The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [351]
Took pain away. I too was given grace
To know unknowing. I knew not my name
No name of any thing in that dark place.
I stared indifferent at the stumps of wood
And stumps of flesh and metal. All was one.
The man beside me rattled in his blood.
He coughed and died. And I knew I was done.
CALLING NAMES
Little scrubbed boys stand stiff. Their names
Are called. Archer and Bates. Castle and Church.
Adsum they pipe. Adsum. Adsunt. Young Field
Stands next to Devon Minor, Green, and Hill,
Meadows and Nuttall. They smell clean,
Soapy and damp, through ink and chalk and dust,
And polish. Outside English sun
Muffled in English cloud, rests on the panes
Of mud-smeared English windows. So to the end.
Waterstone. Wellwood. Scrape of chairs. They sit.
Scratch with their pens the tale of Agincourt.
The leering lords who promulgate the laws
Of arcane study secrets, call names too.
Answer, what are you? Boy, get your names right
Or you’ll be beaten. Say, what are you, boy?
If you don’t answer you’ll be beaten worse.
A worm, a maggot? Those were last week, boy.
A smell, a scapegoat, a smashed snail, a toad
A broken teacup? Now I’ll beat you, boy.
You still know nothing, get it wrong, you cur
You bumboy. Drop your trousers, bend
Over this chair, and whilst I slash the rod,
Say after me I’m null. I’m nothing. I’m
Zilch, nichts, don’t wince, but bear it like a man.
And now, in a French field, the bugle sounds.
Shaven and scrubbed and polished, they salute
The First Eleven and the First Fifteen.
Lined neatly up for battle, hear their names,
Answer the roll call. All these were my men.
Smiling gold Fletcher, eager Billy Gunn,
Knight with long shanks and curly-headed Smith
Shone, full of purpose, and marched out to fight.
What are they now? Names on a marble slab
In a school chapel. Names on double disks,*
One red for bleeding flesh, one green for earth
In which the flesh is scattered, smeared and mixed
With other flesh, and lost. Names written out
On telegrams and letters, which strike at
The hearts of waiting women, hearing fists
Knock on the door they daren’t unlock but must.
I learned them all with gladness, at the start.
I knew them all, the fearful and the bright
Impulsive boys and canny men I knew
And named and named. My head is packed with names.
Names of dead men. I cannot learn the live
Names that come late, boys to replace the boys
Who marched away.
They come, they go, they smile, they frown. I guard
My mind’s door. Today they stand and smile
Numbered and nameless. And they march away.
And I count up more boys and send them on.
TRENCH NAMES
The column, like a snake, winds through the fields,
Scoring the grass with wheels, with heavy wheels
And hooves, and boots. The grass smiles in the sun
Quite helpless. Orchard and copse are Paradise
Where flowers and fruits grow leisurely, and birds
Rise in the blue, and sing, and sink again
And rest. The woods are ancient. They have names
Thiepval, deep vale, La Boisselle, Aubépines,
Named long ago by dead men. And their sons
Know trees and creatures, earth and sky, the same.
We gouge out tunnels in the sleeping fields.
We turn the clay and slice the turf, and make
A scheme of cross-roads, orderly and mad
Under and through, like moles, like monstrous worms.
Dig out our dens, like cicatrices scored
Into the face of earth. And we give names
To our vast network in the roots, imposed
Imperious, desperate to hide, to hurt.
The sunken roads were numbered at the start.
A chequer board. But men are poets, and names
Are Adam’s heritage, and English men
Imposed a ghostly English map on French,
Crushed ruined harvests and polluted streams.
So here run Piccadilly, Regent Street
Oxford Street, Bond Street, Tothill Fields, Tower Bridge
And Kentish places, Dover, Tunbridge Wells
Entering wider hauntings, resonant,
The Boggart Hole, Bleak House, Deep Doom and Gloom.
Remembering boyhood, soldier poets recall
The desperate deeds of Lost Boys, Peter Pan,
Hook Copse, and Wendy Cottage.