Thomas Hardy: Channel Firing

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The British Grand Fleet sails for Scapa Flow in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I: British naval photograph, 1914; image by Wildsurmise, 7 February 2006

That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,

And broke the chancel window-squares,

We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome

Arose the howl of wakened hounds:

The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,

The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No;

It’s gunnery practice out at sea

Just as before you went below;

The world is as it used to be:

“All nations striving strong to make

Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters

They do no more for Christés sake

Than you who are helpless in such matters.

“That this is not the judgment-hour

For some of them’s a blessed thing,

For if it were they’d have to scour

Hell’s floor for so much threatening....

“Ha, ha. It will be warmer when

I blow the trumpet (if indeed

I ever do; for you are men,

And rest eternal sorely need).”

So down we lay again. “I wonder,

Will the world ever saner be,”

Said one, “than when He sent us under

In our indifferent century!”

And many a skeleton shook his head.

“Instead of preaching forty year,”

My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,

“I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”

Again the guns disturbed the hour,

Roaring their readiness to avenge,

As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

King Alfred's Tower in Brewham, Somerset, near Stourhead, Wiltshire. View of the entrance from the southeast: photo by Interesting wiki, 7 November 2007



Camelot: Gustave Doré, illustration in Lord Alfred Tennyson: Idylls of the King, 1868; image by Holger Thölking, 2 April 2006

Ground view of Stonehenge, Wiltshire, with two farm carts, two horses and men: photographer unknown, c. 1885; image scan by Moonraker, 16 June 2011

10th Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force, marches past Stonehenge, winter 1914-1915: photographer unknown (Library and Archives Canada)

Thomas Hardy: Channel Firing, April 1914, from Satires of Circumstance, 1914