| WE’D gained our first objective hours before | |
| While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes, | |
| Pallid, unshaved and thirsty, blind with smoke. | |
| Things seemed all right at first. We held their line, | |
| With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed, | 5 |
| And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench. | |
| The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs | |
| High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps | |
| And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud, | |
| Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled; | 10 |
| And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair, | |
| Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime. | |
| And then the rain began,—the jolly old rain! | |
| |
| A yawning soldier knelt against the bank, | |
| Staring across the morning blear with fog; | 15 |
| He wondered when the Allemands would get busy; | |
| And then, of course, they started with five-nines | |
| Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud. | |
| Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst | |
| Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell, | 20 |
| While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke. | |
| He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear, | |
| Sick for escape,—loathing the strangled horror | |
| And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead. | |
| |
| An officer came blundering down the trench: | 25 |
| ‘Stand-to and man the fire-step!’ On he went... | |
| Gasping and bawling, ‘Fire-step ... counter-attack!’ | |
| Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right | |
| Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left; | |
| And stumbling figures looming out in front. | 30 |
| ‘O Christ, they’re coming at us!’ Bullets spat, | |
| And he remembered his rifle ... rapid fire... | |
| And started blazing wildly ... then a bang | |
| Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out | |
| To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked | 35 |
| And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom, | |
| Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans... | |
| Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned, | |
| Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed. | |