The Trench Poets of The Somme

The Trench Poets of The Somme

Marching off to battle

Cadence Poem By Private John Hobbes

Marching off to battle! Marching to battle! We are we are marching off to battle!

Isn't it beautiful to go! Why I'll never know! We are we are marching off to battle!

Left our families home! Hell am I alone! We are we are marching off to battle!

Will my wife be cheating? Will my children be eating? We are we are marching off to battle!

Why did we do this, though? Bombs' fiery glow. Why are we marching off to battle?

Children in these places. Burnt hungry faces. Why are we marching off to battle?

Blood on my hands! Civilians' lives be damned! Tell me why are we marching off to battle!

Coals in their lands! Coal's in demand! That's why we are marching off to battle!

General swore on sacred oath! Law's but a silly oaf! That's why we are marching off to battle!

They’re the other side! They deserve to die! That's why we are marching off to battle!

Back home, they cheer! Anger, is it fear? That's why we're still marching off to battle!

The battle has been won! God's will be done! Why are we still marching off to battle?

Coming home in pine! General says he's fine! He can't he can't march off to battle.

Empty seat at mother's table! But he's got a hero's label! He can't he can't march off to battle!

When the platoon's dead. Peppered by lead. Only then will we not be marching off to battle.

*

Blood burns from the sky as the platoon crawls on their bellies like snakes in the Garden of Eden. Except this was no idyllic paradise. Hell had boiled over from its infernal domain into the Somme River. The 3rd British platoon, or what is left of it, trudges through the field.

There are seven of them now. Once there had been thirty-two.

Private Callum Reed ducks his head low and clenches his jaw, pulling himself through mud that smells of copper and all-consuming rot. He remembers how over their old brass cooking pot, Hobbes used to sing that damn song, poem, or whatever about the marching. How he used to detest the teenage corporal's drunken recitation.

He'd never hear it again.

What's left of Hobbes is two fields back now, face down in a ditch.

Quiet like mice, another trench poet dead at the Somme.

He'd said a joke before the artillery shell found its quarry. He was funny that way.

Did he linger?

What did he think in that instant?

It’s beautiful how in war you don't have to think of these things. Don't worry yourself over the teenage grey matter smeared on your brow. One, two, one, two. Think of the cadence of your footsteps. think of anything but thoughts.

Do not concern yourself with the face of Hobbes at eight wrapped around his mother's waist, at twelve scribbling away at his first poem, or at sixteen, blown into several chunks the coroner will attribute to five different souls.

A shredded, deformed lump no self-respecting grave could ever stomach.

So fill the coffin with bricks, the family won’t mind. The coffin’s sealed, they’d rather not know.

So here they are at the ridge; the battle won. Corpses strewn along the hillside in a broken collage.

More there's than ours.

The plume of Reed’s flamethrower ensured that.

Enemy ammo still cooks and sputters angry sparks from half-empty magazines.

Fire skipped between the bodies, German and British dead reduced to their flame-broiled basics

Reed imagined more at the top of the elevation, something worth its weight in gold that he could rest on the dead's graves like gilded flowers.

It was only a hill, grass, mud, and slope.

A line on a map sketched from the blood of twenty-five foolish boys.

The horizon, the battlefield. It must have been pretty up here a long time ago before man buried its claws into its river bank and dammed its soul with sulfur.

Looking at their boots, no one dared speak

Why would they?

The sergeant's face drops and sags; any spark of a smile atrophied like a shattered limb.

Talking is for men; they were soldiers. Smiling was for men; they were soldiers. Living was for men; they were soldiers.

The Union Jack impales itself into the ground, the loose mud parting at its bulk. The flag smacks to the ground, covering the white in worms, the blue in blood, and the red in muck.

It sinks, swallows itself in the bloody mire.

A flag’s just cloth.

The grenadiers couldn't be bothered to pick it back up.

Reed looked to the sky, to the heavens, to the god that watched over the Somme.

What was that?

A shooting star from foreign heavens.

German artillery reaches far.

Limbless comets soar from the ridge.

Ascend beyond the muck.

In The Town of Strasburg

Sonnet by amateur poet, baker, and German artillery captain, Hans Fischer.

There is a pretty girl in the town of Strasburg.

Her name Elise, her voice the softest fur

Her lips, the softest lure

She came calling to me, and she brought her laughter

She is my only one, and I must have her

She braids her hair, early in the morning

She caught my stare, she used to find me boring

I went to war, thought I escaped that little town

I’m lost in the trench, no softness from her gown

Once I come back home, she will be waiting

Her face is in my mind, never fading

There is a pretty girl, in the town of Strasburg.

Soon there'll be a wife, in the town of Strasburg.

A new baby life, in the town of Strasburg

My only source of life is in the town of Strasburg

*

Direct hit on the ridge.

Must have been.

No screams, no return of fire, no panic, just a fallen flag, boom, then silence.

Artillery was the safer assignment, Hans always thought. Away from the frontlines, pelting 150mm shells at any fool unlucky enough to leave their trench. It was safer, but god was it loud.

BOOM! A man dissolves like salt-struck snails.

BOOM! His wife feels the vibration.

That's all that sounded until the noise bled his ears and deafened his senses.

BOOM! Infernal wardens' chorus.

BOOM! Medley of hellish reverberation.

How many men died to his shells in the last three months? A hundred? A thousand? How many others would curse the unknown bombardier who took their leg, their body, their mind?

He had never killed a man before the war; he was a baker.

Bread was an art. Now maggots and wheat, a seldom wither.

In some ways, it was the same. Load the metal inferno. Watch the flames christen the young yeast, burn the young man.

Fire cares not the difference; it only burns once its master sets its spark.

She had flour on her lips when they last kissed.

Their laughter almost masked the tears.

The fog began to settle onto no-man's land.

Oblivion.

That's all he could see through the fog.

What was beyond the melancholy vale?

The reaper paddled his pyre from the Styx to the Somme a hundred thousand times over. This was the weather he’d relish. Dark, cold, devoid of any life but the pheromones of humanoid soldier ants.

Were those footsteps or rain? An ear-ruptured man can’t tell.

Elise was home.

He’d be home.

The war would end.

The war would end.

He’d meet his daughter.

Who was that?

Cheekbones like his brother's, rage ticking and fear tocking, a flippant switch flicking on and off a thousand times a second.

The glint of a blood moon bathes a stainless steel bayonet, a chest bleeds.

A gasp escapes, silenced as lungs tread on blood-bathed breaths.

The Styx beckons; he drowns.

Quiet like mice, another trench poet dead at the Somme.

Death retracts his sickle.

The marrow groans, the soul breaches the body.

The body limpens, it’s fighting grown weak.

The man sinks to the mud, the mud-worms, the bread-worms, the corpse worms, the flag-worms squiggle that horrible inch.

Feast on the flesh.

Break down the man.

Macerate the mulch.

Return to earth, fall from hell.

Escape the Somme.

A trench poet deserted from war, the way General ensured.

Elise waits at home; she’ll never stop waiting, even when the brick-filled casket is lost to the wormed dirt.

Twilight whispers, softly for a minute, a perfect lie of a minute, the Somme quiets, boots, booms, and boys' death knells forget their duty, the field joins the planet.

Rain fills hollowed helmets, bathes hallowed men, dried blood runs swallowed by predatory mud.

The corpses are soon cleared. The boots reaped and lashed to the next man. Moon hides, bodies rot, the infections festers.

Convoy arrives at daybreak’s groan.

Church bells ring from the bombed temples, the cadence of new men in former dead men's boots sounds off in sync. One, two. One, two.

The general gives the recruits the welcome speech, a handshake through spotless gloved hands, the recruits smile, marching off to battle, war’s not done till none are left to kill.

Century later, millennia back.

General gives the same speech, same gloves.

Glory!

Honor!

Vengeance!

Duty!

Grab your sword, grab your gun, grab your drone, hoist your flag. Trench poet or not, it doesn't matter, as long as you don’t tire your trigger finger with useless quills and questions.

Know you're not the first, know you're not the last.

You're the new recruit.

Reaper’s general knows next war will be even better.

The Chalice Sieve

Unknown Author: Concrete poem recovered from a shredded satchel

General won’t ever stop

General never stopped

Men go, the blood-soaked pyre awaits

Impale yourself on the Great Spiked Altar

Bleed the soul till General’s chalice full

The chalice holes leak, mess all that’s left

Burn the flame, burn the stain

Burn the boy

Scatter the ashes

Hope, pray for the flag's phoenix rise

Bring the next, soak the wood once more

Fill the chalice, maybe next war will drown the sieve