E.A.Mackintosh

On the peace memorial in the Old Steine Gardens, Brighton, is the name of E.A.Mackintosh, a soldier poet born here and cut down near Cambrai in 1917.

Grandson of the doughty Nonconformist preacher Dr Guinness Rogers, he won a St Paul's scholarship at Brighton College and went to Oxford as a classical scholar at Christ Church. He had been there two years when the war came, and in the summer of 1916 he won the Military Cross.

He came home wounded, and while training cadets at Cambridge became engaged and resolved to settle down in New Zealand after the war.

But the thought of France and the men he had left out there was strong within him, he could hear the roar of shells, he saw his comrades falling, and he wrote a poem longing to be back with them:

'The dead men's voices are calling, calling, And I must rise and go.'

 

He wrote a poem on the death of one of his men in which he addresses the soldier's father, saying that he, his officer, was wrung to the heart to remember how fifty such men who followed and trusted him had seen him with their dying eyes and held him while they died.

 

He went back, and in the autumn of 1917 he wrote to one who loved him:

 

'God knows, my dear, I did not want to rise and leave you so,

But the dead men's hands were beckoning, and I knew that I must go.

The dead men's eyes were watching, lass, their lips were asking too

We faced it out and paid the price - are we betrayed by you ?

But you'll forgive me yet, my dear, because of what you know,

I can look my dead friends in the face as I couldn't two months ago.'

 

He could look his dead friends in the face, and in a month he was with them, falling in battle near Cambrai, one more of that gallant little band of poets whose genius was crushed in the wheels of war, but whose spirit lives on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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