A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad

Chapter 41: THE ORCHARDS, THE SEA, AND THE GUNS

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About This Book

This collection gathers poems composed by a soldier at the Front that alternate between affectionate dialect songs celebrating Gloucestershire landscapes, traditions and pastimes and sober battlefield reflections on comradeship, sacrifice, and homesickness. Short formal pieces—ballades, trios, sonnets—and prose poems shift between light conviviality and stark moral questioning, often anchoring wartime anxiety in images of orchards, rivers and village life. Recurring themes include longing for home, the weight of witnessing death, gratitude, defiance, and the effort to reconcile pastoral memory with the experience of combat, producing verses that balance local humor and song with solemn meditation.

THE ORCHARDS, THE SEA, AND THE GUNS

Of sounds which haunt me, these

Until I die

Shall live. First the trees,

Swaying and singing in the moonless night.

(The wind being wild)

And I

A wakeful child,

That lay and shivered with a strange delight.

Second—less sweet but thrilling as the first—

The midnight roar

Of waves upon the shore

Of Rossall dear:

The rhythmic surge and burst

(The gusty rain

Flung on the pane!)

I loved to hear.

And now another sound

Wilder than wind or sea,

When on the silent night

I hear resound

In mad delight

The guns....

They bark the whole night through;

And though I fear,

Knowing what work they do,

I somehow thrill to hear.