The First World War was exponentially more death inflicting than any war before. Led by a small corps of professional officers, the war was nevertheless fought by civilians with little training, and infantry on all sides bore the brunt of the conflict in fields of fire so deadly that men were huddled into trenches for months at a time and died by the thousands in efforts to rout the enemy from the same sort of dug-out earth works that were the only miserable shelter from machine gun and artillery fire. Between armies the no-man’s land was often narrow, shell pocked and bare of cover. The airplane, the tank, the submarine were much glamorized and written about technological innovations that were vainly deployed to try to overcome the stalemate, but the slaughter went on seemingly without end or hope. In the following poems, my son, Joseph Hugh Kitchens III, displays his poetic vision of what the war was like. -Editor
Dedicated to Wilfred Owen
We are the exhausted men,
We are the depleted men
The spent and discarded shells of men,
Struggling here, not for worldly power or fame,
But for six feet of ground
“Over the top!” Its words we’ve all heard a thousand times before,
Know us, know we lived, we loved, we laughed and cried, hoped, and died.
The Daring Leap
Altimeter shot,
Engine clucking and sputtering,
Wings folding and fumbling,
The spinning making my stomach all a’grum’lin’,
Black smoke through the air all a’bum’lin’,
There’s nothing for it but to leap!
Never you mind that I was only 8&1/2 feet off the ground.
The Tiny Bird
A tiny bird stood on a branch in no man’s land,
Where the mud is weaker than flan
And the skeletons of trees reach up like old turkey bones,
“Life, sweet life, where have you gone? Please come back.”
The tiny bird said,
but only the moldy dead were audient.
Well done, Mr. Kitchens! Paul Fussell’s “The Great War and Modern Memory,” a powerful work steeped in the poets and poetry of WWI, remains one of my favorite books. It should be required reading for anyone who hopes to understand the twentieth century.
Thank you Mr. Lamplugh.
I’ve not read Fussel’s work but I can tell from what I read about it that it’s insightful, thank you for recommending it.
I’m trying to de-glamorize I suppose the image of WW1. I respect the people involved as people and as heroes of their countries, they were. One big problem the poets and literati of the time faced was that every letter going home got sanitized, partially as a necessary precaution in case it fell into enemy hands, (a real concern, spies were being systematically used by everyone involved), and partially to intentionally hide how bad it truly was.
I figure now that I can look on it without fear of censorship, I can tell the world in my own poetic way what it was actually like, not the image of it that poets and propagandists (moving pictures propaganda teams started being a thing early on in ww1) tried to show.