Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard, 2 OCTOBER 1914
From September 1911 until December 1916 Orwell was a boarder at St Cyprian’s, a private preparatory school in Eastbourne, Sussex. This experience motivated him much later to write the long essay, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ (CW, XIX, 353-87). This poem, written just a century ago when Orwell – as Eric Blair – was eleven years old and inspired by the fever of excitement at the outbreak of war and the rush to the colours, was sent, perhaps by his mother, to the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard, which printed it on 2 October 1914. St Cyprian’s headmaster’s wife, Mrs Vaughan Wilkes, with whom Orwell hardly saw eye to eye, felt moved to read it out at school assembly. By the end of the month Eton had already lost sixty-five former pupils, and Wellington thirty-eight, two schools at which Orwell was destined to study (Max Hastings, Catastrophe, p. 422).
Oh! give me the strength of the lion,
The wisdom of Reynard the fox,
And then I’ll hurl troops at the Germans,
And give them the hardest of knocks.
Oh! think of the War lord’s mailed fist,
That is striking at England to-day;
And think of the lives that our soldiers
Are fearlessly throwing away.
Awake! oh you young men of England,
For if, when your Country’s in need
You do not enlist by the thousand,
You truly are cowards indeed.