FINALLY, we settled here, far were our journeyings, far,
Far as the mind, leaving the body, as lover leaving lover.
There was no elation in our hearts, setting out,
Our bows bursting between the gray sky and the surly sea.
We were not overjoyed, we who had lived in unreality,
Suspended between two worlds, suspended eternally
Between was and will be. Now
Was beyond us, there was no time for now,
Setting out, choosing neither certainty nor hope to brood on.
So begins the “Prelude,” the first section of the four-part “Durban Suite,” the opening poem in Donald Thompson’s 1945 Spring Sacrifice. The poem establishes one of the themes of the book: the speaker is a stranger in a strange land, residing in a liminal state, caught “between two worlds.”
The setting is a troop ship transporting British soldiers to the Middle East war zones. There is a sense of alienation and fatalism as “Dragged the days dead/Day upon day, and no relief but only the dip and surge/Of the ship held fast by a finger of foam, . . . .” Finally, the troop ship arrives at Durban, and the city viewed from the waterfront offers both relief and hope (“Raising tall buildings, like fingers in promise —- “ and the earlier mood shifts: “So sang hope, entering the harbor,/Singing a new song in a new land, . . . “
But the speaker realizes that this is a false hope as the war will destroy any sense of youth and innocence: “Disillusion/Dwells in the bone and breeds within the brain/That’s shackled.” However, in the concluding stanza he sees an optimistic post-war future represented by the image of the city, where “those same tall white fingers shall be raised/In benison.” He is confident that victory “will come, the time will come, {although] not without pain . . . .”
The second poem, “Tahag, 1942,” (the El Tahag camp in Egypt) brings out the pain of war alluded to in the previous poem. As the speaker arrives at the camp he feels “the shock/Of silence shape the horror in my skull; . . . ” Additional images further the atmosphere of horror: the camp portends “a maggot fate”; death is a “cloud of flies/Humming, that shrouds the corpse.” In “Poem in Hospital” the desert is an impersonal force that the individual cannot overcome: “Bitterness of stone and the coarse caress/Of sand fashioned us: under the bleak north/We laced our calcine armour.” Similar to Tahag, the speaker sees the wounded in the hospital being cared for by a sister. He recognizes that her “tenderness” and the wounded’s pain are interconnected (“ravelled in one thread”) but in the final analysis her gentle caring cannot overcome the pain of war and the dominance of the desert: “Your white, the alien soothing cool, shall pass . . ./Only the stone endures, only the sand.”
These poems introduce the motif of the overwhelming presence of the desert in its vast dominion and unfamiliarity, symbolized by the unrelenting glare of the sun and its counterpoint in darkness, the contrast between life and death, the transience of life and the eternal endurance of the sand and stone of the desert. These contrasting images are woven throughout most of his poems. One might say that some of the poems these are not war poems as such, but in fact the poems are brought about by war. The 25 poems in Spring Sacrifice comprise three basic patterns: some have a philosophical bent occasioned by war; some directly address the costs of war; some have a sense of hope, while others are more pessimistic.
The motif of the desert is elaborated in one of the longer poems, “Desert Voices.” Adam Piette has taken a close look at the poem, so I will not recapitulate his analysis here, but he avers that the poem “reads the desert as a place of absolutes. In the desert the soldier is assailed by two voices, two ‘creeds’ . . . These two spiritual tendencies – nostalgia for ordinary joys, and attraction to a hermit mysticism – are isolated and concentrated into opposing acts of imagination, both cultural cliches about desert temptation and spirituality” (Piette, 1995, 11-12). The poem, then, is not, at base, strictly about war, but about how the romanticized desert affects one’s understanding of the “real” desert where one finds oneself in war. Piette briefly notes that the poem goes further than just presenting the desert as a “stark contrast, a lying, brutal Manichean conflict between good and evil” (Ibid, 12). He writes that “The soldier, assailed by their influence, is also in contact with the ‘real’ desert, the desert of the war, . . . “ (Ibid). The final section of the poem alludes to the “real” desert stripped of the romantic notions: “Stark are the colors of that savage land, stark/As its creeds, the arid glare/Knifing under the eyelids, sun’s white blink/Shrivelling the sight’s thin string as one sharp truth/Shrivels the sense./ . . . the parched thought sucks limpid images/Making inert the will.” The experience of the “real” desert negates the false duality, leaving the individual as that “stranger in a strange land,” with no preconceived categories to negotiate his experience.
Even the title poem, “Spring Sacrifice,” only hints at war. The first two stanzas recount a myth the speaker remembers from his youth about a princess and her child fleeing from “fiery tendrils like a furnace.” She drops the child in what looks to be a magic pool, which closes over him. She then turns and “The pool followed her heels/Until it stood over all and the wind/Set it blowing before the not-now-burning hills.” As the speaker thinks back on the myth he realizes that in his youthful understanding “There was not only a death, but a creation/Also, a phoenix cycle.” But now, older, in time of war, he sees no rebirth or regeneration, only the death of innocents: “I have seen iron blossoms burgeon,/Consuming a child in their hatred, . . .”.
One could say that such desert poems as “Poem in Gratitude,” “Poem,” and “A Speech for Shepherds” are not really “war poems” as they do not directly express combat-related reality. There may be some truth to this assertion, but at the same time the poems reflect a soldier’s experiences brought about by war, the alienation from the environment and the self, the separation from home, the search for truth, the presence of death, the uncertainty of the future. These are no less the content of “war poems” than poems that are more explicit about the “gory details.” War is not only combat, destruction, and death.
That being said, there are a group of poems which do address more explicitly the costs of war. The first three stanzas of “Out of Blood, Build” begin in a pessimistic tone, in which the speaker appears to be writing after his death (or at least from a psychological space devoid of humanity): “I was young until in a sighing/Year my iron flowed over me and hardened./Sitting on a parched shore without shade,/Where in a world without depth the dry stones stand/Two-dimensional . . . ” He thinks about the deaths of all the other young men who “lie broken” and of the “thousands crushed” in war zones from Tobruk to Stalingrad to Tunis.
The third stanza continues the bitter tone when he asks of the post-war ceremonies of “annual bared heads in public parks” and “brass bands blaring”:
Can this compensate
For the spent youth, the skull, the orbit’s dark
Earnestness, where leaks no light of hope
Nor certainty.
The final stanza shifts to a sanguine plea to not let all the deaths be in vain. The speaker’s hope is that out of the carnage a new world can be created, and that this new world will be worth those who sacrificed their lives for the “living dream [that] outweighed the dying fact.” The complacent ceremonies will betray those who died in the search for a world “Where man and man may live together.” The stanza echoes the optimism of the concluding lines of “Durban Suite.”
Three other poems do not go into such a hopeful direction and describe more explicitly the costs of war. “Death’s Ease” portrays a wounded soldier at the point of death. The soldier falls to the ground with the “final freedom of relaxed/Muscle.” An eye on the upturned face stares with a look of “Wonder . . . that death could be/So easy which before had seemed so hard.” Facing death is hard; being dead is easy.
In what could be seen as a companion poem, and to me one of Thompson’s best, is “On the Relative Merit of Friend and Foe, Being Dead.” Again, the speaker observes a scene of death in the desert, two grinning fleshless skulls, scraped clean by the desert wind and sand. Like Hamlet’s apostrophe to Yorick’s skull, the speaker muses on the once-animate brains, “Whose convolutions intricately wrought/Diversity of pleasure, pain, fear, thought.” As he looks more closely he sees the earhole, which in life was “Fashioned to hoist disturbances of air,/To differentiate the shriek and crack/Of bombs . . . .” He then ponders the “shattered teeth,” “lips that pressed to kiss,” and the “eager eye/[which] assessed the sun’s light,…” The poem ends with the speaker’s realization that a search for the identity of these dead is fruitless, but that does not negate a sense of bewilderment and pity:
I found you half-buried in the sand, and bare
Hollow, dull as stone; beside you lay
Two helmets, peeled by the scavenging sun;
One theirs, one ours. But as to which you wore,
No indication.
There is a human desire to know who the dead are, to come to some sort of identification as a counterpoint to anonymity. There is an undercurrent of anxiety that the speaker could become one of the nameless and fleshless corpses buried in the desert sands. 2
Another poem concerns the effects of the horrors of war on the surviving soldiers, the witnesses. Piette writes, quite correctly, about “Dirge for Youth” that “Disgust with rotting corpses, personal fear, habitual exposure and a preference for death, rather than severe wounding: these, allied to the depersonalizing effects of army life, made mourning for strangers a foolish luxury” (Piette, 1995, 247). However, the poem goes further to describe the psychological effects of the war experience. The war dead are not “tragic” as they are at rest “In a quiet kingdom.” Rather, the survivors, the witnesses, are those who suffer. Although “young in years . . . [their] armoured hearts are old”:
They go now experience-eyed: at their shoulder
A nameless cobweb-dread from which there is no shelter. . . .
But youth now bears a broken stone in its breast
And the green rose with too great heat has burst
Monstrously, and the sap is dried.
The poems concluding the volume again illustrate the dichotomies evident in much of the book – the terrible costs of war and the hope for the future. The penultimate work, “Enter—A Murderer,” is a hybrid in three sections which integrates a narrative poem with a brief dialogue. The three stanzas of section I are a first-person narrative told from the point of view of what appears to be personified violence, a violence that is
innate to the human being. The speaker addresses those who want to deny that the capacity for violence and killing is within them: “But we know better!/I, who am that which you have made me, and you/Who created me to be the bitter/Friend, source and companion of your woe.”
In the second stanza, the theme of denial of responsibility and complicity continues. The speaker refers to the death of “a wide-eyed boy,” apparently a soldier, who, had he lived would have testified to the violence within. Instead, he says:
We killed
Him, you and I, between us: for he died
Because of us. He’d tell you, but he’s cold,
Clay-cold, and cold his word and stone his deed.
In the third stanza the speaker again challenges his “friends” rejection of humankind’s innate violence while proclaiming that he “must introduce myself.”
Section II of the poem is more pronounced about the speaker’s claim that violence is inescapably embedded “In your flesh” and “the marrow/Of your bones, . . . ” The capacity for violence is found “In the complacency of your chapel pew/In the staid convention of your bed,” and is found not just in the individual but is also intrinsic to society at large:
I am self-interest, I, and the goading need
Of economic law. Fear envy greed
And all barriers to love between man and man announce me.
Deny me now if you can for I speak
With the voice of hatred in war . . .
You carry me like a cancer in your sides
And the centuries and the circling tides
Of history conspire to pronounce me
DUX ET IMPERATOR.
Part III is entitled “Dialogue Between Murderer And A Soldier” and can be seen as a coda to the opening sections. A “soldier” opens this section by addressing the murderer:
We were content to live
In a small way, accepting war’s upheaval
As a seasonal malady, . . .
To be caught in the cycle is no concern
Of ours. Beyond our control the wheel
Spins its recurrent course.
The “murderer” responds with mockery, challenging the “soldier’s” attempt to deflect blame and responsibility and alludes to the soldier’s
Remorse? How quaint! A soothing sentiment
So apt and easy after the event! . . .
There’s no necessity
To pose. Admit you know no way to halt me
Nor desire it, preferring to exalt me.
The “soldier” concludes the dialogue:
We admit nothing, noting that the beast
Is in your bones. . . .
We see ourselves treading a knife-edge line
Parts pit and shame. . . .
The “soldier” tries to finesse the options. He stands on the “line,” perhaps common to all combatants, that of participating in the hell of violence and killing and the “shame” of guilt for doing so. He then asserts that this dichotomy can be purged by “a law that will save us in a word— . . . The law is this:/That thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” In the “soldier’s” mind the “law” can neutralize the dichotomy.
The final stanza, though, echoes the “soldier’s” earlier comment about the “wheel” which is beyond an individual’s control and again appears to absolve one of responsibility because of this lack of agency:
And neither you nor we can hope to stay
The motion nor to see the pattern whole.
At best, by love we hold your hate at bay,
Stand, and with dignity accept our lot.
This poem, indeed the whole of Spring Sacrifice, leaves us with a few questions which may not have a neat resolution (probably what Thompson intended). The poem condemns violence but at the same time condemns the excuses for making war. Can the Biblical injunction referred to, Mark 12:31, provide comfort for the injured? The dead? The sufferering? Is war a periodic aberration or is “the state of war” a permanent condition of humanity which erupts and recedes but is always present?
Donald Thompon’s poetic output and critical commentary are outweighed by the work of, say, Keith Douglas, Sidney Keyes, and Alun Lewis. But the best of Thompson’s poems can stand with theirs. Thompson’s work offers not only a unique perspective on desert warfare, but on war in general.
NOTES
1 Little is known of Thompson before, during, or after the war. An article in the Evening Chronicle, “War-Time Poems,” provides some basic information: “He has served throughout the war with a Survey Regiment of the T.A. (Gateshead), and his poems, which are published under the title of ‘Spring Sacrifice,’ are a record of his experiences in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, India, and Burma.”
An article a week later in the Newcastle Journal offers some more details: “A new and vital poet appears to have brought his light out from behind the proverbial bushel, judging by the very favourable comments his first volume ‘Spring Sacrifice’ . . . has evoked from well qualified circles. Mr. Thomas, was at Tynemouth School [Newcastle] prior to entering the bank [Martin’s Bank, Newcastle], was a member of the Survey Regiment (T.A.), Gateshead, so was mobilized at the outbreak of the War. He has since served in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, India, and Burma and is now due for repatriation.” There is some ambiguity about exactly which Survey Regiment he served in. The 3 Survey Regiment was deployed to the Middle East, as the article notes, while the 4 (Durham) Survey Regiment was formed in Gateshead, Tyne, and Wear [see https://ra39-45.co.uk/units/survey-regiments]. In a brief biography in Oscar Williams’ The War Poets Thompson is noted as a “Gunner, British Army” (473). His specific deployment is of no great moment, only that it makes tracking his service record virtually impossible.
An article in the Shields Daily News two years later, in 1947, shows that Thompson’s poetry had some staying power: “Tynemouth’s soldier poet, Donald Thompson, will be speaking some of his own verse at the monthly meeting of the Priory Theatre Club . . . It may be remembered that Donald Thompson’s book of poems, Spring Sacrifice, was widely acclaimed by critics when it was published in 1945.”
In his brief 1945 review J.A. Chapman simply states that some of the poem’s phrases are too abstruse (“what does that convey to one’s seeing mind?”) while he also notes the “powerful description of the North African desert.”
2 Other poems depict the image of the “deserted” dead. For example, T.W. Ramsey’s poem “Eighth Army”:
We ploughed the sand with shell and burning bomb
And found few bones there where we left our own
Bleached by the drifting detritus of stone,
Bright in their busy many-fingered tomb.
Or Sidney Keyes’ “The Wilderness”:
The rock says “Endure.”
The wind says “Pursue.”
The sun says “I will suck your bones
And afterwards bury you.”
Or Keith Douglas’ “Dead Men”:
the dead men, whom the wind
powders till they are like dolls;
For the dead, of course, there is no meaningful difference between “the desert” or, say, “the jungle.” In each, the individual can be subsumed into something vast, erasing any sense of self. Both are alien environments, extreme contrasts to “home” and identity. The only palpable difference would be that in the desert the corpse dessicates, while in the jungle it putrefies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chapman, J. A. The Cambridge Review. Vol.67, 7 June 1945, p.450.
Douglas, Keith. “Dead Men,” in Second World War Poems, edited by Hugh Haughton. Faber and Faber, 2004, pp. 56-57.
Keyes, Sidney. “The Wilderness,” in The Collected Poems of Sidney Keyes, edited by Michael Meyer, Henry Holt and Company, 1947, p. 110.
“North Country Notes,” “New Poet,” Newcastle Journal. 18 December 1945, No. 31,027, p. 2.
Piette, Adam. Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry 1939-1945. Papermac, 1995.
Ramsey, T.W. “Eighth Army,” in Poems of the War Years, edited by Maurice Wollon, Macmillan, 1948, pp. 124-125.
“Round the Town,” Shields Daily News. 27 February 1947, no. 27,414, p. 2.
Thompson, Donald. Spring Sacrifice. John Lane/The Bodley Head, 1945.
“War-Time Poems,” Evening Chronicle [Newcastle upon Tyne]. 11 December 1945, no. 21,713.
Williams, Oscar, editor. The War Poets. The John Day Company, 1945.