Battle

1.

Noon

It is midday; the deep trench glares….

A buzz and blaze of flies….

The hot wind puffs the giddy airs….

The great sun rakes the skies.

No sound in all the stagnant trench

Where forty standing men

Endure the sweat and grit and stench,

Like cattle in a pen.

Sometimes a sniper's bullet whirs

Or twangs the whining wire,

Sometimes a soldier sighs and stirs

As in hell's frying fire.

From out a high, cool cloud descends

An aeroplane's far moan,

The sun strikes down, the thin cloud rends….

The black speck travels on.

And sweating, dazed, isolate

In the hot trench beneath,

We bide the next shrewd move of fate

Be it of life or death.

2.

Night Bombardment

Softly in the silence the evening rain descends….

The soft wind lifts the rain-mist, flurries it, and spends

Itself in mournful sighs, drifting from field to field,

Soaking the draggled sprays which the low hedges wield

As they labour in the wet and the load of the wind.

The last light is dimming.  Night comes on behind.

I hear no sound but the wind and the rain,

And trample of horses, loud and lost again

Where the wagons in the mist rumble dimly on

Bringing more shell.

The last gleam is gone.

It is not day or night; only the mists unroll

And blind with their sorrow the sight of my soul.

I hear the wind weeping in the hollow overhead:

She goes searching for the forgotten dead

Hidden in the hedges or trodden into muck

Under the trenches or maybe limply stuck

Somewhere in the branches of a high, lonely tree -

He was a sniper once.  They never found his body.

I see the mist drifting.  I hear the wind, the rain,

And on my clammy face the oozed breath of the slain

Seems to be blowing.  Almost I have heard

In the shuddering drift the lost dead's last word:

Go home, go home, go to my house,

Knock at the door, knock hard, arouse

My wife and the children - that you must do -

What d' you say? - Tell the children too -

Knock at the door, knock hard, and arouse

The living.  Say: the dead won't come back to this house.

Oh… but it's cold - I soak in the rain -

Shrapnel found me - I shan't go home again.

No, not home again - The mourning voices trail

Away into rain, into darkness… the pale

Soughing of the night drifts on in between.

The Voices were as if the dead had never been.

O melancholy heavens, O melancholy fields!

The glad, full darkness grows complete and shields

Me from your appeal.

With a terrible delight

I hear far guns low like oxen, at the night.

Flames disrupt the sky.  The work is begun.

"Action!"  My guns crash, flame, rock, and stun

Again and again.  Soon the soughing night

Is loud with their clamour and leaps with their light.

The imperative chorus rises sonorous and fell:

My heart glows lighted as by fires of hell,

Sharply I pass the terse orders down.

The guns stun and rock.  The hissing rain is blown

Athwart the hurtling shell that shrilling, shrilling goes

Away into the dark to burst a cloud of rose

Over their trenches.

A pause: I stand and see

Lifting into the night like founts incessantly,

The pistol-lights' pale spores upon the glimmering air…

Under them furrowed trenches empty, pallid, bare….

And rain snowing trenchward ghostly and white,

O dead in the hedges, sleep ye well to-night!