Stand-To: Good Friday Morning
I’d been on duty from two till four.
I went and stared at the dug-out door.
Down in the frowst I heard them snore.
‘Stand to!’ Somebody grunted and swore.
Dawn was misty; the skies were still;
Larks were singing, discordant, shrill;
They seemed happy; but I felt ill.
Deep in water I splashed my way
Up the trench to our bogged front line.
Rain had fallen the whole damned night.
O Jesus, send me a wound to-day,
And I’ll believe in Your bread and wine,
And get my bloody old sins washed white!
Siegfried Sassoon
Which of course Sassoon, the greatest of the World War I soldier war poets, as well as a superb combat soldier, eventually did when he joined the Catholic Church in 1957.
May I?
Somewhere in Kipling’s, the Irish Guards in the Great War, he relates how immediately forward of the IG in an attack a company of the Coldstream Guards ceased to exist in a flash of artillery explosions.
Attack
BY SIEGFRIED SASSOON
At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun
In the wild purple of the glow’ring sun,
Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud
The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,
Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.
The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed
With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,
Men jostle and climb to, meet the bristling fire.
Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear,
They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!
Source: Collected Poems (1918)
A minor miracle that Sassoon survived the war.
Greet them ever with grateful hearts.
He was known as Mad Jack by his men for his crazy courage.