Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 37: 3. THE OLDEST INHABITANT HEARS FAR OFF THE DRUMS OF DEATH

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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.

3. THE OLDEST INHABITANT HEARS
FAR OFF THE DRUMS OF DEATH

Sometimes ’tis far off, and sometimes ’tis nigh,

Such drummerdery noises too they be!

’Tis odd—oh, I do hope I baint to die

Just as the summer months be coming on,

And buffly chicken out, and bumble-bee:

Though, to be sure, I cannot hear ’em plain

For this drat row as goes a-drumming on,

Just like a little soldier in my brain.

And oh, I’ve heard we got to go through flame

And water-floods—but maybe ’tisn’t true!

I allus were a-frightened o’ the sea.

And burning fires—oh, it would be a shame

And all the garden ripe, and sky so blue.

Such drummerdery noises, too, they be.