| HAVE you forgotten yet?... | |
| For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days, | |
| Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways: | |
| And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow | |
| Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go, | 5 |
| Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare. | |
| But the past is just the same—and War’s a bloody game... | |
| Have you forgotten yet?... | |
| Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget. | |
| |
| Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz— | 10 |
| The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets? | |
| Do you remember the rats; and the stench | |
| Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench— | |
| And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain? | |
| Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’ | 15 |
| |
| Do you remember that hour of din before the attack— | |
| And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then | |
| As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men? | |
| Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back | |
| With dying eyes and lolling heads—those ashen-grey | 20 |
| Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay? | |
| |
| Have you forgotten yet?... | |
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.
March 1919. | |
