War Poetry

From The Dug-Out; A Memory Of Gallipoli

It was my home, not ringed with roses blowing,
Nor set in meadows where cool waters croon;
Parched wastes were round it, and no shade was going,
Nor breath of violets nor song-birds' tune;
Only at times from the adjacent dwelling
Came down with Boreas the quaint, compelling
Scent of the Tenth Platoon.

And there not hermit-like alone I brooded,
But ant and lizard and all things that crawl
With great grasshoppers by brigades intruded;
Therein the tortoise had his homely stall;
Green flies and blue slept nightly in their notches,
Save when a serpent, in the middle watches,
Came and disturbed us all.

There, where the sun, the senseless sun, kept pouring,
And dust-clouds smothered one about the chest,
While secret waters filtered through the flooring
(In case the heat should leave one _too_ oppressed),
Always I lay in those sad fevered seasons
Which Red-Hat humourists, for mystic reasons,
Regarded as our 'rest.'

For it was home; and when I was not in it,
But in the trenches, it was home indeed;
When mad foes fired at twenty rounds a minute
(Not, I may say, the regulation speed),
For me far more it harboured my Penates;
I missed my animals; I missed my gay teas
With Alf, the centipede.

And I am shocked to think that that same ceiling
Shields now some Mussulman of lowly strain;
Yet, though he knows me not, I can't help feeling
That something of my spirit must remain,
And if, in that rich air the man should mellow
In mind, in soul, and be a better fellow,
I have not lived in vain.

And it may be, when worlds have ceased to wrestle,
I shall go back across the Midland foam
At special rates in some large tourist vessel
To my late hollow in the Sultan's loam,
And there clasp hands with that uplifted warrior,
Compare brief notes and wonder which was sorrier
To have to call it home.

By A. P. Herbert

The evacuation of ANZAC, December 1915