]. Lt. Col. J. D. Player, killed in Tunisia, Enfidaville, February 1943, left .3,000 to the Beaufort Hunt, and directed that the incumbent of the living in his gift [i.e., the church whose vicar he was entitled to appoint] should be a 'man who approves of hunting, shooting, and all manly sports, which
are the backbone of the nation.' [Douglas's note on one of the manuscripts of 'Aristocrats.' Player was in fact killed in April.]
2. Cf. Wilfred Owen's 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' (p. 1971).
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DOUGLAS : VERGISSMEINNICH T / 245 7 5 Into the ears of the doomed boy, the fool whose perfectly mannered flesh fell in opening the door for a shell as he had learnt to do at school. 1 0Conrad luckily survived the winter: he wrote a letter to welcome the auspicious spring: only his silken intentions severed with a single splinter. isWa s George fond of little boys? We always suspected it, but who will say: since George was hit we never mention our surmise. 2 0It was a brave thing the Colonel said, but the whole sky turned too hot and the three heroes never heard what it was, gone deaf with steel and lead. But the bullets cried with laughter, the shells were overcome with mirth, plunging their heads in steel and earth? (the air commented in a whisper). El Ballah, General Hospital, Apr. 194 3 1949 Vergissmeinnicht1 Three weeks gone and the combatantsreturning over the nightmare ground we found the place again, and found the soldier sprawling in the sun. gone 5 Th e frowning barrel of his gun overshadowing. As we came on that day, he hit my tank with one like the entry of a demon. 10Look. Here in the gunpit spoil the dishonoured picture of his girl who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht in a copybook gothic script. 15We see hi m almost with content, abased, and seeming to have paid and mocked at by his own equipment that's hard and good when he's decayed. 1. Forget me not (German).
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2458 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR II
But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart0 flies move; black
the dust upon the paper eye
20 and the burst stomach like a cave.
For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.
Tunisia, 1943 1944
Aristocrats1
'I think I am becoming a God'2
Th e noble horse with courage in his eye clean in the bone, looks up at a shellburst: away fly the images of the shires3 but he puts the pipe back in his mouth.
5 Peter was unfortunately killed by an 88:4 it took his leg away, he died in the ambulance. I saw him crawling on the sand; he said It's most unfair, they've shot my foot off.
Ho w can I live among this gentle
io obsolescent breed of heroes, and not weep? Unicorns, almost, for they are falling into two legends in which their stupidity and chivalry are celebrated. Each, fool and hero, will be an immortal.
is Th e plains were their cricket pitch15 and in the mountains the tremendous drop fences6 brought down some of the runners. Here then under the stones and earth they dispose themselves, I think with their famous unconcern.
20 It is not gunfire I hear but a hunting horn.7
Enfidaville, Tunisia, 1943 1946
1. Another version of this poem is entitled 4. A German tank fitted with an eighty-eight' Sportsmen.' millimeter gun. 2. The dying words of Roman Emperor Vespasian 5. Field on which the game of cricket is played. were supposedly 'Alas! I suppose 1 am turning into 6. Fences in the course of a steeplechase horse a god.' race. 3. Counties. Cf. Owen's 'Anthem for Doomed 7. See n. 1, p. 2456. Youth,' line 8 (p. 1971).
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2459
CHARLES CAUSLEY 1917-2003
Born and educated in Launceston, Cornwall, Charles Causley followed the tradition of his seafaring people and served in the Royal Navy from 1940 to 1946. His experiences on a destroyer and an aircraft carrier had a catalytic effect on him as a poet. 'It was Hitler who pushed a subject under my nose,' he wrote. 'I think the event that affected me more than anything else in those years was the fact that the companion who had left my home-town with me for the navy in 1940 was later lost in a convoy to Russia. From the moment I heard this news, I found myself haunted by the words in the twenty-fourth chapter of St Matthew: 'Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.' If my poetry is 'about' anything, it is this.'
Causley's Cornishness shows in his skillful use of verse forms and narrative strategies drawn from an oral folk tradition. A formally conservative poet, he was a master of the ballad told in a voice that is at once impersonal?the voice of the anonymous early balladeers?and unmistakably his own. Causley's seeming simplicity, like that of the early balladeers, can be misleading; his jaunty cadences, bis spry interweaving of ancient and modern diction, heighten the poignancy of elegies such as the ones printed here.
From 1947 to 1976 he taught at a school in Cornwall. He wrote many volumes of poems and several plays?some of each, with great success, for children.
