Jeremy Hooker. (Born 1941)
I’m assuming this poem was written to commemorate the Hundredth Anniversary of the First Day of the Somme offensive in 1916. When i was at school we learnt the statistics; 60,00 casualties, 20, 00 of them dead. In one morning, between 7.30am and “lunch time”. By the end of the battle, which got them nowhere, when the snows closed it down in November, British, Empire and allied troops had suffered over half a million casualties.
While historians might debate the significance of the battle and the actual casuality figures, (57,470 of which 19,240 died). The image of men lined up in rows and ordered to advance into machine gun fire was a dark shadow on the collective imagination, made more terrible by the fact they were fighting in a ‘war to end wars’.
Hooker shows how effective a poem can be without the poet having to resort to distorted syntax, complex rhyme schemes or obscure allusions. The tragedy is summed up …’the old men/that we knew and the young men/we did not.’ The poem also deftly suggests a difference between then and now in its play on ‘divisions.’
The poem is taken from Hooker’s excellent ‘Word and Stone’ (Sheearsman 2019).
