'Even the Last Rat and Last Kestrel Banished'

In his Vietnam War poems, R.L. Barth occasionally honors a kinship with soldier-poets who wrote of wars fought before he was born. Take “A Letter to the Dead”: 

“The outpost trench is deep with mud tonight.

Cold with the mountain winds and two week's rain,

I watch the concertina. The starlight-

Scope hums, and rats assault the bunkers again.

 

“You watch with me: Owen, Blunden, Sassoon.

Through sentry duty, everything you meant

Thickens to fear of nights without a moon.

War's war. We are, my friends, no different.”

 

First published in Looking for Peace (Abattoir Editions, 1985), it is collected again in Bob’s Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems (Broadstone Books, 2021). Several months ago he wrote a poem addressed to Blunden, as yet unpublished, titled “Edmund Blunden (1896-1974)”:

 

“A shepherd in a greatcoat (the MC

Appended, unacknowledged) you patrolled

Old battlefields, the trenches, no man’s land,

The rear, the transports, nature all despoiled,

The shattered houses, farms, and roadside shrines,

But most of all you celebrated: troops,

The comrades you remembered all your life.

You would not, could not, let the horror go,

Nor undermine affection for your friends.

I honor you for that. I understand.”

 

“MC” is the Military Cross, then the second highest (now third highest) military decoration awarded by the British Armed Forces. In World War I, Blunden saw continuous action from 1916 to 1918, and survived the fighting at Ypres and the Somme. His friend Siegfried Sassoon said Blunden was the Great War poet most obsessed with his memories of the Western Front. In November 1968, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Armistice, Blunden wrote in the Daily Express:

 

“I have of course wondered when the effect of the Old War would lose its imprisoning power. Since 1918 hardly a day or night passed without my losing the present and living in a ghost story. Even when the detail of dreams is fantasy, the setting of that strange world insists on torturing.”

 

Barth’s description of No Man’s Land on the Western Front, with “nature all despoiled,” echoes many lines in Blunden’s poems, including these from one of his finest, “Report on Experience” (Near and Far, 1929):

 

“I have seen a green county, useful to the race,

Knocked silly with guns and mines, its villages vanished,

Even the last rat and last kestrel banished―

     God bless us all, this was peculiar grace.”

 

The poem’s first line – “I have been young, and now am not too old” – recalls the King speaking in I Henry VI, Part 1, Act III, Scene 4: “When I was young, as yet I am not old.” Also, Psalm 37:25.