Worthwhile Sayings:

Channel firing (1914)



Thomas Hardy


That night your great guns, unawares,

Shook all our coffins as we lay,

And broke the chancel window-squares,

We thought it was the Judgement-day

And sat upright. While drearisome

Arose the howl of wakened hounds:

The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,

The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, ‘No;

It’s gunnery practice out at sea

Just as before you went below;

The world is as it used to be:

‘All nations striving strong to make

Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters

They do no more for Christés sake

Than you who are helpless in such matters.

‘That this is not the judgment-hour

For some of them’s a blessed thing,

For if it were they’d have to scour

Hell’s floor for so much threatening…

‘Ha, ha. It will be warmer when

I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).’


So down we lay again. ‘I wonder,

Will the world ever saner be,’

Said one, ‘than when He sent us under

In our indifferent century!’

And many a skeleton shook his head.

‘Instead of preaching forty year,’

My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,

‘I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.’

Again the guns disturbed the hour,

Roaring their readiness to avenge,

As far inland as Stourton Tower,

And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.













Edited by monarch - 11-November-2017 at 13:35

HAR ! Pat --The origin of that joke

Never knew this thread even existed! Some magnificent stuff above - the piece by Hardy that Frank posted up some years ago is a very poignant marker for what's going on in Ukraine... 

An old saying of my mother's popped into my head yesterday.

Love it Gerry ❤️