LITMIR.BIZ

      Bond and Free

       Table of Contents

      (THE BAPAUME ROAD, March 1917)

      Misty and pale the sunlight, brittle and black the trees;

       Roads powdered like sticks of candy for a car to crunch as they freeze . . .

       Then we overtook a Battalion . . . and it wasn't a roadway then,

       But cymbals and drums and dulcimers to the beat of the marching men!

      They were laden and groomed for the trenches, they were shaven and scrubbed and fed;

       Like the scales of a single Saurian their helmets rippled ahead;

       Not a sorrowful face beneath them, just the tail of a scornful eye

       For the car full of favoured mufti that went quacking and quaking by.

      You gloat and take note in your motoring coat, and the sights come fast and thick:

       A party of pampered prisoners, toying with shovel and pick;

       A town where some of the houses are so many heaps of stone,

       And some of them steel anatomies picked clean to the buckled bone.

      A road like a pier in a hurricane of mountainous seas of mud,

       Where a few trees, whittled to walking-sticks, rose out of the frozen flood

       Like the masts of the sunken villages that might have been down below —

       Or blown off the festering face of an earth that God Himself wouldn't know!

      Not a yard but was part of a shell-hole—not an inch, to be more precise—

       And most of the holes held water, and all the water was ice:

       They stared at the bleak blue heavens like the glazed blue eyes of the slain,

       Till the snow came, shutting them gently, and sheeting the slaughtered plain.

      Here a pile of derelict rifles, there a couple of horses lay—

       Like rockerless rocking-horses, as wooden of leg as they,

       And not much redder of nostril—not anything like so grim

       As the slinking ghoul of a lean live cat creeping over the crater's rim!

      And behind and beyond and about us were the long black Dogs of War,

       With pigmies pulling their tails for them, and making the monsters roar

       As they slithered back on their haunches, as they put out their flaming tongues,

       And spat a murderous message long leagues from their iron lungs!

      They were kennelled in every corner, and some were in gay disguise,

       But all kept twitching their muzzles and baying the silvery skies!

       A howitzer like a hyena guffawed point-blank at the car—

       But only the sixty - pounder leaves an absolute aural scar!

      (Could a giant but crack a cable as a stockman cracks his whip,

       Or tear up a mile of calico with one unthinkable r-r-r-r-rip!

       Could he only squeak a slate-pencil about the size of this gun,

       You might get some faint idea of its sound, which is those three sounds in one.)

      But certain noises were absent, we looked for some sights in vain,

       And I cannot tell you if shrapnel does really descend like rain—

       Or Big Stuff burst like a bonfire, or bullets whistle or moan;

       But the other figures I'll swear to—if some of 'em are my own!

      Livid and moist the twilight, heavy with snow the trees,

       And a road as of pleated velvet the colour of new cream-cheese . . .

       Then we overtook a Battalion . . . and I'm hunting still for the word

       For that gaunt, undaunted, haunted, whitening, frightening herd!

      They had done their tour of the trenches, they were coated and caked with mud,

       And some of them wore a bandage, and some of them wore their blood!

       The gaps in their ranks were many, and none of them looked at me . . .

       And I thought of no more vain phrases for the things I was there to see,

       But I felt like a man in a prison van where the rest of the world goes Free.