So sad the cemetary stood,
Rows of identical crosses
Commemorating wasted lives
And pointless sacrifice for glory.
One rainlashed day I was there with a fat little **** I knew
To inspect her great-grandfather's grave;
A hero who had repeatedly groped his own daughter
Shortly before meeting death in Paschendael's slaughter.

My friend elegantly squatted, hovering o'er the grave
And performed a perfect Valsalva manoeuvre,
Depositing a well-aimed sausage thereupon.
"That's for you, you grandmotherfucker"
She gaily murmured sotto voce.
But tragedy struck: a defecation syncope
Caused her collapse, skull smashed on the gravestone;
"I'm in the ****," was her final tragic moan.

He was sent to Aldershot for training
He would learn ******* or be killed
The training was all done with broomsticks
When he thought back it made his blood chill.

His unit was sent down to Portsmouth
To board a ship and go over there
It was packed to the gunwales with weapons
And the rations left no room to spare.

He practiced with his rifle on the journey
Like others who’d not held one before
He’d no sense of the horror he’d be facing
Nor the violence he’d always abhorred.

It was such a small piece of shrapnel
Caught both eyes as a shell case shattered
He never saw his two boys as they grew into men
Missing out on so much that had mattered.

His wife who he loved always helped him
And a life with new interests grew
He learnt how to read the braille papers
It pleased him he’d still know the news.

But the trauma from the experience scarred him
And ire with politics grew by the day
So he took to his new odd braille keyboard
And wrote articles and letters to complain.

He could sense the new way that the wind blew
In the corridors of power in the House
There was money to be made in new weapons
And politicians ignore those who grouse.

Then again two decades later it started
Another war that would mean more dead men
The obscenity rose like a bile in his throat
So once again he took to his ‘pen’.

©JRW2014

To a war that they’d never understand
Were sent men who hadn't a clue
Because men behind doors make decisions
While the dying’s for me and for you.

So thousands went off into battle
To places that they’d never known
Over the top and shot down to die
In fields where red poppies have grown.

Is there ever a point to this mayhem
I struggle to find one, I do
History'll record that I stayed here
So it matters not, but to a few.

©JRW2014

Mud goes so stiff as it dries on the clothes
And it gets in the rifles and ammo
And men live in the mud for day after day
And they die there as the death tolls just grow.

The lads call it Wipers, but we know it’s called Ypres
And we don’t know the language but know mud
And the massive field guns that are firing this way
Causing lots of men to stay here for good.

In two months I’ve not heard the sound of a bird
With the fighting and dying you don’t listen
But I saw a dead blackbird lying out in the mud
And memories of home made my eyes glisten.

I’d rather be back at my home on the farm
Tending cattle and working the land
But I’m lying here shooting at men I don’t know
In a hard ****** war that I don’t understand.

We’ll soon be coming to the end of this year
We were told that it wouldn’t last too long
I don’t know how much longer the men can last out
The spirits willing but their bodies aren’t strong.

We’ve been pounded for hours, we’ve been pounded for days
It seems like so long and it’s so cold
There are men who've got frostbite and gangrene and sores
But it’s the dysentery that makes some men fold.

When will it end and who will make peace
They’re decisions that aren't made at the front
But by men back at home who think they know best
Not by poor dying men bearing the brunt.

©JRW2014