In Neverland - never to grow old never to marry that sweetheart never to have children and grandchildren nor watch hair thin and grey.
Full of derring-do - more dash than discipline lanky and loose-limbed they swank and saunter not like soldiers at all no doff the cap humility to the old rules and distant monarchies.
From a newly stolen world hardly secured or steady with itself lodged on the edge of a vast continent clinging to a rim of turquoise blue.
Now cramped in the pock-holed sores of ancient lands richly bone-dusted from time to time.
Waiting for the fight to end to go ‘back home’ ‘over there’ to farms and factories; schools and stations.
Still there - left behind in the archipelago of cemeteries as far as Fromelles, Pozieres, to Bullencourt and Paschendaele in fields of beetroot and corn, fields bleeding red with poppies beside the Menin Road at Ypres in bluebelled woods of Verdun in the silt of the Somme on the plains of Flanders in the victory graves at Amiens
Monash’s boys - the lost boys cried for their mothers begged for water screamed to die hung like khaki bundles on the wire.
Commanded by Field Marshalls who never went to the fields, who played the numbers game in a war of bluff and bluster, who never touched the dirt and slime, nor waded through the ****** slush of broken men and boys, never waist-deep in mud and sinking, wounded and drowning in that shambles of a war
Wearing dead men’s boots and shrapnel-holed helmets tunics and leggings splattered and rotting with dead men’s blood and brains
Some haunted boys came home knapsacks full of secret pictures, old rusty tins crammed with suffering breast pockets held their grief wrapped in shroud-shreds.
They brought their duckboard demons to the world of peace Gas-choked fretful lungs still brought the caustic fumes with every breath exhaled and from every pore the death-sweat of decay.
25th April Anzac Day 2016 In remembrance of the total waste and loss of young mens' lives in WWI. For all the civilians who died and the mothers, wives and sisters who waited in vain for so many soldiers who never returned.