Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 21: THE LITTLE ROAD

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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.

THE LITTLE ROAD

I will not take the great road that goes so proud and high,

Like the march of Roman legions that made it long ago;

But I will choose another way, a little road I know.

There no poor tramp goes limping, nor rich poor men drive by,

Nor ever crowding cattle, or sheep in dusty throng

Before their beating drovers drift cruelly along:

But only birds and free things, and ever in my ear

Sound of the leaves and little tongues of water talking near.

The great roads march on boldly, with scarce a curve or bend,

From some huge smoky Nothing, to Nothing at their end;

They march like Cæsar’s legions, and none may them withstand,

But whence, or whither going, they do not understand,

But oh, the little twisty road,

The sweet and lover’s-kiss-ty road,

The secret winding misty road,

That leads to Fairyland!