Song of the Guns

Few poems have ever been written under such dire circumstances. Gilbert Frankau composed "Song of the Guns" in the frozen mud of the Western Front, jotting down its first lines during a lull at the Battle of Loos while gunners slept like wounded animals beneath their artillery. He finished it in the trenches near Ypres, within sight of the ruined cathedral tower, with German shells screaming overhead into the ruined town. This is not war remembered and polished into something readable. This is war as it was lived: sleepless, terrified, and strangely beautiful in its devastation. The poem captures the mechanized horror of modern warfare, the bonds between soldiers who face death nightly, and the strange poetry that emerges when language must match the unprecedented violence of the twentieth century. Frankau wrote from the belly of the beast, and every line carries the weight of shrapnel and sound. For readers who want to understand what World War I actually felt like to the men who fought it, there are few documents as raw and essential as this.