CLOSING THE BOOK
BY
JOHN GILHAM
© John Gilham 2001
for my grandfather
52290 A.V. Gilham, Sergeant, RAMC
and did you, as I did
hunched in the driving rain
see rainbows over Passchendaele
a trick of the light, a trick of God?
when do His promises come true?
I imagine it to
be flat
I imagine the
ridges to be like
the eskers
around York,
hardly rising
above the plain
and sometimes
bearing a village, or a church
there will be
woods squared off by tracks and ditches
and ruled
fields with crosses in straight lines
over eighty
years, imagination blends
with the
memories of those who were there
with the
pictures, the poems,
and the
collective, conscious
memorialization
of the death of millions
and their dead
now our dead, our dead now theirs
still, we bring
the war home -
my grandfather,
yours
still those
elderly spinsters of my childhood
mourning their
unlost virginity
and cradling
who knows what loneliness
the great Home
on the hill now empty
all its
cripples dead at last
so we don't
have to pass by and remember
and yet we do.
that war above all
hits home here.
our eyes still weep
our wonder
still grows, appalled,
and the
agonised still cry out -
for
understanding, and relief
it does not
fade, nor become veiled.
the Holocaust
was not,
or not in the
same way, our holocaust
Passchendaele
was, and Ypres, and Vimy Ridge
our genocide,
or suicide, was on the Somme
and now our
images are mud, and poppies
and a hand
reaching for the butterfly
snared on the
wire
if I were ever
asked to show
what wound most
scars this country's soul
I would show this.
East Yorkshire 26th November 1997
could it be anywhere?
one field is like another,
one shell-shocked stream impassable
as any other to men weighed down
with rifles, gas-masks, sandbags, shovels;
and this mud not less than Flanders mud;
blood here not less bloody;
where to be dead is just as dead.
imagination furnishes the battlefield.
is there a holiness of place?
what sanctifies this tump, that bridge,
this Mount of Olives, that Passchendaele?
and what invests these lines of beet, or wheat,
these stunted vines, that oak, with meaning,
if not memorials we build there?
there are no crosses in these fields,
no church or temple, roadside plaque,
no weight of tears.
but for that, it could be anywhere,
but for that.
Ypres 28th November 1997
No doubt the richness of this earth:
fields greening with new wheat,
fields red with cabbages, piles of beet, bone coloured,
and marrows left to rot like severed limbs.
A wet, fertile soil; and where the sun
catches water standing in ruts and rows,
(deep enough to hide a body in),
they flash explosion-silver;
wet grass between the graves,
peppered with points of light:
"Soldiers of the Great War - Known Unto God."
Stand now where the towers of Ypres, the spire of
Passchendaele,
are the horizon's span
and know the space it takes to fire a shell,
draw lines on a map
and throw a million lives away.
Poplars grow, farms and houses rise again,
wheat turns toward summer.
The dead stay dead.
From this rich land, "little Belgium",
the lorries spread across Europe,
to England, Germany, Sarajevo,
to markets where some still mourn
the father whom they never knew,
but "Known unto God".
forget the midnight walk that brought us here
and the years survived, stretching back like
duckboards,
uneven, shattered, avoiding shell-holes;
we are going over the top.
logistics matter, but not now;
how we got here, how we're burdened,
what we leave behind, and with whom we go
are all irrelevant; the acid taste is now.
courage is it, or just the next step?
do we bare our breasts or duck and weave,
drown in the mud, hang in the wire,
or engage hand to hand with .....what?
and do we live after,
free of everything but the wounds of fear
the scars of passage, the smell of death?
your memory was
not where I expected it to be
not on the
approach to Passchendaele
not where McRae
wrote of poppies
nor, marching
through with the November ghosts
in the market
square at Ypres
no, but here at
Bridge House,
looking back
across the years
across the
waste, where, six to a stretcher
you carried
each wounded, mutilated shade
of what was
once a man, borne from hell,
back to where
the roads began, and healing,
restored,
perhaps, to death in life.
you were here.
in front, a
little stream it cost five hundred men to cross;
behind, the
dead city, and here, dead in these graves
your men, your
mates, blokes you knew
the ghosts you
kept in silence to your grave -
an
unacknowledged loss from round the heart
born 1898
died, nearly, in '17
and packed his kit for good in '89
when the walls crumbled all over Europe
he had fought for some Freedom
however they defined it
he had worn, with some pride,
the medals they gave
he had mourned, quietly, behind his eyes
the blokes he knew who'd died
beside him, or in his arms
he had been gentle, all his life
with those who had known fear -
and he would never touch a strawberry
for him, the treat of cream, fresh fruit
was crossed with images of death
the moist, torn flesh caused him to weep,
and then to scream
loud in the summer night
the burden of grief, borne all this century
lightens, does it, as its bearers die,
remembrance becomes academic, does it,
now that no-one mourns their son or husband here
and those too, who mourn their fathers
are fewer every year
the wreaths "To my dear Dad"
the poppies by a name, will disappear
and then these children's children,
will pay visits to some other place of death
and these neat lawns, off the curriculum,
straggle to forgetfulness
the Last Post will sound for the last time
and even Flanders close the book at last?
(the Vietnam
war memorial, Washington D.C.)
with no flags,
no razzamatazz, no ranks, no precedence
here, in the
angle between Washington and Lincoln
the names of
arrogance's bitter legacy
glimmer in the
moonlight, traced with the fingers,
kissed with the
lips, prayed for with the hearts
of all those
who on this ordinary April night
late, chill,
the moon full,
grieve here
their loss of innocence
and I, from a
generation who marched against this war
who saw beyond
the Mekong mud the fields of Europe
and at My Lai
the Holocaust come round again
thirty years on
and thirty years on and thirty years on
multiply out
the names, the lives, the web of war
(Vietnam War Memorial, Washington D.C.)
The book records that two men bore my name, and took it
to Vietnam.
Both from the same New England town
they were born two years apart, stayed so in death
and now are spaced apart on this black wedge
who in life, I do not doubt, were kin.
My candle is for them -
how else make real the lists of names
beyond the remembering crowd's tumultuous hush,
the press of unrelated people, the faces in the dark,
each one a name I do not know.
Tonight, the moon rides over Virginia,
and columns of no more than air, blocks of granite
and this calm within the city, make of this simple
thing
a cathedral where, alone and alien, I mourn my
brothers.
there are visions, and re-visions
and we begin to see, not clearly
but across a landscape dashed with showers,
splashed with sunlight
a sketch, pencilled in the haze of distance
of what might be a destination
there are advances and retreats
but overall, peacefully,
building a bridge here, filling a trench there
and by sowing crops
(which very action is a kind of promise)
we build a country we can grow in
reaching towards a city
that might be home
Eighty years after the end of the third battle of
Ypres, (Passchendaele) the wreaths of poppies still lie thick around the Menin
Gate in Ypres, which commemorates and lists the tens of thousands of missing
soldiers whose remains were never found. Most wreaths are from regiments,
councils, official bodies. A few are not:
In Remembrance of Cpl. Nathan Coucill from
Charlotte, the daughter you never saw, and from
all your grandchildren and families.
To my dear Dad
In Memory of Grandad, killed in action June 1916,
Uncle Freddie, killed in action 6 November 1918.
and Dad, who also served, died 1978.
The simple inscription on a gravestone in Vladslo
German Cemetery, near Ypres:
HIER RÜHT IN GOTT
UNSER LIEBER SOHN UND BRUDER
JOHANNES ABELS
I sometimes think that a true understanding of these
tells me all I will ever need to know about war, and the pity of war.