ࡱ> ` 05bjbjss .n-```` `t````````sssssss uhtwDsm``mms``spppm``spmsppp`` u`ioHpss0tpwpwpwp`dpgLj```ssp```tmmmmd[ _ _ In dust of this museum Lit dully by the sun The specks like tiny planets Go drifting one by one The souls of sleeping soldiers Suspended in their prime Who heard the bells of Arras And settled, after time. Troop dutifully by now Exhibits of the years The mortar shells and badges The pay-books in arrears The trenching spades and buckles Of sergeants and recruits Who left their rusting helmets Their billy-cans and boots. Historians and poets Re-published over years Appended and amended The inventory of tears The irony remains though Despite all items crossed: Advertisement Because of human progress Eight million lives were lost Though don't let's haggle on it Of how it was begun Or how the Hun killed Tommy Or Tommy killed the Hun Not in this French museum Lit dully by the sun In dust of all these decades The two are now at one. (2) In federal yellow, euro blue The trains snake out from Waterloo And chug along the weed-choked track On south-east London's unscrubbed back They glide beside the downs of Kent The gentle way the troop trains went Eventually dropping south To halt outside the tunnel-mouth And after varying lengths of wait Leave England by her picket gate Till twenty minutes on, about The whole of Europe opens out Then casually, yawns and yields The unexciting Flanders fields Grown over long-corroded guns And crusted blood of all her sons Where on damp mornings, locals said The land still stinks - not of the dead In bone-flecked furrows everywhere - But rusting iron on the air. It's not the France of those with means For pantiled gites in magazines Though Arras is a pretty town The English herd moves further down South-west or more south-east it ambles Almost like... it sensed the shambles Quaint idea, though errant stuff It simply isn't warm enough And Flanders is notorious The farming work laborious Its common catch-crop, lead and iron Of German eagle, British lion A cannon-shell, a wagon wheel They lost along the road to Lille The workers taciturn, sincere Eschewing wine for Flemish beer Are almost English in their looks And rarely grace the tourist books Though in the summer every year The thinning ranks of chaps appear Who stand sea-eyed to gaze once more Remembering a later war. (3) November hangs on winter Like bodies hang on wire Exhausted on the tree boughs A last few leaves expire While wreaths of paper poppies Run pink in dripping rain The ghosts of broken soldiers Are waiting for a train. The melancholy generals With Marshall Foch respond In grunts and nods and thank-yous The forest of Rethondes Near Compiegne is chosen Three days they'll wrangle there Their trains sat in the sidings, To sign the Clairiere Eleven / eleven / eleven This peace made on a train To spare the weary living And stem the flood of slain Who swamped the fields of Flanders Picardy and Champagne Restoring to the farmers Their livelihood again. The trenches, pits and craters Abandoned as they'd been The hue of blood and faeces And not a patch of green The rats grown fat on corpses On ground the gas made sour And not a tree left standing And not a single flower... (4) When I was ten - or not much more In 'sixty-three or 'sixty-four The damage of the First World War Was still around, I sometimes saw A tramp with medals on his chest Though destitute, he did his best He marched, more than he walked, around But startled by a sudden sound - A car backfiring in the town, He'd panic, throw his body down Clap filthy hands across his ears And tremble or dissolve in tears Some nameless terror in his head "Poor sod," the passing shoppers said Being kinder then, perhaps, than now Conveyed it to us kids somehow: "It's shellshock - from the war, you see." And whispered later on to me: "The last war yielded far more dead But oh, the First was worse," they said. The Great War, whether right or wrong Although it cast its shadow long Its winning cultured no conceit No Vimy, Somme or Ypres Street Became a London thoroughfare There is no Paschendaele Square If other conflicts lend their name To roads and highways, all the same The Great War left the streets alone Inhabiting a darker zone Of gaps in families, seeds unsown Of fathers, uncles, names unknown Of meetings never reconvened Of debts unsettled, slates uncleaned The breaking of that simple thread Which binds the living to the dead And sombre, some November day With trees outlined against the grey The country stops, observes the date And rakes the embers in its grate. (5) At Ipswich Square in Arras An English phone box sits The British fought two battles The town was left in bits And further, through an alley, The Place des Heros funnels Into a larger, grander square With labyrinthine tunnels The Spanish-Flemish grandeur Of centuries before The pockmarked sandstone pillars Were skittled during war Estaminets and churches Destroyed in occupation Restored with patient labour And German compensation The tunnels under Arras And cellars where they ended Were utilised, adapted Developed and extended By Scots and Maori soldiers Who worked them much like mines And dug for stifling, dripping miles Beneath the German lines Advertisement They lived... existed down here Cooked food and carved crude faces Into the claustrophobic chalk Of sundry stopping places And left their names and countries Bashed out with maul and knife Perhaps to help remind them There'd been an earlier life. (6) When China Wright and Charlie Newell Were young, the world had thinner gruel Than most of us are dished today And both were posted long away The first to Egypt - lucky chance The second out to northern France While China quietly did his bit, Charlie, in the thick of it - A medic, joined six years before - Would see a rather rougher war My grandads: ordinary chaps The yeomanry this country taps If ever there's a song and dance Would take up arms and then advance And Charlie, never one to wait Who re-enlisted 'thirty-eight Was posted back abroad once more A V2 hit a Woolworths store... His boys were told their mum was dead He drank himself to death, they said. "A pint of wallop and a job A girl at home, an extra bob To put by for a rainy day." As China had been known to say Was all that they expected then An England, full of youngish men Whom war made prematurely old, Asked what they did, they joked: "As told." And winked and called each other "cock", Kept pubs, drove buses, watched the clock Anonymous in caps they wore Brought up polite, they seldom swore In front of children or their wives They rented houses all their lives And bodgered in their sheds for years With pencil stubs behind their ears A now-forgotten breed of blokes Whose stubborn ways and arcane jokes So hard to re-communicate Were what made Britain quietly great. (7) So Tommy put his mask on As someone banged the gong He heard the thump of gas shells Like footballs landing wrong And men began to panic And shouted it was gas And prayed the wind would waft it Away towards Arras He later saw the corpses Laid out on frozen mud All lemon-yellow, lolling tongues, Their nostrils clogged with blood While medics fixed the blindfolds To choking, crying men Who one week out of Blighty Went sightless home again Young Harry checked his privates A bullet went beneath He never felt the second one Which entered through his teeth So Tommy manned the fire-step And hauled the corpse about To supplement the sandbags A shell had blasted out And stretchered back to England On trucks and railway tracks He thought about young Harry The mustard-gas attacks The sandbags made of bodies The faces - which were worse - Then lost control completely And threw up on a nurse. (8) The clock that chimes on market day When heard from this estaminet Sounds pretty as it marks the time Reminding of a nursery rhyme The Place des Heros and Grand' Place The ancient quarters of Arras Have seen more soldiers on their stones - Young men who'd never make old bones - And echoed to that marching sound Advertisement Than almost anywhere around. The Romans and the Spanish came And left, though Arras took her name A word from Celtic: Water - Ar The locals, known as Arageois Who dealt in tapestries and lace Were used to strangers in the place Knew bloodshed in the market square And spawned a son called Robespierre Who made a name himself one day. By setting guillotines in play. In fields which surround this town A quarter-million troops went down Those modern European sons Who, torn from families, given guns Were wounded, died, went missing there - Just atomised, in Flanders air - Were caught on wire or drowned in mud Or shot like dogs or choked on blood Till many who survived the war Would ask what they were fighting for And was it worth this bloody mess? Back would come the answer: "Yes." Of course, as Bertolt Brecht would say: "War is like love - it finds a way." Until at last we all see sense Our names shall go on monuments And death retain its dark romance Despite the fact we die like ants As men at desks insist we must - Until we are museum dust. (9) In towns of eastern England Like Framlingham or Diss They'd always pack the churches Around the Armistice A brass band in the High Street To honour all those men Though, church was quiet at Easter They all played football then The Catchpoles and the Thurgoods From field, farm and forge The sacrifice of Suffolk For Plumer, Haig and George Who never asked a question And only owned one suit Yet put the thing on gladly And crowded to recruit They all rushed off to Flanders To Flanders, in the rain To give what-for to Fritzi Then pop back on the train They'd all be done by Christmas And back in civvy hats The heads of huns in helmets As bully-beef for rats So from this French museum Lit dully by the sun Pick up the glossy leaflets The tour has just begun The battlefields tomorrow And former Siegfried line The Beffroi chimes the hour A coach departs at nine. (10) The train glides back to Waterloo In federal yellow, euro blue As autumn loiters in the park At five o'clock already dark The clocks gone back, the days drawn in A woman with her poppy tin Her iron hair and winter hat Goes home and trembles in her flat The shellburst in the sky she fears And those explosions which she hears Are not the fireworks seen outdoors But rolling thunder of two wars Carried on the wind and rain Over from a Flanders plain They'll cough beside the Cenotaph The great and good and chiefs-of-staff While wreaths are laid and words are said And everyone will bow their head Acknowledging, in general gloom Advertisement The unknown warrior's empty tomb He's there because, we must assume The actual dead take too much room The need arose, the men would fight Like Charlie Newell and China Wright And everybody that they knew And every other bugger too. So war retains its dark romance Despite the fact we die like ants As men at desks insist we must Until we are museum dust. Published by kind permission of Martin Newell. The complete A Return to Flanders is available from Jardine Press www.jardinepress.co.uk h5i55h _fhl/0NOgh  - . H I k l gdl5   ' ( B C _ ` n o    gdl 6 7 M N l m ! F G m n gdl   3 4 U V v w  12PQz{gdl  45WXuv9:YZ{|gdl  23MNSTno !;<UVrsgdls)*DEab}~ .gdl./IJgh&'GHklgdl#$CDef@Amngdl)*KLlm :;^_gdl23YZ!"BC`agdl)*CDbc|}'(NOgdlOijxy !AB_`gdl>?bc * + M N s t gdl !!!H!I!f!g!!!!!!!!! " "*"+"X"Y"""""""""#gdl##?#@#g#h#########$$ $!$;$<$X$Y${$|$$$$$$$gdl$$$%% %!%9%:%^%_%%%%%%%%%%%&&4&5&S&T&u&v&&gdl&&&&&&&& ' '+','J'K'd'e''''''''''' ( (*(+(gdl+(O(P(n(o(((((((,)-);)<)Z)[)|)})))))))**-*.*S*gdlS*T*z*{******* + +&+'+L+M+u+v+++++++ , ,2,3,W,X,gdlX,|,},,,,,,,--4-5-X-Y-y-z-----------..1.gdl1.2.K.L.p.q......... / /&/'/@/A/^/_/w/x///////gdl///00)0*0H0I0a0b0~000000000011#1$1>1?1E1F1i1gdli1j11111111122-2.2R2S2x2y222222233#3$3G3H3gdlH3p3q333333333448494]4^444444444 5 5-5.5N5gdlN5O5i5j5555gdl,1h. A!"#$% D@D NormalCJ_HaJmH nHsH tHDA@D Default Paragraph FontRi@R  Table Normal4 l4a (k@(No List- n/0NOgh-.HIkl'(BC_`no67MNlm !FGmn34UVvw  12PQz{  45WXuv9:YZ{| 2 3 M N S T n o  ! ; < U V r s   ) * D E a b } ~  . / I J g h   & ' G H k l #$CDef@Amn)*KLlm :;^_23YZ!"BC`a)*CDbc|}'(NOijxy !AB_`>?bc  *+MNst !HIfg  *+XY?@gh !;<XY{| !9:^_45STuv  +,JKde * + O P n o ,!-!;!)?)E)F)i)j)))))))))**-*.*R*S*x*y*******++#+$+G+H+p+q+++++++++,,8,9,],^,,,,,,,,, - ---.-N-O-i-j----h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0@0 ---.-N-O--j0(j0[h0h0f@ @5  s.O #$&+(S*X,1./i1H3N55 !"#$%&'()*+,-./01234565I 8<5I8LH8H8 H8H8TH8H8|H8\H888 8 888ĕ88Ė8E 8E!8|E"8LE#84E$8t@%8LE&8.A'8E(8E)8F*8\%F+8$,8.F-89F.818284չ3885?88,8$H88888%8<%H8I8J8,K8lL8M8Tf4N8f4O8f4P8g4Q8Tg4R8#4S8#4T8$$4U8d$4@@!e^^z22 U^^vv((ZZii !!#%%&&''_)_)+,,--      !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGH  DD'mdd77 Zjj||--``nn     !!#%%&&''g)g)+,,--  !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGH9/ *urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagsState=4*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags PlaceName=5*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags PlaceType:,*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagsStreet;-*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagsaddress8H#*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagsCity9I$*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagsplaceBB*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagscountry-region cIHIHIHIBIBIIIBIHIIHI54IHII/I-,IH-,IHIHIBIBIBIBIBIBIBIHIBIHIHIIBIHIIIHIIBI  ' OSQVDL} !!!!$$%%%%&&&&''("(7(;( ))}))W*a*-----, 0 3 K ! 9 n %Ts)C`*\+1,P4-k-A;./1/O0=01uc1yw1=D56f.6A27-:+: =6@B$B C/9CNF]cFGH5{IwJ%&6 C81!F+7ir\8fedlCEs,2*\*^ {0 ywjK:8+I(X1b`0&rxqJ''=?>K7j _2@-@UnknownGz Times New Roman5Symbol3& z Arial;SimSun[SO"qhêF'S'S24d-- KX)?l2 Julian SturdyOh+'0\  $ 0<DLTJulian Sturdy Normal.dot1Microsoft Office Word@F#@@u'՜.+,0 hp|  ˿S-  Title  !"#$%&'()*+,-./012345679:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrsuvwxyz{}~Root Entry Fu1Table8wWordDocument.nSummaryInformation(tDocumentSummaryInformation8|CompObjq  FMicrosoft Office Word Document MSWordDocWord.Document.89q