It can’t have escaped anyones attention that this weekend is the centenary of the First World War. It is being marked across the country with various events. I wanted to mark it in my own way by sharing with you a beautiful poem called Aftermath. It is written by Sigfried Sassoon. He was both a soldier and a poet and became one of the leading poets of the first world war. I came across this poem in a collection called Poems from the First World War. I was given this as a gift a few years ago and it is filled with a moving poems written by those who experienced the war first hand. From nurses to mothers to those on the front line. It seems entirely appropriate to share it with you this weekend. I hope you enjoy this poem which conveys the horrors of war and reminds us to “Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget”
Aftermath by Siegfried Sassoon
Have you forgotten yet?…
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same–and War’s a bloody game…
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz–
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench–
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’Do you remember that hour of din before the attack–
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads–those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?Have you forgotten yet?…
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.
