Jul 2016
From their farms and their villages, they answered the call;
of King and of Country, to the great game of war.
They drilled and they practiced to work as a team,
then were shipped to the Somme, July, Nineteen sixteen.
A film of their training was made to be shown
to their sisters and mothers and lovers back home.
It was screened one time only, to standing acclaim,
for the unwitting widows who carried their names.
Like ripe wheat at the harvest felled by the scythe,
the chums led the assault and half paid with their life.
Lincolnshire wept when the casualties were read.
That first day at the Somme saw twenty Thousand dead.
Those that returned to their village or farm
Thereafter oft woke from their sleep in alarm.
They were changed men and broken, who returned from the fray,
and who bore their survivor guilt to their own dying day.
of King and of Country, to the great game of war.
They drilled and they practiced to work as a team,
then were shipped to the Somme, July, Nineteen sixteen.
A film of their training was made to be shown
to their sisters and mothers and lovers back home.
It was screened one time only, to standing acclaim,
for the unwitting widows who carried their names.
Like ripe wheat at the harvest felled by the scythe,
the chums led the assault and half paid with their life.
Lincolnshire wept when the casualties were read.
That first day at the Somme saw twenty Thousand dead.
Those that returned to their village or farm
Thereafter oft woke from their sleep in alarm.
They were changed men and broken, who returned from the fray,
and who bore their survivor guilt to their own dying day.
The sons and brothers of Grimsby in Lincolnshire enlisted together, trained together and on 07/01/1916 they died together in the first massed attack at the battle of the Somme. Their loved ones attended a screening on 07/04/1916 of a patriotic film made about their training for war unaware that their men, shown on film, were already dead.
