War Games
(Written after finishing Robert Graves, 'Goodbye to All That' (1929) and the Bondarchuk film, 'Waterloo' (1970)
So many boys have died!
Collapsed like crisp packets
Or aluminium beer cans
They sank into wet-cold mud
Or bled upon the sun-baked sand
Never the same again.
A numberless mass have fallen thus
But once to each a name
Brim full with expectation
Was it history or destiny they sought?
But dying just the same.
Shot in the front or back,
Blasted by friend or foe,
Run through with axe or sword,
Ended with blast or blow.
Never a hero claims.
Changed to a thousand bits
Or sleeping so no one knows
Or left to groan or drown
Or submerged in the icy deep
Playing the fatal game.
Their cries for help unheard
The victims fall from age to age
In silence or primeval scream
A name inked on a remembrance page
Or name etched on a concrete plane.
The 'Glorious Dead' you may agree
Or wonder at stupidity
Of man's incessant need to go to war
Paid for in young men's blood
And parents' searing pain.
Survivors wonder how they did
Haunted by memories too bad to claim
Unable to communicate
Themselves they hate
And take on all the blame.
Where should it rest?
With those who now lie underground
Marked with the bone-white stones?
Or those that lived to go back home
To do it all again?
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ReplyDeleteI have clear memories of aspects of the mining heritage. As a kid it sort of epitomised two worlds, rather akin to "And did those feet in ancient times". There was green nature, in all its variety and interest, and there was the dark, deep pit, from which men emerged, as if from another subterranean, Dante-ish, nether-place. The village characters also fell into these two distinct groups. It was of course a child's simplified view of a much more sophisticated relationship, that relied on both worlds for food and energy, all within the family social and religious context. Ancient ideas and concepts permeated the here and now and had a strange connection to it. It all seemed to make perfect sense at the time, this four-fold world of earth and water, fire and air; salvation and damnation. Of eternal souls and moral choices. I with other children from the Primary School were taken up and out of the village, via the enchanted Stanton Wick Lane, to watch the chimney being demolished by explosives. It fell like a wounded soldier, still complete and erect, amidst a cloud of brick dust. In a sense it marked an end of an era, not just for the village, but for the country and world. The demise of King Coal and Queen Steam and the dethroning of Britain as an imperial power, then under the beguiling illusion of replacement nuclear energy and a European ideal. The 'white hot heat (and hope) of science and technology'. It also marked a game-changer for just one insignificant little boy, moving from childhood towards manhood, from certainty to doubt, from naivety to scepticism, from reassuring community to a wild and wicked world!
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