My uncles, John Gunn Seville and Arthur Seville, item 1

Edit transcription:

...

Transcription saved

Enhance your transcribing experience by using full-screen mode

Transcription

You have to be logged in to transcribe. Please login or register and click the pencil-button again

New Song of War Recalls

Horrors of Gallipoli

By John S. Heffernan

Long ago Pegasus failed me, and I descended

from the heights of poetry to the plain of prose.

However, this the become my rule, the once

a year if I found the right poem, I might pub-

lish if in ths column. Mr. John Seville has

sent me the right poem. It comes to me at a

time when there is a possibility of war, and

once more Hibernian and Scpttish Gael may

be brigaded with English lads for service on the

field of blood. So here, in this column of

prose is a really splendid poem-it belongs with

Davis' "Fontenoy" and Kipling's war verses.

An Epic of the Tenth (Irish) Division. 1915

The hail is beating crisply on the northern

window panes;

The muffled streets are quiet now as frozen

country lanes;

The ragged clouds fly, black and torn,

across a sky of gray;

It minds me of that time, when on the

Beschik range we lay.

We had fought the Turk at Suvla, though

the odds were ten to one;

We had held that strip of sea-shore, with

all hope of victory gone.

And it wasn't till long after that we

learned the awful cost,

When our death-toll read, "Gallipoli-six

thousand here were lost"!

Well, they shipped us from that sandy hell

of flies and thirst and blood,

To a camp outside Salonika, a rain-swept

hill of mud.

We came weak and sick and war-worn

from that windy hell-hot plain,

And the boys went down by dozens in that

cold and lashing rain.

We were joined by drafts from Blighty-

a thousand men, or more,

Till we mustered seven thousand (it was

twelve not long before).

Then away through Macedonia, o'er the

Serbian table-land,

To where the swift Vodena flows, and the

Beschik Mountains stand.

We climbed those tangled ranges, till we

reached their highest steep,

And a great plain lay before us, empty

far as eye could sweep.

As with stones we built our sangars, the

snow began to fall

Till valley, plain and mountain lay 'neath

a frozen pall.

We had neither tents nor blankets to screen

us from the cold

And the suffering on those mountain-tops

will never all be told.

It grew colder yet, and colder, with blind-

ing sleet and snow.

We'd a thousand frost-bite cases when it

reached "eighteen below."

A quarter-million Austrians swept up

against us then.

And for three mad days we held them with

five thousand half-mad men!

They blew the hills to splinters with their

heavy long-rang guns-

Our shells were eighteen-pounders, and

theirs were almost tons!

We spent our ammunition; then with bay-

onet and butt

We fought them, as they drove us ever

backward, foot by foot.

Then, in the Dhedli Pass, once more we

closed our shattered ranks,

But we couldn't hold them longer, they

were swinging round our flanks.

So 'twas back to Salonika, to the shelter of

the fleet,

With our frozen ears and fingers, and our

bare and bloody feet.

Though the world has long forgotten it, I'm

on those hills again

When I hear the hail come crackling on

the northern window pane.

JACK SEVILLE

Is suffering the soul of song? We all love

peace, but somehow from that remote hour

when a warrior bard wrote the Song of Roland,

to the present hour, it is the song of war that

stirs the human heart.