Spike Milligan 'The Soldiers at Lauro'

                                                     Young Are Our Dead 

                                                    

                                 (Terrence)  Spike Milligan,born in India in 1918, most famous as a comic with The Goon Show, along with Peter Sellers, Harry Seacombe, Michael Bentine. which ran on British radio from 1951-1960,with regular re-unions into the early 1970's. Highly regarded  and relatively popular, the show became famous for its surrealism and zany humour. Generally considered to be a forerunner of Monty Python's Flying Circus (first broadcast in 1969) and 1980's Alternative Comedy. Spike Milligan also had his own comedy series during the 1970's and into the 1980's. 

Spike Milligan was also an actor, author,Jazz musician and poet. He served in the North Africa and Italian campaigns as a gunner in the 56th Heavy Regiment Royal Artillery. Milligan also wrote a series of war memoirs such as 'Adolf Hitler-My Part In His Downfall' (which was also filmed) , 'Rommel Gunner Who- A Confrontation in the Desert'. The books combine an irreverent look at army life from the point of view of the ordinary soldier, with tragic-comic reportage based on his own military experience. Along with cartoons, drawings, photos with humorous captions. Milligan's overall empathy for the soldier of the lower ranks resounded with many of the generation who served during World War 2, and subsequent conflicts during the National Service era. 

Whilst Milligan's instinctive distrust of military authority, emphasis on the suffering and absurd nature of War, his interest in Surrealism and love of Jazz appealed to the more rebellious Post- War youth. There is compassion and humanity in Milligan's work, but also a strong sense that admiration for rank should be earned,not automatically awarded on the basis of privilege. Spike Milligan also campaigned for peace, animal welfare, and for the environment. 

The fourth war memoir, 'Mussolini-His Part in My Downfall', is longer than the others, dwells on the Italian campaign of September 1943-1944. Presented as a diary. (Keeping a diary whilst on campaign was against the rules of the Forces.) 'Musollini-His Part in My Downfall' reads as a progress report :  After military success in North Africa, the Allied armies cross into Italy. Mussolini's regime fell. However the Germans invaded, Mussolini was sprung from captivity, and the Allies faced a slow, and often gruelling, progress north through the Italian peninsula. In this memoir the comedy angle still prevails and even flourishes, but also the boredom and sense of futility as war persists with no clear victory in sight. At Lauro in January 1944, Milligan is physically wounded and also traumatised with PTSD as a result of combat, and undergoes a mental breakdown. Very poignant, seeing how a soldier can lose all their coping mechanism and descend into panic

                ‘The Soldiers at Lauro ‘

            Young are our dead
            Like babies they lie
            The wombs they blest once
            Not healed dry
            And yet-too soon
            Into each space
            A cold earth falls
            On colder face.
            Quite still they lie
            These fresh-cut reeds
            Clutched in earth
            Like winter seeds
            But they will not bloom
            When called by spring
            To burst with leaf
            And blossoming
            They sleep on
            In silent dust
            As crosses rot
            And helmets rust "

Perhaps one of my favourite World War 2 poems. The image of the cross with the helmet placed on it on the soldier's grave, corroding away, is startling. It is not clear when 'The Soldiers at Lauro' was first written or originally published. The poem is included in Milligan's small dream of a scorpion collection of poems from 1972.

Spike Milligan endured a series of re-occurring breakdowns throughout his life. One drawing from small dream of a scorpion is accompanied by the lines "If I die in War/You remember me/If I live in Peace/You don't. Just says so much in so few words.

UPDATE

I have just been looking at 'Poems of the Second World War- the Oasis Selection- published in 1985. There is a short piece included by Spike Milligan titled 'How I wrote my First Poem' , which discloses more background to 'The Boys at Lauro'. This refers to his service as a gunner in January 1944.

A gun position had been dug by the village of Lauro and a battery had dug in. The Germans established where they firing from and their position incurred a direct hit. The camouflage netting caught fire, setting off their ammunition. All but 2 of this group of Gunners were killed in the explosion or burnt to death. Spike Milligan was moved to write' The Boys at Lauro', his first ever poem, as a consequence.

Michael Bully

Brighton

22nd March 2025.

Picture Credit 

'The Fifth Army in Lauro,Italy, 19th January 1944 , courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, used via Non-Commercial licence. Further Information  

Use of Poem 

I have not been able to find who owns the copyright to Spike Milligan's work. No deliberate copyright infringement has been intended. Please me contact below if anyone can assist. 

As ever, thank you to all the people around the world who visit this blog. Any errors or schoolboy howlers that appear in this post are of my own making and not attributable to any source that I have cited. 

Michael Bully 

Brighton

13th March 2025.  

Contact: Michael Bully     World War 2 Poetry@mail.com   ( please ram words together without spaces) 

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Bleak Chesney Wold  19th Century 'dark' history & literature

A Burnt Ship               17th century War & literature 

UPDATE 2025 

World War 2 Poetry blog supports the Second World War Experience Centre  Please consider looking at their website and the SWWEC Youtube Channel 

World War 2 Poetry blog welcomes the new War Poetry Review website run by the War Poets Association

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) 'The News-reel'

                                               Since Munich, What? 

                                   "Since Munich,what? A tangle of black film
                                   Squirming like bait upon the floor of my mind
                                   And Scissors clicking daily. I am inclined.
                                   To pick these pictures now but will hold back.
                                   Till memory has elicited from the blind
                                   Drama its threads of vision, the intrusions
                                   Of value upon fact, the sudden unconfined
                                    Wind of understanding that blew out
                                    From people's hands and faces undesigned
                                    Evidence of design, that change of climate
                                    Which did not last but happens often enough
                                    To give us hope that fact is a facade
                                    And that there is an organism behind
                                    Its brittle littleness, a rhythm and a meaning
                                    Something half-conjectured and half divined
                                    Something to give way to and so find."

                                    

                                   -The News-reel  ( first published in Louis Macneice's  The Springboard, collection from 1944).

                 Louis MacNeice's poem News-reel is generally not anthologised in collections of World War 2 poetry. And the poem is omitted from  Louis MacNeice's Selected Poems (edited with an introduction by Michael Longley) from 1988. Just happened to find the poem  by chance in a copy of Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice edited by Professor E.R. Dodds. 

Next to the rise of  radio, one of the great changes in media between the two World Wars was the legendary Pathe Newsreels, which were screened before major feature films at the cinema up to 1970 in Britain.

If nothing else, the poem highlights MacNeice's skill as a social observer but delves deeper. There is a great tension between the individual and the current events. The idea of the  newsreel as being an accurate record is questionable and prone to be being tampered with, whilst the narrator's is selecting and possibly censoring their own inner pictures. Reminds one of how George Orwell's war work in the Ministry of Information led to the fictional Ministry of Truth in  the novel 1984. The poem is quite short, and doesn't need to be pulled apart line by line, but raise thorough questions concerning how 'News' is constructed. 

         Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast, 1907, his father was an Anglican minister, his mother died when he was aged six. MacNeice was educated in English public schools from the age of 10, and then attended Oxford University, and became a classics lecturer in Birmingham,then at Bedford College,University of London. He visited Spain with Anthony Blunt in early 1936 on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. Later the same year, MacNeice visited Iceland with W H Auden. 

 MacNeice was living in London as from 1938. In 1939- 1940 he was in the USA for months at a time.  In 1941 MacNeice returned to London and  worked for the BBC, both as a broadcaster and radio producer, dying in 1963 from pneumonia contracted whilst out working with BBC sound engineers, exploring potholes to use for special effects for his play 'Person from Porlock'. LONGLEY Among his successes on radio must be the plays Columbus from 1944 (with music by Sir William Walton) and The Dark Tower from 1946, (with a score by Benjamin Britten).

His first poetry collection Blind  Fireworks appeared  in 1929, but really it was Poems 1935, published by Faber & Faber, which established MacNeice's reputation as a poet . Around a dozen more collections, were to follow, along with books of literary criticism. His one and only novel, Roundabout Way, published              in  1932, using the name Louis Malone, has been rather neglected.  

Philip Larkin praised MacNeice's work as follows:

"...his poetry of our everyday life, of shop-windows, traffic policemen, ice-cream soda, lawn-mowers, and an uneasy awareness of what the newsboy were shouting. In addition he displayed a sophisticated sentimentality about falling leaves and lipsticked cigarette ends...."  LONGLEY 

Macneice's 'Autumn Journal' ,written between August and December 1938, first published in 1939, must rate alongside George Orwell's  novel 'Coming up for Air' as a  superb literary depiction of the incredible tensions generated by the progress to World War 2. Autumn Journal approaches 3,000 line so poetry anthologies tend to just take a few lines samples from it. But the range of subjects it covers is far reaching :  The Spanish Civil War, religious divide in Ulster, Ancient Greece, the author's own sexual frustration after the breakdown of his marriage and next love affair, everyday life in Britain as the 1930's stagger to a close, are woven into a griping narrative. There is this great sense of individual helplessness in the face of World events as preparations are made for war.

"If the puzzle has an answer. Hitler yells on the wireless,

The night is damp and still.

And I hear the dull blows on wood outside my window;

They are cutting down trees on Primrose Hill.

The wood is white like the roast flesh of roast chicken'

Every tree falling like a closing fan.

No more looking at the view from seats beneath the branches,

Everything is going to plan;

They want the crest of the hill for anti-aircraft,

The guns will take the view

And searchlights probe the heavens for bacilli "  (part VII Autumn Journal)  LONGLEY

MacNeice visited Barcelona in December 1938, and experienced bombing raids, though did not appear to have seen armed fighting there. MacNeice was exempt from military service during World War 2 on health grounds. His work certainly deserves to be recognised in any study of World War 2 poetry.  

 In 2023 a  Louis MacNeice Society was launched. 

Weblinks 

In the Dark Tower  BBC Archive on Four 'Louis MacNeice at the BBC' 

Pathe newsreels Archive

Poetry Foundation  Page on Louise MacNeice 

Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice online  Faber & Faber collection edited by Peter McDonald, 2007

Books 

Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice Edited by Professor E.R. Dodds, Faber & Faber, 1966 

The Myth of the Blitz, Angus CALDER, Jonathan Cape, London, 1991 

Louis MacNeice's Selected Poems (edited by Michael LONGLEY)

Image 

In the Public Domain courtesy of Wikipedia Britain. 'People in London look at a map illustrating how the RAF is striking back at Germany during 1940'. Interesting to see the uniformed airman amongst the civilians looking at the map. 

Other blogs :

Bleak Chesney Wold   19th century history & literature blog

A Burnt Ship                17th century history warfare & literature blog 

UPDATE 2025 

World War 2 Poetry blog supports the Second World War Experience Centre  Please consider looking at their website and the SWWEC Youtube Channel 

World War 2 Poetry blog welcomes the new War Poetry Review website run by the War Poets Association

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Second World War Poems -Chosen by Hugh Haughton -Revised Edition

                                                               Review 

                                                     Mass destruction,mass disease;

                                                     We thank thee, Lord, upon our knees

                                                     That we were born in times like these

                                                     Louis Macneice 'Bar-room Matins'

                                            Originally appeared in 2004, and great to see that a new edition was published by Faber & Feber Ltd in 2023. As with any such collections there is the question of who is deemed qualified to write World War 2 poetry? And how does an editor select a poem to be included in this anthology? Hugh Haughton has adopted a similar but not identical approach to that taken by Desmond Graham whose Poetry of the Second World War -An International Anthology appeared in 1997 : Whilst Desmond Graham would only consider the poetry written by those lived through World War 2 as adults, Hugh Haughton has extended this remit to allow a few poets who were children during when war broke out, such as Tony Harrison ( born 1937) and Derek Mahon (born 1941). In other words, the contributors had to have a memory of the War.  

The vexed question of whether or not poetry can be a fitting medium for dealing with something so vast and devastating as World War 2 looms.  Certainly Dylan Thomas had his doubts of the effectiveness of poetry in his harrowing 'Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire, of a Child in London' ,declining to 'blaspheme down the stations of the breath, With any further, Elegy of innocence and youth.  And at the start of the War , Stevie Smith in her poem 'The Poets are Silent' declared And I say it is to the poets' merit/ To be silent about the war. 

Yet this collection shows how poetry was used as a powerful channel of expression during this conflict. World War 2 Poets are not really as  important in shaping our views of the conflict in the same way that the Soldier Poets of the Great War achieved. But their work can hit home. For example, Keith Douglas's poem 'Vergissmeinnicht', ('forget me not') where the poet, fighting in the North African campaign, discovers amongst the debris in a shell hit German tank, the body of a dead soldier and his scattered possessions : the dishonoured picture of his girl/who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht/ in a copybook gothic script. Or Tadeus Rozewicz's poem 'Pigtail'. about the discarded hair of women and girls having their head shaved before being gassed at Auschwitz, and finding a faded plait/ a pigtail with a ribbon/pulled at school/by naughty boys. The poems depict images which sum up the pathos of War. 

And sometimes the poems develop beyond witness accounts. To take Leon Zdzislaw Stroinski's poem 'Warsaw',setting a scene which nearly becomes a slice of magic realism. 

In its shade at dawn caretakers come out with huge frayed brooms to sweep up the tears which have collected during the night and lie thickly in the streets. 

Or World War 1 serving soldier Herbert Read's 'To a Conscript of 1940' 

A soldier passed me in the freshly fallen snow

His footsteps muffled,his face unearthly grey';

And my heart gave a sudden leap

As I gazed on a ghost of -five-and twenty years ago. 

 Three poems are included Nelly Sachs, a Jewish poet living in Germany who was already listed for deportation to the Camps. who managed to obtain Swedish citizenship and leave on the last plane to Stockholm in 1943, but wrestled with survivors's guilt. More famous poets who were in exile during World War 2 such as W.H.Auden and Bertold Brecht get their place. Poems by Primo Levi and Paul Celan who saw the Camps, were freed, but took their lives afterwards, also appear. The nationalities represented include Japan, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Russia, USA, France, Italy and Scottish Gaelic speakers. 

Personally I would like to have seen Vera Brittain's 'Lament to Cologne' -her protest against saturation bombing- included, and more than one poem by Alan Ross. Also hard to envisage a World War 2 poetry anthology without Vernon Scannell, a serving soldier who saw the North African and Normandy campaigns, who absconded a few times when in uniform. But these are simply my own preferences.

Due to the huge amount of work included in this anthology, it is hard to draw any generic conclusions about World War 2 poetry contained therein. There is little triumphalism or romantic heroism, neither are there pleas for negotiations to end the War. Moreover, German poets such as Huchel and Bobrowski from the Eastern Front, who both became Soviet Prisoners of War, and rehabilitated into becoming DDR citizens, have poems featured here.There is a sense of shared human experience. And certainly this anthology shows that World War 2 poetry still holds great potential. Doesn't fade with age. The final word should go to Scottish poet Donald Bane in his poem 'War Poet'

We in our haste only see the small components of the scene

We cannot tell what incidents will focus on the final screen

A barrage of disruptive sound, a petal on a sleeping face,

Both must be noted, both have their place    

Note : All poems quoted in this post are published within the above anthology 

Other blogs :

Bleak Chesney Wold   19th century history & literature blog

A Burnt Ship                17th century history warfare & literature blog 

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World War 2 Poetry blog supports the Second World War Experience Centre  Please consider looking at their website and the SWWEC Youtube Channel 

War Poets Review article by Michael Bully ' Lynette Roberts and the Second World War'.