This week’s poem is “On the Western Front” by Alfred Noyes and I have chosen it for Remembrance Day.
Yet, as I read the crosses, name by name,
Alfred Noyes (1880—1958)
Rank after rank, it seemed that peace was there;
Poem 463. On The Western Front
I
I found a dreadful acre of the dead,
Marked with the only sign on earth that saves.
The wings of death were hurrying overhead,
The loose earth shook on those unquiet graves;
For the deep gun-pits, with quick stabs of flame,
Made their own thunders of the sunlit air;
Yet, as I read the crosses, name by name,
Rank after rank, it seemed that peace was there;
Sunlight and peace, a peace too deep for thought,
The peace of tides that underlie our strife,
The peace with which the moving heavens are fraught,
The peace that is our everlasting life.
The loose earth shook. The very hills were stirred.
The silence of the dead was all I heard.
II
We, who lie here, have nothing more to pray.
To all your praises we are deaf and blind.
We may not ever know if you betray
Our hope, to make earth better for mankind.
Only our silence, in the night, shall grow
More silent, as the stars grow in the sky;
And, while you deck our graves, you shall not know
How many scornful legions pass you by.
For we have heard you say (when we were living)
That some small dream of good would “cost too much.”
But when the foe struck, we have watched you giving,
And seen you move the mountains with one touch.
What can be done, we know. But, have no fear!
If you fail now, we shall not see or hear.
Noyes was a pacifist but has often been criticised as a militarist. He was unable to serve in the First World War because of his poor eyesight and worked instead with John Buchan at the Foreign Office on propaganda, also writing short stories and poems that exhorted Britain’s men to greater exertions and defending the justness of the cause. This seems like a conflict with his pacific nature but he had concluded that faced with a belligerent enemy which wouldn’t listen to reason, the only course was to fight.
This poem was written in 1916 and speaks of the difference between the chaos, clamour and carnage of the trenches with “their own thunders of the sunlit air” and the tranquillity of “a dreadful acre of the dead.”
He suggests that the dead in their graves can know nothing of the progress of the war or the bloody price paid by the living and their grief and impairment and that their peace transcends the tremors of explosions, the whistling of shells and the crack of gunfire: “The silence of the dead was all I heard”.
The dead, he says, care nothing for fulsome eulogies and will never know if their hope for a brighter future was betrayed by those left behind. The survivors will know though, and that knowledge will overshadow them as they bring tributes to the fallen: the knowledge that these heroes would hold them in scorn for declining to remedy some minor nuisance because ‘some small dream of good would “cost too much”’ but straining every sinew “when the foe struck”. The dead know what can be achieved with faith and hope but if the living should fail, the dead will never know.
I like it because it reminds me of part of John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields” but conveys a different idea:
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:
In Flanders Fields, by John McCrae.
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
McCrae’s poem exhorts the living to greater efforts and not to break faith because the dead will haunt them; Noyes asserts that the dead cannot know what happens after their death or exert any personal influence, but the living will be aware of what could have been done and the difference between that and what was done and be conscious of the scorn that the dead would feel for them if they fall short.
I like the phrases Noyes uses, particularly “a dreadful acre of the dead,/marked with the only sign on earth that saves”, “a peace too deep for thought”, and “How many scornful legions pass you by.” I have chosen a performance on YouTube by Poetry Paul’s PANaceas Plus Pothead Pixie Previews.