netting:
Shell brass summoning through death's dread open door .
Only more war freshens memory
War is dead! Long live war!

The souls are beyond counting
Who came before and make the mounting
Soil of contingency. They all died fighting too;
Nine millimetre nature with their nameless lives;
Made the now, for me and you.

No hero-song, war-winning
To mourn their death, their life, their sinning
So come! Blow horns bang drums with all our might!
Their widows have re-wed! Give them rough music
On the wedding night!

Epilogue
While wars are being fought, all men are the losers; there are no winners only fighting soldiers. Shamefully war is its own remembrance of past conflict.
We include as a sort of post script a short verse by someone known only as Ali, a suicide bomber, who saw himself as a soldier too. He recorded the lines in a video to his family before the bombing in which he and twenty four soldiers from a Highland Regiment were killed. In his way he was brave too having stayed behind to assure the bomb, planted at a roadside by him and his comrades, went off at the right moment.


Four and twenty Scotsmen
Came down from Inverness
When the bomb exploded
There were four and twenty less
Oh infidels and running dogs
You dare to ask me why
I have no medal?
Because two and seventy virgins
Await me in the sky all the same
And Allah don't back-pedal
On promises in His name
To soldiers
Like some