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Автор George Walter
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF FIRST WORLD WAR POETRY
GEORGE WALTER was educated at the Universities of Leeds and Birmingham, and is currently Senior Lecturer in English at the university of Sussex. He has published widely on the literature of the First World War, including critical editions of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Ivor Gurney. He is currently working on a critical study of Ivor Gurney and, in the longer term, critical study of First World War poetry.
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry
EDITED BY GEORGE WALTER
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This collection first published by Penguin Books as
1
Selection and editorial matter copyright © George Walter, 2004, 2006
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editor has been asserted
Pages 366–8 constitute an extension to this copyright page
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN-13: 978–0–141–18190–5
ISBN-10: 0–141–18190–7
In Memory of Private William Job Packer The Royal West Kent Regiment 1889–1916
Prelude
1 YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU
‘Let the foul Scene proceed’
‘Who’s for the khaki suit’
In Training
2 SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE
In Trenches
Behind the Lines
Comrades of War
3 ACTION
Rendezvous with Death
Battle
Aftermath
4 BLIGHTY
Going Back
The Other War
Lucky Blighters
5 PEACE
Everyone Sang
The Dead and the Living
‘Have you forgotten yet?’
Coda
Shortly after the outbreak of hostilities, Edmund Gosse tried to predict the impact that the First World War would have on contemporary literature. That the war would be good for Britain wasn’t in doubt: according to Gosse, it was ‘the sovereign disinfectant’ that would purge those habits of self-indulgence and luxuriousness which had so corrupted the nation during peacetime.
But he was also aware that this purification would come at a price. Looking across the English Channel, he saw that literature had been ‘trodden into the mud by the jack-boot of the Prussian’ and feared a similar catastrophe would occur in Britain, even if actual invasion was averted. With the public’s attention firmly fixed on the war and its progress, those ‘branches of literature which are most delicate, admirable and original’ were already being dangerously neglected, and this woeful state of affairs would surely continue until peace was once more restored. Whilst the damage might not be permanent, the immediate future looked bleak: ‘the book’, he concluded, ‘which does not deal directly and crudely with the complexities of warfare and the various branches of strategy will, from Christmas onwards, not be published at all’. 1
