Command As a Form of Love: Herbert Read's "My Company"

By James S. Robbins

Some poets addressed the relationships that developed on the battlefield between the men who fought together. The relationship of the commander to his men, which in its finest expression is a sacred and indefinable bond, a form of love that will allow, even compel soldiers to follow officers into the maw of deathly peril, and do so willingly, happily, was the topic of many stirring poems. Herbert Read's "My Company" expresses the many moods of command, at times somber, other times manic. Read survived the war and became a pacifist in the 1930s.

My Company

1

You became 

In many acts and quiet observances 

A body and soul, entire. 

I cannot tell 

What time your life became mine: 

Perhaps when one summer night 

We halted on the roadside 

In the starlight only, 

And you sang your sad home-songs, 

Dirges which I standing outside you 

Coldly condemned. 

Perhaps, one night, descending cold, 

When rum was mighty acceptable, 

And my doling gave birth to sensual gratitude. 

And then our fights: we've fought together 

Compact, unanimous; 

And I have felt the pride of leadership. 

In many acts and quiet observances 

You absorbed me: 

Until one day I stood eminent 

And I saw you gathered round me, 

Uplooking, 

And about you a radiance that seemed to beat 

With variant glow and to give 

Grace to our unity. 

But, God! I know that I'll stand 

Someday in the loneliest wilderness, 

Someday my heart will cry 

For the soul that has been, but that now 

Is scatter'd with the winds, 

Deceased and devoid. 

I know that I'll wander with a cry: 

"O beautiful men, O men I loved, 

O whither are you gone, my company?' 

2

My men go wearily 

With their monstrous burdens. 

They bear wooden planks 

And iron sheeting 

Through the area of death. 

When a flare curves through the sky 

They rest immobile. 

Then on again, 

Sweating and blaspheming —

"Oh, bloody Christ!" 

My men, my modern Christs, 

Your bloody agony confronts the world. 

3

A man of mine 

          lies on the wire. 

It is death to fetch his soulless corpse. 

A man of mine 

          lies on the wire; And he will rot 

And first his lips 

The worms will eat. 

It is not thus I would have him kiss'd, 

But with the warm passionate lips 

Of his comrade here. 

4

I can assume 

A giant attitude and godlike mood, 

And then detachedly regard 

All riots, conflicts and collisions. 

The men I've lived with 

Lurch suddenly into a far perspective; 

They distantly gather like a dark cloud of birds 

In the autumn sky. 

Urged by some unanimous 

Volition or fate, 

Clouds clash in opposition; 

The sky quivers, the dead descend; 

Earth yawns. 

They are all of one species. 

From my giant attitude, 

In a godlike mood, 

I laugh till space is filled 

With hellish merriment. 

Then again I resume 

My human docility, 

Bow my head 

And share their doom.