We lost good friends, cut down by others.

Those others’ friends? – we killed a few.

But friends, and others’ friends, had mothers,

whose lives were ended that day too,

 

when precious sons laid down their lives,

to serve their Kaiser and their King.

They paid the greatest sacrifice,

with unimagined suffering.

 

But when the guns had quietened down,

to mark the beaten Cross of Death,

they’d kicked a battered ball around …

those sons with mothers now bereft.

 

 

The wasted generation 1914-1918

 

(Dedicated with grateful respect to the lost boys of Crawley)

 

Weather-beaten village sons,

driven mad by German guns;

The shepherd lads torn from their sheep,

then torn to shreds themselves at Ypres;

Young labourers from the Sussex Weald,

left dying in some foreign field;

The brick yard boys of old West Green,

slaughtered by the war machine;

Those plough boys of the chalkland vale,

dead in the mud of Passchendaele.

Newly khakied vagabonds

equalled, all, by death at Mons.

 

Fallen teenage heroes all,

just answering their country’s call.


The Lost Boys

 

I see lanes down which village lads

marched off to war with pride

and read the list of long lost names

that lump the throat and wet the eyes,

their orphans, playing children’s games

in memory of lost fathers’ lives,

engraved upon memorial stones

which proudly face their exit road

as if such gestures can atone

the monumental debt that's owed.

 

But hearts it seems no longer dwell

within the mindset of today,

like those that beat within the breasts

of our youthful troops of yesterday

when young boys khakied for their King

reacted to a man each one

and rushed to do the decent thing

exchanging ploughshares for the gun.

 

With fathers’ tales of Kimberley

and Mafeking in their heads,

they marched to meet their destiny

of mud, and gas, and death

and spurred them on to burnt-out eyes

and horrid broken minds and limbs.

Unquestioned duty paid in full to

England, God, and George their King.

 

With treasured tattered photographs

of loved ones buttoned tight,

they faced undreamt of horrors

and the slaughter of the fight.

In muddied tunic pockets

precious love so sorely missed,

they faced their roles, while dreaming all,

of sweethearts left unkissed.

 

A century down time’s long track,

their great-grandchildren, poppied red,

from lessons never learned, look back

remembering their beloved dead.