Oorspronkelijke Nederlandse tekst SIEGFRIED SASSOON ABOUT THE MENIN GATE
Oorspronkelijke Nederlandse tekst
Next text is an English translation from the book "De troost van de schoonheid" ("The consolation of the beauty") of Piet and Wim Chielens (1996 / page 9-10). Thanx to Dominiek Dendooven for the original English text of the poem "On Passing the New Menin Gate" of Siegfried Sassoon.
(...) I don't remember what I've answered, only that I was searching feverishly the words of the poem "On Passing the New Menin Gate". Because Siegfried Sassoon feeled exactly the same when he stood between the mass on 24 July 1927, the day that they inaugurated the (Menin) Gate. "Is there really nobody of the thousands present here who want to scream 'scandalous'?". One day later it became:
Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride
Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,-
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.
'Their name liveth for ever,' the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.
Sassoon wrote a first copy of a poem about the Menin Gate (this "pile of peace-complacent stone") on 25 July 1927 in his hotel room in Brussels, and finished it some months later in London.
I don't believe that an important collection of poems or publication was published during his life. Sassoon was and stayed alone with his rage. (...)
Piet Chielens
Read also next articles about the glorification of war in Ieper:
*) Glorification of war in Ieper (Ypres)
*) Menin Gate bullshit
*) Thoughts from Hill 62