Page:Poems of the Great War - Cunliffe.djvu/126

 100 WILFRID WILSON GIBSON

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When consciousness came back, he found he lay Between the opposing fires, but could not tell On which hand were his friends ; and either way For him to turn was chancy — bullet and shell Whistling and shrieking over him, as the glare Of searchlights scoured the darkness to blind day. He scrambled to his hands and knees ascare, Dragging his wounded foot through puddled clay, And tumbled in a hole a shell had scooped At random in a turnip-field between The unseen trenches where the foes lay cooped Through that unending battle of unseen, Dead-locked, league-stretching armies; and quite

spent He rolled upon his back within the pit, And lay secure, thinking of all it meant — His lying in that little hole, sore hit. But living, while across the starry sky Shrapnel and shell went screeching overhead — Of all it meant that he, Tom Dodd, should lie Among the Belgian turnips, while his bed. . . If it were he, indeed, who'd climbed each night. Fagged with the day's work, up the narrow stair,

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