Page:Soldier poets, songs of the fighting men, 1916.djvu/29

Rh Lines written between 1 and 2.30 a.m. in a German dug-out

H horrible! How can the pen describe

The ghastliness of that which meets the eye,

The devastation and the frightfulness?

It seems as if some superhuman force,

Vast and malevolent, had passed this way,

Tormented by the Furies till its hate

Became insensate and demoniac:

Then, prompted by its innate cruelty,

Had ravaged where it went and had destroyed

All that it met, and made the countryside

A scene of horror without parallel.

Vast craters pit the ground, no blade of grass

Is left to shew what was a fertile plain;

Now is all barren, rugged, hideous,

The nightmare landscape of a fevered brain.

And scattered over all the stricken field,

See lie the shattered bodies of the slain

In all the ghastly posturings of death,

Their attitudes suggesting all their pain;

While over all, despite the blazing sun,

There hangs the shadow of a lurking death,

And in the cannon's never-ceasing roar

One hears the knell of many friends and foes:

But yet, for ever boastful of our worth, 25