A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad

Chapter 45: F. W. H.

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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.

F. W. H.

(A Portrait)

A thick-set, dark-haired, dreamy little man,

Uncouth to see,

Revolving ever this preposterous plan—

Within a web of words spread cunningly

To tangle Life—no less,

(Could he expect success!)

Of Life, he craves not much, except to watch.

Being forced to act,

He walks behind himself, as if to catch

The motive:—an accessory to the fact,

Faintly amused, it seems,

Behind his dreams.

Yet hath he loved the vision of this world,

And found it good:

The Faith, the fight ’neath Freedom’s flag unfurled,

The friends, the fun, the army-brotherhood.

But faery-crazed or worse

He twists it all to verse!