Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 27: II

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About This Book

A sequence of sonnets composed by a soldier in enemy captivity during the First World War, recording frontline violence, the suddenness of bombardment, marches and captures, the strain of waiting and the loss of comrades, and the solace found in memory and poetic labour. Many poems juxtapose immediate scenes—exploding shrapnel, crowded billets, marches, and internment camps—with reveries of homeland landscapes and classical or moral reflections. Sections move between field incidents, the nadir of imprisonment, thoughts of home and influences, and short epigrams or maxims, showing how verse acted as a mental bulwark against despair while exploring themes of fate, endurance, and the persistence of inner freedom.

II

Hour followed hour, and slowly on we wound,

Till wan day turned to front the gradual west;

And with day’s waning waned the dream of rest

For the worn bearers, whom the twilight found

Voyaging no-man’s gray, wide-watered ground,

Their shoulders bowed and aching backs distressed;

Isthmused between deep pools, and sorely pressed

To foot the flanks of many a slippery mound;

While floundering convoys, till the light was gone,

Across the perilous space their drivers nurse,

Limber and gun, by frighted horses drawn,

Whose plunging swerve that bogged their burdens worse,

Provoked Teutonic fury, well laid on

With sounding whipcord and sonorous curse.

Rastatt, 2nd May