- The Working Party
- Three hours ago he blundered up the trench,
- Sliding and poising, groping with his boots;
- Sometimes he tripped and lurched against the walls
- With hands that pawed the sodden bags of chalk.
- He couldn’t see the man who walked in front;
- Only he heard the drum and rattle of feet
- Stepping along barred trench boards, often splashing
- Wretchedly where the sludge was ankle-deep.
- Voices would grunt `Keep to your right — make way!’
- When squeezing past some men from the front-line:
- White faces peered, puffing a point of red;
- Candles and braziers glinted through the chinks
- And curtain-flaps of dug-outs; then the gloom
- Swallowed his sense of sight; he stooped and swore
- Because a sagging wire had caught his neck.
- A flare went up; the shining whiteness spread
- And flickered upward, showing nimble rats
- And mounds of glimmering sand-bags, bleached with rain;
- Then the slow silver moment died in dark.
- The wind came posting by with chilly gusts
- And buffeting at the corners, piping thin.
- And dreary through the crannies; rifle-shots
- Would split and crack and sing along the night,
- And shells came calmly through the drizzling air
- To burst with hollow bang below the hill.Three hours ago, he stumbled up the trench;
- Now he will never walk that road again:
- He must be carried back, a jolting lump
- Beyond all needs of tenderness and care.He was a young man with a meagre wife
- And two small children in a Midland town,
- He showed their photographs to all his mates,
- And they considered him a decent chap
- Who did his work and hadn’t much to say,
- And always laughed at other people’s jokes
- Because he hadn’t any of his own.That night when he was busy at his job
- Of piling bags along the parapet,
- He thought how slow time went, stamping his feet
- And blowing on his fingers, pinched with cold.
- He thought of getting back by half-past twelve,
- And tot of rum to send him warm to sleep
- In draughty dug-out frowsty with the fumes
- Of coke, and full of snoring weary men.He pushed another bag along the top,
- Craning his body outward; then a flare
- Gave one white glimpse of No Man’s Land and wire;
- And as he dropped his head the instant split
- His startled life with lead, and all went out
- — Seigfried Sassoon
Beach Burial
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.
— Kenneth Slessor