The First World War has been a recurring theme of the daily poem. Andrew Ferguson’s engrossing new book, Ghosts of War: A History of World War I in Poetry and Prose (foreword by Nicola Sturgeon, The History Press, £9.99), offers new insights into the course of the vast conflict and the responses of the men and women caught up in it.
Although the poetry is drawn from a wide range of sources, there is an emphasis on Scottish poets, among them Ewart Alan Mackintosh (1893-1917). Here is his opening poem.
GHOSTS OF WAR
When you and I are buried
With grasses over head,
The memory of our fights will stand
Above this bare and tortured land,
We knew ere we were dead.
Though grasses grow on Vimy,
And poppies at Messines,
And in High Wood the children play,
The craters and the graves will stay
To show what things have been.
Though all be quiet in day-time,
The night shall bring a change,
And peasants walking home shall see
Shell-torn meadows and riven tree,
And their own fields grown strange.
They shall hear live men crying,
They shall see dead men lie,
Shall hear the rattling Maxims fire,
And see by broken twists of wire
Old flares light up the sky.
And in their new-built houses
The frightened folk will see
Pale bombers coming down the street,
And hear the flurry of charging feet,
And the crash of Victory.
This is our Earth baptised
With the red wine of War.
Horror and courage hand in hand
Shall brood upon the stricken land
In silence evermore.
(Sent from France, October 1917)
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