It started when he had brought a box
He’d bought, back home from the fair,
The size of an average tinder box
In brass, and embossed with care,
The scene was the site of a battlefield
Where the redcoats marched as one,
In the face of the French artillery
Looking down the mouth of a gun.
And on the right was a drummer boy
Who drummed to the marching feet,
He gazed ahead but his eyes were dead
As he kept up a steady beat,
A moment of peril embossed in time
When nations ruled by the gun,
The redcoats all in a staggered line
With the battle not yet won.
‘And how did you come by that,’ she said,
His wife, when he brought it home,
‘I should know better than let you out
With a pound, when you’re on your own.
The gypsies see you abroad, my lad
And they say, ‘Now there’s our mark!
They’d pick you out of a thousand folk
Out there, a-stroll in the park.’
‘It wasn’t a gypsy, Jen,’ he said,
‘But an old, sad military man,
Struggling on a pension for
His bread, as best he can.’
‘You’re just as soft as the next one, Bill,
They’d steal a beggar’s cup,
But now that you’ve got your tinder box
Let’s see, just open it up.’
‘I can’t, it’s locked with a type of lock
That I’ve never seen before,
It’s rusted on, and there is no key,
It’s a work of art for sure.’
He set it down by their rustic hearth
Where it looked so very fine,
A piece from their ancient history
Where the soldiers stood in line.
That night they woke to the distant sound
Of a battle, lost and won,
The sound of cheers, of clashes, tears
To the beat of a distant drum,
And Jen was lying there frozen as
She clung to her husband’s arm,
‘What have you brought on home to us?’
She cried, in her alarm.
The morning saw her attack the lock
With a hammer to no avail,
The lock, it might have been rusty but
Was solid, strong and hale,
And Bill said ‘Stop! You will ruin it,
There’s nothing there to hide,
I bought it more for the picture than
What might there be inside.’
Each night the sound of a battle filtered
Out of that tinder box,
The sounds of the muskets firing, of
Whizz-bangs and battle shocks,
And through it all was the steady sound
Of the little drummer’s beat,
It rose up out of the battleground
With the sound of marching feet.
They finally cut the lock away
With a coarse old hacksaw blade,
It took a couple of hours that day
So sturdy was it made.
Then Bill said ‘Your curiosity
Has made me wreck the lock,
So now, there’s nothing to stop you, Jen,
Just open up the box.’
The lid flew up and the sight she saw
Was enough to make her faint,
For there, the skull of the drummer boy
Lay with its coat of paint,
And blood, red blood was the skull in there
Though the teeth were pearly white,
A bullet hole in the frontal lobe
That had kissed the boy goodnight.
And folded there, but beneath the skull
Was the skin of the drummer’s drum,
Blackened, torn and beyond repair
It had sounded for everyone.
It’s buried now with the drummer’s skull,
It’s resting beneath a tree,
And never sounds, for its war is won,
It’s where it was meant to be.
David Lewis Paget