All That They Had They Gave

Composed by Andea Ramsey
Series Editor: Rebecca Rottsolk
Voicing: SATB
Instrumentation: Piano
Catalog number: AMP 0859
Price: $2.10

Historic Central Junior High School in Lawrence, Kansas, (formerly Memorial High School) was built as a memorial to the former students from Lawrence who died in World War I. Inspired by an inscription above the school's stage, director Kevin Hart commissioned “All That They Had They Gave” as part of a project to highlight the history and memorial aspect of the school.

The lines above the stage (in bold below) are from a longer poem by Rudyard Kipling. A contemporary poet of the time, Kipling wrote “he King's Pilgrimage” about King George's journey in May 1922 to visit the WWI cemeteries and memorials being constructed in France and Belgium by the Imperial War Graves Commission. The king's journey was part of a wider movement in which tens of thousands of grieving relatives from the United Kingdom visited the war battlefields in the years after the Armistice.

The King's Pilgrimage

Our King went forth on pilgrimage
His prayers and vows to pay
To them that saved our heritage
And cast their own away.

And there was little show of pride,
Or prows of belted steel,
For the clean–swept oceans every side
Lay free to every keel.

And the first land he found, it was shoal and banky ground –
Where the broader seas begin,
And a pale tide grieving at the broken harbour–mouth
Where they worked the death–ships in.

And there was neither gull on the wing,
Nor wave that could not tell
Of the bodies that were buckled in the life–buoy's ring
That slid from swell to swell.

All that they had they gave – they gave; and they shall not return,
For these are those that have no grave where any heart may mourn.

And the next land he found, it was low and hollow ground –
Where once the cities stood,
But the man–high thistle had been master of it all,
Or the bulrush by the flood.

And there was neither blade of grass,
Nor lone star in the sky
But shook to see some spirit pass
And took its agony.

And the next land be found, it was bare and hilly round –
Where once the bread–corn grew,
But the fields were cankered and the water was defiled,
And the trees were riven through.

And there was neither paved highway
Nor secret path in the wood,
But had borne its weight of the broken clay
And darkened 'neath the blood.

Father and mother they put aside, and the nearer love also –
An hundred thousand men who died whose graves shall no man
know.

And the last land he found, it was fair and level ground
About a carven stone,
And a stark Sword brooding on the bosom of the Cross
Where high and low are one.

And there was grass and the living trees,
And the flowers of the spring,
And there lay gentlemen from out of all the seas
That ever called him King.

'Twixt Nieuport sands and the eastward lands where the Four Red Rivers spring,
Five hundred thousand gentlemen of those that served their King.

All that they had they gave – they gave –
In sure and single faith.
There can no knowledge reach the grave
To make them grudge their death
Save only if they understood
That, after all was done,
We they redeemed denied their blood
And mocked the gains it won.

Rudyard Kipling

performance by Central Junior High School Excalibur Choir
Lawrence, Kansas
Kevin Hart, director

Click here to see a sample.

Click here to listen to a recording (MP3).



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