On the first hour of my first day
in the front trench I fell;
'Get up,' bawled Sergeant Major,
'and stand eye to eye with hell,
and look ye on the plucky dead
whose chests swell out with pride';
but t'was the rats that swelled them
as they plucked them from inside..
I wondered if I borrowed a line of poetry whether words of my own might follow after, the borrowed line is Mr Kipling's, from Epitaphs of the war 1914-1918..