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Western Front

POETRY

THE SILENCE OF THE MOON

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read4.4K views

For Gerald Kelly

 

In 1918 W.B. Yeats published

a set of metaphysical essays

on the nature of being and art:

PER AMICA SILENTIA DE LUNAE.

The first sentence of one of the essays

reads as follows: ‘We make out of the quarrel

with others, rhetoric, but of

the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’.

 

***

 

The school I attended had been founded

by Henry VIII – or, rather, his fixer,

Thomas Cromwell – from some of the riches

acquired through the Reformation of the Church

and the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

Such schools were focussed on the training of clerks,

and their medium of instruction was Latin.

 

Some centuries later the Latin set text

we studied was Book II of Virgil’s AENEID,

in which the Greeks emerge from the wooden horse

to ravage the sleeping city of Troy

‘per amica silentia de lunae’,

in the friendly silence of the moon.

 

***

 

Despite the title the essays make no mention

of the ten-year siege of Troy or its fall.

Perhaps the title was to please his patroness,

Lady Gregory, another with

mystical leanings – for, like her, Yeats

believed in the divinity of the moon.

 

The Prologue to the essays was written

in May 1917. Yeats writes

of walking with a friend the summer before

in Calvados, Normandy, and how

the ideas in the essays were forming then.

Curious that a poet who could write

about ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’

makes no mention in prose of the young men

dead and dying on the Western Front

a couple of hundred miles away.

‘…out of our quarrels…’

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

INTO MY HEART

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.9K views

In a little less than two hour’s drive from here

I could be motoring through A.E. Housman’s

‘land of lost content’. Softly playing

on the radio is George Butterworth’s

A minor Rhapsody A Shropshire Lad,

its pianissimo opening chords

evoking Housman’s ‘blue remembered hills’.

 

From his boyhood home near Bromsgrove,

the poet could see the summit of Brown Clee Hill –

above the smoke of Kidderminster

that lies in-between. The opening line

of the first poem in A Shropshire Lad

begins ‘From Clee to heaven the beacon burns’.

 

I am not sure whether it is harmonies

like Butterworth’s and Ralph Vaughan Williams’,

and cadences like those of Housman and

Edward Thomas, that conjure for me,

immediately and movingly,

a prelapsarian England in which

my ancestors had no part, a country

that exists as if the Western Front’s

criminality – which murdered both

Butterworth and Thomas – had never been,

or whether what summons such nostalgia

is merely that sense of loss I feel about

my own life’s absences.

 

 

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POETRY

EXCEPTIONALISM

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.2K views

The Japanese Imperial Army’s

mistreatment of POWs

during World War II was a war crime.

The killing of Japanese civilians

in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

by the United States Army Air Force

was a geopolitical strategy.

 

Daily, on the tv screen, out of the sky

suffering comes: dust, flames, detritus,

outcries – and the living burdened, fleeing…

 

…Myanmar, Baghdad, Grozny, the fall

of Paris – long lines of people south

on the roads through the fields of the Beauce,

trying to scatter at the siren sound

of a Stuka bomber beginning its dive…

 

…as armies retreat or advance, casual

atrocities, private massacres

randomly uncovered, indicted,

transmogrified if necessary

by statecraft’s convenient amnesia…

 

I used to believe that if there had been

24/7 Live Updates from

No-Man’s-Land on the Western Front

or the VC tunnels in the forests

of Vietnam those conflicts would not have

lasted a week – but now I am not so sure

for someone, somewhere is gaining glory,

telling lies, making money out of this

the simple immorality of war.

 

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POETRY

TOWARDS A DEFINITION

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.6K views

Anti-Semitism is the demagogue’s

canard,  the resort of the populist,

the calculating racist’s dog whistle,

the opportunist’s bigotry, hatred of,

and prejudice against, Jewish people.

 

When Alfred Dreyfus was humiliated

on the Champs de Mars there were three hundred

Jewish officers in the French Army,

ten of them generals. The real spy,

Major Esterhazy, with official

connivance, died in his bed as Count

de Voilement at ‘Holmleigh’, 21

Milton Road, Harpenden, Hertfordshire,

 

Eventually exonerated,

after two trials and Devil’s Island,

Colonel Dreyfus served on the Western Front,

as did his son, Pierre. His granddaughter,

Madeleine, a Red Cross social worker,

frontline member of the French Resistance,

arrested by the French police, held

briefly by the SS at Drancy,

was murdered at Auschwitz.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.6K views

The Armistice was agreed at 5.10 –

in Foch’s personal railway carriage

– among the cigar and brandy fumes.

The Chancellories of Europe knew

thirty minutes later. Big Ben was rung

for the first time in four years and gas lamps

lit in Paris. There was dancing, and streamers.

 

Foch insisted the truce would not take effect

until 11.00  – ostensibly

so the news could be keyed and carried to

each trench and dugout on the Western Front.

 

Thousands of soldiers were killed that morning.

The last to die – at 10.59 –

was Private Henry Günther from Baltimore,

advancing with comrades in ignorance

through the wild woodland of the Argonne.

The division’s history records: ‘Almost

as he fell, the gunfire died away

and an appalling silence prevailed’.

 

 

 

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POETRY

PASSING THE PARCEL

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.5K views

i.m. Ron Durdey

 

Each time I walk or drive by the one storey

Edwardian sandstone building with its

daunting windows and an entrance for Boys

and another for Girls and Infants –

one of my alma maters, an All Age

Church of England school – a memory

will appear like a genie… It is Empire Day,

’51. Mr Youd, the Head Master,

takes the assembly. We sing, ‘I vow to Thee,

my country, all earthly things above,

Entire and whole and perfect…’ I whisper

something to a friend. ‘Stand on the mat!’

And I do but it is the wrong mat – not

the one outside his office where the rough boys

from the farms and the council estate wait

to be caned. He forgets me. He walks past

at break. ‘What’s your name?’ I tell him and see

he remembers and thinks carefully. ‘Go!

Count yourself lucky this time!’

 

I would like to think I had, at nine,

been mocking his imperial twaddle.

‘We may have lost India but…’ and knew

it was the wrong mat. Maybe I was sharing

my aunts’ views of him, his school peers:

toady, bully and a quarter master

corporal in Ceylon while their father

and step brothers were on the Western Front.

Perhaps the line ‘The love that makes undaunted

the final sacrifice’ made me think

of my father. Whatever it was

I had learned a lesson.

 

 

 

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