WAR, WAR, WAR
To me the following "Service Selection" is the most haunting of all of Robert's wartime ballads. The verse served as the foreword of "Rhymes of a Red Cross Man" published in 1916. War is Hell! and Service brings this home brilliantly in this ballad of a weary Red Cross worker fighting fear and the horrors of battle.
"Foreword" along with many other of Service's wartime ballads can be found on an extraordinary record entitled "War, War, War" and set to music by recording artist "Country Joe McDonald". This classic recording is now available on CD and is a must for any Robert Service fan. You may order the CD by going to Country Joe's site at:
http://www.dnai.com/~borneo/howto.htm
As an introduction to the ballad the following was taken from Service's autobiography "Harper of Heaven" published in 1948.
"Despite the usefulness of my work I began to long for something more exciting, so volunteered for outpost duty. We had several posts close to the First Aid Stations, and kept cars there day and night. There were two of us to a car and we were relieved every ten days. The life was rough, for we had to sleep in our clothes on the floor of ruined cottage or in a tent or dugout. We were exposed to shell-fire, at least to a direct hit, so that as we slept we felt we were in the hands of Providence. Usually we resigned ourselves on a bad night of bombing, thinking that if a shell did get us we would never be any the wiser. Soon the cannonading ceased to keep us awake; it was the rats that really annoyed us. A rat running across one's chest can feel as heavy as a sheep, and one of my best laughs was to see a big grey one chewing the beard of and old poilu by my side.
The night driving was the worst. We could not show the faintest light and the roads were pitted with shell holes. It was nerve-racking, crawling on low speed, with a badly wounded man along those coal black devastated roads. Once I had a soldier die in my car-but I prefer to forget that. There is so much I want to forget. Those who went through the horrors of war never want to talk about it. But if there was slaughter, there was also laughter. We would laugh a lot, mostly about nothing and we became very callous, grumbling if brains or guts soiled the car. We were sorry for the poor devils but saw so many they were like shadows"
Foreword
I've tinkered at my bits of rhymes,
In weary, woeful, waiting times:
In doleful hours of battle din,
Ere yet they brought the wounded in;
Through vigils of the fateful night,
In lousy barns by candle-light;
In dug-outs, sagging and aflood.
On stretchers stiff and bleared with blood;
By ragged grove, by ruined road,
By hearths accurst where love abode;
By broken altars, blackened shrines,
I've tinkered at my bits of rhymes.
I've solaced me with scraps of song
The desolated ways along;
Through sickly fields all shrapnel-sown,
And meadows reaped by death alone;
By blazing cross and splintered spire,
By headless Virgin in the mire;
By gardens gashed amid their bloom,
By gutted grave, by shattered tomb;
Besides the dying and the dead,
Where rocket green and rocket red,
In trembling pools of poising light,
With flowers of flame festoon the night,
Ah, me! by what dark ways of wrong
I've cheered my heart with scraps of song.
So Here's my sheaf of war-won verse,
And some is bad and some is worse.
And if at times I curse a bit,
You needn't read that part of it;
For through it all like horror runs
The red resentment of the guns.
And you yourself would mutter when
You took the things that once were men,
And sped them through that zone of hate
To where the dripping surgeons wait;
And wonder too if in God's sight
War ever, ever can be right.
Yet may it not be, crime and war
But effort misdirected are?
And if there's good in war and crime,
There may be in my bits of rhyme,
My songs from out the slaughter mill;
So take or leave them as you will.
From Rhymes of A Red Cross Man By Robert W. Service, 1916
"And wonder too if in God's sight
War ever, ever can be right."
