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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 18: BALLADE No. 2
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About This Book

A collection of short poems written by a soldier in captivity reflecting on home, memory, and the experience of imprisonment. The verse moves between intimate domestic images—mother, English gardens, county landscapes—and the hardships of internment, loneliness, and comradeship, often blending pastoral detail with wartime grief and wry humor. Forms vary from ballades and sonnets to rondel and villanelle, and recurring motifs include nature, loss, longing, and reflections on duty and sacrifice. Many pieces juxtapose the small joys of remembered rural life with the starkness of prison, producing restrained lyricism that balances tenderness, anger, and quiet faith.

BALLADE
No. 2

You dawns, whose loveliness I have not missed,
Making so delicate background for the larches
Melting the hills to softest amethyst;
O beauty never absent from our marches;
Passion of heaven shot golden through the arches
Of woods, or filtered softly from a star,
Nature’s wild love that never cloys or parches;
Because of you I love the name of War.
I have seen dawn and sunset, night and morning,
I have tramped tired and dusty to a tune
Of singing voices tired as I, but scorning
To yield up gaiety to sweltering June.
O comrades marching under blazing noon
Who told me tales in taverns near and far,
And sang and slept with me beneath the moon;
Because of you I love the name of War.
But you most dear companions Life and Death,
Whose friendship I had never valued well
Until that Battle blew with fiery breath
Over the earth his message terrible;
Crying aloud the things Peace could not tell,
Calling up ancient custom to the bar
Of God, to plead its cause with Heaven and Hell ...
Because of you I love the name of War.
L’ENVOI
Prince Jesu, who did speak the amazing word
Loud, trumpet-clear, flame-flashing like a star
Which falls: “Not peace I bring you, but the sword!”
Because of you I love the name of War.