“Dearest Ma, Hello, how are you, I am in the pink, everything is A1 out here. We are at present resting, we hear plenty of gun fire, but of course, up to now, we have not been in any of it … don’t forget a paper, if you have the Sunday Pictorial, when you are finished with it, send it on. The boys out here, although they have been out here for about six months, speak well about things in general, so I don’t think there is much to worry about.”

This extract from a cheery letter sent by Clifford Salvucci, pictured, to his mother Emily, is dated 3 June 1915. Clifford was aged 20, from Pimlico in the heart of London. He had been a railway dining car attendant before he enlisted, and was now with 3rd Battery Motor Machine Gun Service in France. He was no Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon, but, like many other servicemen in the trenches, he was soon writing poems in attempt to express his feelings about being in the frontline.
In a poem titled simply ‘17th December’ the early, cheery optimism is gone:

 

Tonight, my thoughts run riot
Of the many days gone by.
Filled with joy and laughter,
The sky was always blue.
O, happy memories of a child
No cares or worries were mine.
… Come back, come back, O happy days
You have gone, all too quick for me

Another poem, titled ‘St Eloi, France, March 1916,’ addresses God: “Thou last called, O God, to the souls of men / From earthly peace to the horror of war / Have thou departed, ne’er to return? / Or is this hell, wherein we sleep / To dwell for eternity, or shall we wake / Midst the peaceful dawn of tomorrow?” 

The machine gunners were known as the “Suicide Club”, and targeted by snipers. Salvucci was wounded and found himself in hospital in Carniers, in France. From there, looking forward to a return to Blighty, he wrote a poem of tribute ‘To Our Nurse’, and also to his comrades:  “As I lay in my cot and look around / At the men who have paid the cost / And in their eyes, a new light found / Not a word of what they had lost”.

After the war his poems become tinged with bitterness for a while. One written on 11 November 1918, the day the war ended, which should have been a time of rejoicing, speaks of his loneliness in the big city: “The terrors of war have flown / I feel as a stranger in a foreign land, / No one extends a welcome hand / For me, with a soul filled with tears, / For the brave men who paid for this peace.”

On the same day two years later he wrote:  “Search your hearts well, when the silence falls / Have you done much, for the many calls / For help to those, by the war brought low? / Oh, have you forgotten the debts you owe.”

Another poem, titled ‘The Silver Badge men’, calls for help for those wounded in the war. The Silver War Badge was issued in the UK to those who had been honourably discharged due to wounds or sickness. It was intended to be worn in the lapel, on civilian clothes.

 

My God, yet how soon forgotten,
War is now a thing of the past
Patriotism, God, King and Country
Are feelings that are fading fast.

It’s only the mothers, who gave their sons,
The wives, who have husbands lost,
The crippled, the maimed and the blind
Who have fully realised the cost.

To make England fit to live in,
For her hero’s who’ve not fought for gain.
Honour to the men who have fallen
Show that they have not died in vain.

Salvucci, who later changed his surname to Arthur, did not remain bitter for ever. He met Nellie, the love of his life, and, instead of poems about the war, began writing poems to her. Eventually, as his life settled down and he took a job in local government, the poems dried up. In a strange literary twist, his mother was a relative of the adventure writer H Rider Haggard.

Clifford and Nellie had three children. He died in Hastings in 1969. In a letter to her sister Jean, Clifford’s daughter Margaret said: “We didn’t know anything about his poems until much later -  maybe after he died, when we went through his papers. He never talked about the war, although I don’t remember ever asking him about it.” 

His granddaughter, Lucy Dean, is to read extracts from the poems at Sutton library in south London at 7pm on Friday 21 November, as part of the library’s first world war archives exhibition, from 6 November until 12 December – and as a tribute to all those poets from the trenches, who weren’t Owen or Sassoon, but still deserve to be heard. 

Greg Freeman