Somoshree Palit
SCENE I
A quiet night on the Western Front. The wintry winds gush in a harrowing whisper over bodies of soldiers, as indifferent to the shivering bodies as the bodies that had ceased all tremors and lay lifeless under the clear moonlight. Occasional gunshots heard. Snow fell in soft wisps over the dense solitude. Solitude at the war front is a dangerous thing.
Narrator : On either side of barbed fence,
Where falling snow at night condense-
As if the earth in peace immense,
Softly lulled in sleep intense,
The men of mortal hunt.
Quietly fell the Christmas snow,
Songs of war it did not know.
Aching limbs of friend or foe
Dreamt of home in trenches
All quiet on the Western Front.
The German trench. Soldiers can be seen sitting silent in the trench. A young boy of eighteen is seen bent over a piece of paper, writing.
Joel : O Momma dear, how have you been?
Sweet Momma, it’s been a year.
Over lands of Ypres, Somme and Marne,
Do you, your Joel hear?
O Momma here the copper sky.
Cannot but court the red,
That bejeweled lie on men who sigh,
Heroes when they are dead.
But if I die, sweet Momma dear,
Know that I would never yield.
l’d die for Germany without a fear
For flung from a German field.
Give my love to all, Momma,
That your gallant boy is well.
That your boy has sent you love, Momma,
Merry Christmas, yours, Joel.
Hans : Your words might in a Church be read
To rouse the boys at home.
And would you vouch for ones who ‘re dead
Decayed in the muds of Somme?
You may not, but I have seen
You scream when a shrieking shell
Fumes red with limbs all over the green
Marking our German hell.
Joel : O Hans should I write the truth
For all of the world to know
The ‘Roll of Honours’ gallant youth
Are kids left dying slow?
Of kids who smile at poppies bright
With nothing but wounds that ache,
The poppies know, and knows the night:
Those kids would never wake.
Do I write of maggots that feed a-fresh
On roads cobbled with worms and flesh?
Or how we envy the dead who cease;
And the dead envy living rats in cheese?
They said we’d be back for Christmas,
Back for Christmas from France.
Oh lovely war! Good ol’ fashioned war
They never said which Christmas, Hans.
Hans : Oh such a lovely war!
Smiling they wrote our lie
‘Aged Nineteen’, with our shield
Sent to war to die.
Joel peeps out of the trench, as the scene closes on the German trench, shifting to show the trenches of the British. Tommy, a boy of twenty. glides his wounded fingers over his fiancée’s picture.
Tommy : If I could trade the world my love,
In lieu for your gentle smile,
I would trade my death, my life, my love,
To kiss your eyes awhile.
My lips that brushed your burning blush
Has kissed those frightened eyes,
Of soldier-boys’ fading flush
The fears the world denies.
Sill would I return to you one day:
My beloved, my spring-time dove,
Can you hear me, from trenches faraway?
Merry Christmas, my love, fair love!
Branden : Hey Tommy, look at my cherubin smile,
O look at his face in glee,
O now would I exchange a thousand miles,
And a million furlongs of sea
To behold that face of angelic grace;
If the war would let me free.
Tommy : Such an angle, a sweet little child
Bright as a morning sun
That day I said in the barrage wild
”Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun'”.
It’s best that he died, my brother John,
He could not have borne the ring
Of spitfire shells on Christmas morn,
And the night when angels sign.
A buzz of voices heard. Soldiers in the trench grow restless, sensing probable danger. The scene shifts to the German Trench.
Hans : Joel! JOEL! Stay where you are,
Stay where you are, don’t leave!
Their guns don’t know it’s Christmas tonight
Their guns no carols believe.
Joel O Hans, Hans, pray, do glance,
The Brits in France with guns.
Look them in the eye, say you deny :
That they look not like German sons!
Look at their eyes, the darkling skies –
The similar eries, you’l see,
Those fall in rain, in agonized pain
When slain can set them free.
A Christmas bell is a shrieking shell
Flaming hell where laughter goes.
Behind our scar, we are soldiers from far,
But we are just children up close.
Joel walks out of the trench. A thousand guns point at him, threatening him with death. Joel sings, heedless of a probable death.
Joel : Stille Nacht, heileges Nacht,
Alles schläft, einsam wacht,
Nur das traute hochheilige Paar.
Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar,
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh!
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh..
The British Trench. Tommy looks out of the trench.
Tommy : It’s the night when the angels sing
Over the dead in sand!
O rebel angel, sing. pray sing.
Shattering the No-man’s land.
Tommy sees Joel, holding up a little Christmas tree. Behind him, Hans held up a placard, his childish handwriting read, “You no shoot, we no shoot.”
Branden : What if it’s a trap, a trap to kill?
The Huns haven’t won much ground.
What if their songs are a strategy still?
Their Christmas: our dying sound?
Tommy : The fat grey civilians at home
Said, “Go out and fight the Hun!”
O can’t you see them thanking God
That they’re over sixty-one?
All the roads to victory
Are flooded as we go
There’s so much blood to paddle through
That’s why we are marching slow.”
Tommy and Joel meet on the No-man ‘s land, half-scared, half-brave: tired children beneath the ever-waiting firmament. Their fears vent in songs.
Joel : Stille Nacht, heileges Nacht,
Alles schläft, einsam wacht…
Tommy : Round yon virgin mother and child,
Holy infant so tender and mild…
Joel : Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh…
Tommy : Sleep in heavenly peace.
Slowly, the waiting sky heaves a sigh of relief. The soldiers came out of their trenches, singing greeting, laughing, embracing. It was the night of holiness. It was the night of Christmas. It was the night when the Saviour was born.
Narrator : On dreary nights of a screaming shell,
When like rain the bullets fell –
When terrors convulsed rang their knell
The hell on earth mocked Satan’s hell
Ypres sounded as muffled scream.
On those bare bleached bones of boys
Who marched to death : those gagged convoys,
On their eaten brains and tortured voice
Blooms poppies over all warring noise
Over the merriest Christmas dream.
Those boys so young for home did crave:
Who were sent to kill and pretend to be brave.
Iron forged to an iron slave
Graved in death in an uprooted grave
Ypres still sounded as a scream.
Close your eyes and see those boys,
They make a snowman, their laughing voice
O hear, it is the very same noise
That brewed love to Mary’s joys!
Merry, merry Christmas dream.
Dawn broke. The soldiers were now no longer distinguishable as Germans or British. They laughed, played football, sang, and remembered their lives at home.The soldiers, the machines of war, were children once again.
Tommy : Of men who plan our mortal wars,
And smoke cigars in your old-age barn,
And tell that God loves dying kids-
God died with us in the trench of Marne.
Hans : I have seen men choke on Somme-nian mud
Carrion-flies dance on their rotten skin,
Dear Huns mouths with British guts and blood;
Your God in heaven is a soldier’s kin.
Branden : I have shuddered at what men can kill
For God, for land as big as Rome.
When you murder a boy crying still
Don’t you feel he ‘s crying for home?
Joel : I had a friend, a German friend,
At Ypres’ end he sat,
At Marne-ian trench he killed a French,
Stabbed his lungs, liver and fat.
And then he cried for the boy that died,
May be lied to the Verdun mud,
He began to pale at Passchendaele,
Down the vale of holy blood.
Old men of mind say “War is kind,”
Look behind at my German chum:
Aching he squirms, his grim confirms
That carrion worms ate his thumb.
He grins somewhere out in the air,
His auburn hair but poppies anew,
No verse or lull blooms off his skull,
”My pal, I died, so will you.”
A man in a trench, Hun, Brit, French
Has a nation, a notion, a name.
When aching they die like children cry-
When dead, we are all the same.
Explosions heard. The anxious soldiers hurriedly get back to their trenches. The dream was over. Those betrayed eyes screamed for justice -but who provides justice when God is dead?
Tommy : Merry Christmas
Joel : Frohe Weinachten.
The boys return to their trenches.
(Exeunt.)
SCENE II
The British Trench. Tommy reclines on the sand-bags, fiddling with his helmet. Gunshots, shells, explosions and screams rage all about him.
Narrator : Amid God help Germany’ and ‘God save the king’ ,
’God this’, ‘God that’, and ‘God the other thing’.
Amid war-cries, battalions and bugles death ring,
All birds forgot their very job was to sing
Choking on their breath.
And now screams a copper sky,
The calm for every aching eye:
”Politicians are honest men who lie
For Europe’s peace they war at Versailles.
Sent youth like moths to death.”
A lark gets entangled in the barbed wires. Tommy attempts to free its tangled, almost bloody wings, and succeeds. He smiles.
Tommy : O lark of skies, sweet skylark free,
As winds brush past your amber flight,
Sing to skies, the earth, the sea:
Fly higher and higher to the Heaven of light.
And ask of God who sits right there,
Of worms that eat up living skin apart,
He would not answer, he wouldn’t dare!
We love our crooked father with our crooked heart.
Gunshot. A groan, and silence.
SCENE III
The German trench. Artillery fires rage horridly on the Western Front. Screams rise and cover the air, as if suppliant to a deity that itself is victimized. Joel crouches down, hands over his ears, trembling. writhing in pain. The Western Front knew no mercy.
Joel : Christ! Christ! O why don’t they stop!
Why don’t they stop the murder of dead!
O God it hurts! Stop! Stop! Stop!
I wanna go home I don’t wanna be dead!
Shall I awake, and find all this a dream?
HELP! STOP THE NOISE! STOP IT! CEASE!!
O we cannot be made for this sort of pain!
O KILL ME KILL ME KILL ME PLEASE!”
Joel looks over his shoulder at the explosion just behind him, worsening his shell-shock
Out of the bullets, who is that born?
His eyes my eyes do meet…
Who smiles in pain on a warring morn,
Amidst the warring heat?
His blood is shed in a crown of thorn
Nail-marks glow on His feet.
Gunshot, a whimper, and silence.
Narrator : Close your eyes, and hear them still.
The countless graves and names they wrote.
Close your eyes, can you hear him sing?
That rifle shot him on his throat.
EPILOGUE
Five nails has killed the Prince of Peace Whose soldiers dead are children’s geist. Four shots had killed us children four And the last bullet was shot at Christ.
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