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Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp cover

Gloucestershire Friends: Poems From a German Prison Camp

Chapter 48: KOSSOVO DAY
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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.

KOSSOVO DAY

From this sweet nest of peace and summer blue—
England in June—a sea-bird’s nest indeed
Guarded of waves, and hid by the sea-weed
From envious hunter’s eye, we send to you
Our flying thoughts and prayers, our treasure too,
Poor though it be to bandage wounds that bleed
For country dear beloved. There the seed
Of homely loves and occupations grew
To wither in the flame of godless might
Kindled by hands of treachery, yet reeking
With blood of friends and neighbours. Serbia, thou
Hast thought us careless and far off; know now
Thy name to us is sudden drums outspeaking
And tortured trumpets crying in the night!

Note.—This poem was sent from Crefeld, but was written in England just before the author left for the front.