English - WW1 poem quotes

Dawn broke like a face

with blinking eyes, pallid, unshaven and thirsty, blind with smoke.

Naked sodden buttocks,

mats of hair, bulged clotted heads slept in the plastering slime

He watched them burst

spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell

Down, and down and down

he sank and drowned, bleeding to death. The counter attack had failed

The place was

rotten with the dead

Wallowed

like trodden sandbags, loosely-filled.

He crouched and flinched

dizzy with galloping fear, sick for escape.

Loathing the strangled horror

and butchered frantic gestures of the dead

If I should die

think only this of me. That there's some corner of a foreign field that shall be for ever England

Rich earth a richer

dust concealed; a dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware.

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

In hearts at peace

under an English heaven

Washed by the rivers

blest by suns of home

Dreams happy

As her day

A dust whom

England bore, shaped, made aware

None

Heeded him

On he went…

Gasping and bawling