One for Remembrance Day. Sir Herbert Edward Read (1893-1968) was best known as an art historian, but was also a poet and literary critic. He had served in the First World War, attaining the rank of captain, and won both the MC (Military Cross) and DSO (Distinghuished Service Order) for ‘conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty’. This piece captures the mood of the poets at the outbreak of the Second World War, which was very different from the jingoistic enthusiasm that greeted the First, being more an acceptance of necessity, of the fact that sometimes good people must do bad things to stop bad people doing worse, all tempered by a weary disillusionment, memorably summed up in C. Day Lewis’s terse quatrain: ‘It is the logic of our times/No subject for immortal verse/That we who live by honest dreams/Defend the bad against the worse’. Of course, at the outset of the war the world had yet to realise just how much worse the worse could be.

To a Conscript of 1940

A soldier passed me in the freshly fallen snow,
His footsteps muffled, his face unearthly grey:
And my heart gave a sudden leap
As I gazed on a ghost of five-and-twenty years ago.

I shouted Halt! and my voice had the old accustom’d ring
And he obeyed it as it was obeyed
In the shrouded days when I too was one
Of an army of young men marching

Into the unknown. He turned towards me and I said:
‘I am one of those who went before you
Five-and-twenty years ago: one of the many who never returned,
Of the many who returned and yet were dead.

We went where you are going, into the rain and the mud:
We fought as you will fight
With death and darkness and despair;
We gave what you will give – our brains and our blood.

We think we gave in vain. The world was not renewed.
There was hope in the homestead and anger in the streets,
But the old world was restored and we returned
To the dreary field and workshop, and the immemorial feud

Of rich and poor. Our victory was our defeat.
Power was retained where power had been misused
And youth was left to sweep away
The ashes that the fires had strewn beneath our feet.

But one thing we learned: there is no glory in the deed
Until the soldier wears a badge of tarnish’d braid;
There are heroes who have heard the rally and have seen
The glitter of garland round their head.

Theirs is the hollow victory. They are deceived.
But you my brother and my ghost, if you can go
Knowing that there is no reward, no certain use
In all your sacrifice, then honour is reprieved.

To fight without hope is to fight with grace,
The self reconstructed, the false heart repaired.’
Then I turned with a smile, and he answered my salute
As he stood against the fretted hedge, which was like white lace.

Herbert Read