whenever the subject of Crete's role in the Second World War comes up I immediately think of this great poem by Kenneth Slessor. He was an Australian war correspondent reporting in Greece and reporting from Crete before going to North Africa to cover Tobruk and El Alamein. In this poem he describes the washed up casualties of a torpedoed war ship.. 'Purple ' refers to the indelible pencil used to inscribe the hastily tacked together crosses making each grave.
Beach Burial – Kenneth Slessor
Softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs
The convoys of dead sailors come;
At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,
But morning rolls them in the foam.
Between the sob and clubbing of the gunfire
Someone, it seems, has time for this,
To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows
And tread the sand upon their nakedness;
And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,
Bears the last signature of men,
Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity,
The words choke as they begin –
"Unknown seaman" –the ghostly pencil
Wavers and fades, the purple drips,
The breath of the wet season has washed their inscriptions
As blue as drowned men's lips,
Dead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall,
Whether as enemies they fought,
Or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together,
Enlisted on the other front.
El Alamein
(if this resonates then make sure to read his equally moving 'Five Bells' about his friend Joe Lynch who disappeared one night from a ferry in Sydney Harbour, during the war. . the pockets of his overcoat weighed down with a couple of long-necks. Obviously Beach Burial was finished after he got to El Alamein.)