Sonnets from a prison camp

Chapter 28: III

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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.

III

And darkness fell, and a great void of space,

As if to bar our further going on,

Unfeatured, huge, gloomed o’er us. No light shone.

Strength, too, scarce held sufficient now to trace

The squalid reaches of this dismal place;

And silence settled near and far upon

That vacancy at length—our last guide gone.

Night hid each from his comrade, face from face.

As is a voyage through the uncharted waste

Of seas, unpiloted by any star,

Alone, unmooned, uncomforted, unplanned;

So forward still in silent pain we paced,

Nor light of moon nor pharos gleamed from far

Across the boding gloom of that lost land.

Rastatt, 3rd May