Four days in the line…

In January 1917 Wilfred Owen described four days in the front line in a famous letter to his mother that is seen as the source for ‘Sentry’.   The letter is reproduced in the Digital Poetry Archive and is full of astonishing material –  http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/document/5233/4732#  This is Australian EPF Lynch’s fourth day in the front line – similarly memorable,

‘…Somehow we got through the night and our fourth day breaks upon a poorly manned trench.  I decide to walk the length of the trench just to keep warm, but half way along I prop still, for there protruding from the trench wall is a very white hand palm upwards.  Someone, friend or foe, I do not know, is buried in the trench wall and a hand has had the earth broken away from it.  A little cardboard square hangs from the hand by a piece of string.  Upon the card is written ‘Gib it bacca, boss’.  And the poor upturned hand is half full of cigarette bumpers.  Suppose it is witty, but its not the brand of wit that appeals to me.  Probably we are becoming callous, but wouldn’t you be, living among the things we experience?  You get hardened to death the the dead when you see them around you all the time.

I look at the hand.  It is bleached white from exposure to the weather.  A delicate sensitive hand, long pointed fingers, straight and well shaped.  Maybe a musician, a Fritz as the trench had lately been captured.  Perhaps a little flaxen headed kid waits for its caress and there it lies protruding from its muddy grave, another trophy of the abominable war.  Poor beggar!

I wander on to B Co., where there are a few chaps I know.  I ask if they’ve seen the hand? 

‘Yes, that’s nothing.  The war must be getting on your nerves if you let little things like that upset you…’

A corporal joins the discussion.  He is an elderly man, educated and cultured, every word he says carrying the hallmark of a thinker.

‘Look here lad,’ he says, ‘You give up thinking too much, or this war will get you down.  It will beat you.  I’ve been in it since Gallipoli and I know.  The man who thinks is done.  He’ll never know a moment’s peace.  Don’t look too deep and above all don’t think too deeply.  Try to see the funny side of everything for you will see enough that hasn’t any funny side.  Take the narrow escapes we all have.  Lots of men worry afterwards over them.  What earthly good does it do?  None at all.  They become a misery to themselves and to everyone near them.  Take my tip, bring yourself to treat danger as a humorous episode and not as a narrowly averted tragedy and although I can’t say that you’ll live longer, you’ll certainly live happier…’ EPF Lynch, Somme Mud, p34

Owen Sheers’ breathtakingly good Mametz Wood (2000)

Mametz Wood

For years afterwards the farmers found them -

the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades

as they tended the land back into itself.

A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade,

the relic of a finger, the blown

and broken bird’s egg of a skull,

all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white

across this field where they were told to walk, not run,

towards the wood and its nesting machine guns.

And even now the earth stands sentinel,

reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened

like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.

This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave,

a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm,

their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre

in boots that outlasted them,

their socketed heads tilted back at an angle

and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.

As if the notes they had sung

have only now, with this unearthing,

slipped from their absent tongues.

…from Skirrid Hill (2005) (Seren)

Listen to the recording at : http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=6005

Wilfred Owen -Oxford’s Digital Archive

The  First World War digital archive is brilliant.  This is the Wilfred Owen collection which has poems, manuscripts, documents, letters – http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/owen . The tutorials in the education section are breathtakingly good too e.g. see the Wordle cloud of Isaac Rosenberg’s Break of Day in the Trenches.