There are strange Hells within the minds War made
Not so often, not so humiliating afraid
As one would have expected - the racket and fear guns made.
One Hell the Gloucester soldiers they quite put out;
Their first bombardment, when in combined black shout
Of fury, guns aligned, they ducked low their heads
And sang with diaphragms fixed beyond all dreads,
That tin and stretched-wire tinkle, that blither of tune;
"Apres la guerre fini" till Hell all had come down,
Twelve-inch, six-inch, and eighteen pounders hammering Hell's thunders.
Where are they now on State-doles, or showing shop patterns
Or walking town to town sore in borrowed tatterns
Or begged. Some civic routine one never learns.
The heart burns - but has to keep out of face how heart burns.
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From guest Nicole Corteen (contact)
Ivor Gurney is fantastic, this poem represents such a depth of meaning as to put him up there with some of the greats such as Owen or Sassoon.Gurney is a wholly undervauled war poet. his evident unstable state of mind does not inhibit his creativity if anything, it permits acess to the deepest recesses of his mind for inspiration without guard or repression. -
This is a very truthful and rough and beautiful and sorrowful poem, it seems to me. As one who has suffered the effects of bomb-blast whilst in the Army, that last line reads very true.
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Gurney has always had a love for the ideal of brotherhood. So this poem is just a representation of this ideal.
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