On The Centenary Of The Death Of Rosenberg's Rat Poem by Keith Shorrocks Johnson

I Cosmopolitan Sympathies

Being of follower of Tom Paine -
Like Rosenberg's Rat
I have cosmopolitan sympathies.
No doubt Remy would have said:
‘The world is my country
To be a rat is my condition'
Though in its squeak
There would have doubtless been:
'Un peu de sarcasme - Monsieur'
[In an attempt to engage obliquely
We idealists feign the droll and sardonic].

Across in the opposition trenches
A German Corporal of Austrian origins
Would not have approved of Remy or Rosenberg
As he said some very nasty things
About rats and Jews, purporting
Both to be scavengers
Who fought bloodily among themselves -
With the latter hell bent on world domination -
But Isaac wrote simply:
'Nothing can justify war.
I suppose we must all fight to get the trouble over.'

How the Gefreiter could have believed
What he did is hard to credit
Given that he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class
At the special intercession of his Regimental Adjutant
Leutnant Hugo Guttman who was also Jewish
And who personally pinned the award to his chest.
This he later wore as Führer und Reichskanzler.
Hugo had been awarded the Iron Cross First Class
Four years earlier to the day but was forced
Twenty-five years later to flee to St Louis
Where lived out his days as Henry G. Grant.

The Regimental Runner's life had been spared
At the Battle of St Quentin Canal in late 1918
When the most decorated private in the British Army
Henry Tandey had held his fire at Marcoing
After Adolf had tottered into his rifle sights
And as a sentiment the latter kept a copy
Of an English newspaper report of Henry
Being awarded his Victoria Cross
For carrying a wounded comrade under fire
And later acquired a copy of the painting by Matania
That depicted Tandey's courage at the Kruiseke Crossroads

Of which he commented to Chamberlain at the Berghof:
'That man came so near to killing me that
I thought I should never see Germany again;
Providence saved me from such devilishly accurate fire
As those English boys were aiming at us'.
Just a few short miles away my countryman
Wilfred Owen died crossing the Sambre-Oise Canal
Having won the Military Cross near Amiens
And two years later his mother wrote to Rabindranath Tagore
That Wilfred had said goodbye with:
'When I go from hence, let this be my parting word'.

After the shrieking iron had stilled, the flames had cindered
And the poppy was lustrous red, free of the dust of war,
When the silence had come - the rats had a lean time
With the end of their fresh meat rations
But the trenches were filled, the borders opened
And eventually dismantled in many places
So people came and went as they pleased -
Under Schengen and EU acquis communautaire -
And scion Remy Ratatouille became a famous chef in Paris.
It would be sweet to have dessert and sit back at this juncture
But true stories are a movable feast and there is no separation.

II Small Horizons

Growing up as a country boy of small horizons
I was much in awe of old Edmond Tickle
Who lived in a cottage on Long Lane in Wettenhall
And worked then as a platelayer on the railways
But who had been with the Cheshire Regiment
In Iraq ‘chasing the Turks' - with his comrade Charlie Dickens,
Who souvenired a copy of the Maude Proclamation in Baghdad:
'Our armies do not come into your cities and lands
As conquerors or enemies but as liberators -
In the hope and desire of the British people that the Arab race
May rise once more to greatness and renown...'

Britain had fielded an army of half a million men
In the ‘Mes-Pot' or Mesopotamia Campaign
Of whom three quarters were from British India.
Provisions and armaments for the sepoys were hugger-mugger
And there were 3-4 doctors for every 3-4 thousand wounded.
But conditions were not cushy for T. Atkins and E. Tickle either.
During a three week period in 1917, temperatures
Did not fall below 116 degrees Fahrenheit
And 423 British and 59 Indian troops died of heat stroke.
Though every effort was to be made to score as heavily as possible before the whistle blew
And in October 1918 General Cobbe broke the Armistice of Mudros and occupied Mosul.

Outback of Townsville and up into Cape York
I got to know Jack Kelly who had been a trooper
With the Australian Light Horse in Palestine
No doubt Jack have concurred with his English comrade Bob Wilson
That, on crossing the border from Egypt, the land around Gaza
Was 'delightful country, cultivated to perfection with chiefly barley and wheat
If not better looking than on most English farms.
The villages were very pretty - a mass of orange, fig and other fruit trees.
The relief of seeing such country after the miles and miles
Of bare sand was worth five years of a life.'
The charges of the Light Horse and the Mounted Rifles became legendary.

So in December 1917, General Allenby walked
Through the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem to show respect -
British Prime Minister Lloyd George having described its capture as
'A great morale boost and Christmas present for the Empire'.
Allenby was the first Christian in many centuries to control Jerusalem.
In 1099, Godfrey de Bouillon and the Roberts II of Flanders and Normandy
Had taken Jerusalem from a Fatimid Garrison and
‘No one ever saw or heard of such slaughter of pagan people,
For funeral pyres were formed from them like pyramids,
And no one knew their number except God alone'.
And the Jews were incinerated in their synagogue refuge.

But things had not always gone to plan.
Sir Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend's 6th Poona Division
Had been besieged for five months at Kut-al-Amara
And surrendered with 13,164 soldiers being taken prisoner
For the British, this humiliation was followed by another
Defeat in the Battle of Gallipoli four months later -
Leading Curzon and Chamberlain to renew the campaign
With greater vigour, arguing that ‘there would be no net saving
In troops if a passive policy in the Middle East
Encouraged Muslim unrest in India, Persia and Afghanistan'
So Jack and Edmond had to stick to the job.

And finally, the Australians under Chauvel swept in a Great Ride
Spear-heading the capture of Homs, Damascus, Beirut and then Aleppo
Traversing 800 kilometres from the Palestinian coast
Across the plains of Armageddon and into Syria,
As thousands of Turks and Arabs died and 78,000 were captured
And T.E. Lawrence snarled at the Aussies winning the race to Damascus
'Too sure of themselves to be careful... thin-tempered, hollow... instinctive'
Meanwhile Townsend was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath,
And given the use of a yacht by the Pashas in Istanbul,
Though they had executed, starved and brutalized his Indian troops.
And he eventually became Member of Parliament for The Wrekin in Shropshire

III What goes around, comes around

And now in the Pas-de-Calais and Picardy
Come the summer, the rape seed will be gold
Kissed by the deep high sky and the noble sun
And the poplars will rustle in the light wind.
But in the ancient land of the two rivers
The crescent moon fades on barren land
With sheep unshorn and the wheat unsown
Shells, wrecks and sumps in the wilderness
The sun rising pitiless where the shade is cut:
So its sculptors rule with sneers of cold command
And hands that kill let children go unfed.

And there will be wars and rumours of wars
Folk wanderings and escapes from bondage
Pillars of fire before, and writing on the wall,
Angered gods and stiff-necked supplicants,
Promised lands flowing with milk and honey
And homesick girls amid the alien corn.
That there is nothing new under the sun is sure
That we will wander following an empty ark
For a century living off the fat of the land
Or smitten by famine, plagued by boils and vermin
Visited with iniquity to the third and fourth generations.

What goes around, comes around
And what goes over the horse's head
Comes out under its belly or behind its arse.
So now we have thousands of dispossessed
Fleeing from Aleppo and Baghdad
The subject of a distant war and a want of peace
For the pity is in the hundreds drowned
And the thousands of fleeing children abducted:
Of small figures floated face-down
And brought to the shore and its pebbles
With their tiny faces posed for reportage.

Higgledy piggledy - it starts again
Rats in a hamper, sheep in a pen
Flies in a bottle, frogs on the boil
Trusting to sieves in seeking safe soil,
Longing for harbour, haven and rest
Risking it all - the worst and the best:
Food for the waves, praying for land
Children now mute with mouthfuls of sand
Hist! Square shoulders, close up your gates
We'll not let them in to our privileged states.

Now the dispossessed are again like rats
For them the world is their country
And to do good for their own is their denomination -
With no place for them, they take their place
In forced marches, in queues at broken fences
Dashing, evading... on the look-out for scraps.
But then the sea did not part for our own children
As fired with portents and miracles
They crusaded and sought Jerusalem
But were sold Into slavery by cruel merchants
Or played to the deep by the Pied Piper

'There must have been a moment when
There not being a war on went away -
How did we get from the one case of affairs
To the other case of affairs? '
'Do you mean 'Why did the War start'?
'The war started because of the vile warmongers
And their villainous empire-building? '
'No - the real reason was that
It was too much effort not to have a war'.

The logic remains the same.
There have been many villainies in pursuit of power
Many treacheries in pursuit of oil, land and resources
But the real reason is that life is not held sacred.
When a shepherd in Lemnos named Nasos
Milks his goats early to feed half-starved children
When a Croatian policeman turns away in tears
As a little girl embraces him for small kindnesses
When helpers who visit The Jungle in Calais conclude:
'Beneath the tragedy lies a painful, beautiful humanity of the most raw kind'
The world is still ours and doing some little good keeps faith.

© 2016