War Poetry

A Vision

This is a tale of the trenches
Told when the shadows creep
Over the bay and traverse
And poppies fall asleep.

When the men stand still to their rifles,
And the star-shells riot and flare,
Flung from the sandbag alleys,
Into the ghostly air.

They see in the growing grasses
That rise from the beaten zone
Their poor unforgotten comrades
Wasting in skin and bone,

And the grass creeps silently o'er them
Where comrade and foe are blent
In God's own peaceful churchyard
When the fire of their might is spent.

But the men who stand to their rifles
See all the dead on the plain
Rise at the hour of midnight
To fight their battles again.

Each to his place in the combat,
All to the parts they played
With bayonet, brisk to its purpose,
Rifle and hand grenade.

Shadow races with shadow,
Steel comes quick on steel,
Swords that are deadly silent
And shadows that do not feel.

And shades recoil and recover
And fade away as they fall
In the space between the trenches.
And the watchers see it all.

By Patrick MacGill

In the Morning

The firefly haunts were lighted yet,
As we scaled the top of the parapet;
But the east grew pale to another fire,
As our bayonets gleamed by the foeman's wire;
And the sky was tinged with gold and grey,
And under our feet the dead men lay,
Stiff by the loop-holed barricade;
Food of the bomb and the hand-grenade;
Still the slushy pool and mud -
Ah, the path we came was a path of blood,
When we went to Loos in the morning.

A little grey church at the foot of a hill,
With powdered glass on the window-sill -
The shell-scarred stone and the broken tile,
Littered the chancel, nave and aisle -
Broken the altar and smashed the pyx,
And the rubble covered the crucifix;
This we saw when the charge was done,
And the gas-clouds paled in the rising sun,
As we entered Loos in the morning.

The dead men lay on the shell-scarred plain,
Where Death and the Autumn held their reign -
Like banded ghosts in the heavens grey
The smoke of the powder paled away;
Where riven and rent the spinney trees
Shivered and shook in the sullen breeze,
And there, where the trench through the graveyard wound
The dead men's bones stuck over the ground
By the road to Loos in the morning.

The turret towers that stood in the air,
Sheltered a foeman sniper there -
They found, who fell to the sniper's aim,
A field of death on the field of fame;
And stiff in khaki the boys were laid
To the sniper's toll at the barricade,
But the quick went clattering through the town,
Shot at the sniper and brought him down,
As we entered Loos in the morning.

The dead men lay on the cellar stair,
Toll of the bomb that found them there.
In the street men fell as a bullock drops,
Sniped from the fringe of the Hulluch copse.
And the choking fumes of the deadly shell
Curtained the place where our comrades fell.
This we saw when the charge was done
And the east blushed red to the rising sun
In the town of Loos in the morning.

by Patrick MacGill

The Battle of Loos opened September 25, 1915

The Star-shell
(Loos)

A star-shell holds the sky beyond
Shell-shivered Loos, and drops
In million sparkles on a pond
That lies by Hulluch copse.

A moment's brightness in the sky,
To vanish at a breath,
And die away, as soldiers die
Upon the wastes of death.

by Patrick MacGill