BOND AND FREE
(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.