Many thanks to Tim for this timely contribution, with apologies that I am slightly late in posting for Remembrance Day. He mentions Wilfred Owen, who was killed on the 4th November, 1918, having just delivered ammunition for LMGs after crossing a canal at Ors (France). He was shot whilst returning for more ammunition. It was early morning, in mist, during the last main offensive of the First World War, the (2nd) Battle of Sambre, 4th November, 1918.
Picture of Menin Road showing ‘hell holes.’
Tim writes: Every so often I come over all Wilfred Owen and feel the urge to write a war poem. I like to share them at this time of year, for obvious reasons. Though I’ve never been in the Armed Forces, I worked alongside them for many years, and was at the Veterans’ Agency for a while, so am well aware of the trauma they can experience and the problems they may face when they leave. In these three poems I’ve tried to capture a bit of both.
War Walk From lurid dreams, I wake to silence. Strange – the air is still, no longer torn by screams. Nor is it pierced by the stab of gunfire, or shredded by the shock of bursting shells. Despite my pain, my weariness, I rise out of my ditch, drawn by this eerie sense of peace to walk the battlefield, to see what human madness wrought upon this land. The earth is churned and pitted, acrid fog is draped like cotton wool upon its wounds. I do not recognize this place, its greens replaced by brown and black, or livid red and as I stumble through the drifting mist I find the dead, some blown to pieces, some incongruously peaceful, as in sleep. I have no words for them, but as I pass the quiet time is ending. Guns awake, sharp cracks, bright flashes cutting through the fog and soon enough the shells are falling. Yet they seem unreal: why do I have the sense that they can do no harm to me; indeed, why do my feet not sink into the mud? I have been walking in a circle – yes, here is that ruined tree, the twisted wire and there, in my familiar ditch, I see a pile of corpses. One of them is me. Blighty When he returned, they were so glad to find him whole, unblemished: four limbs, two eyes, skin tanned but unburnt, unholed. They’d heard the stories of what might have been, those bodies minced and sutured back together, faces melted, bones and flesh replaced with metal. You made it through, they cried, wrapped arms around the solid, reassuring mass of him, awaiting his embraces in return. None came: those fine, muscled arms hung limply by his side. Such words as passed his mouth appeared to come from very far away. So much of him had missed the plane and was still over there, among the bullets and the bombs that took his friends but spared this now half-empty body. What’s left of him is lost inside it, midway between these caring faces and the other self for whom there can be no way back. First published in 'The Lake' The Gift He gave his life, they said as if it were some little thing he thought might be more use to someone else. And true, there was a time when, drunk on martial sentiments and songs, and for some noble end, he would have given. But not for fifty yards of mud long stripped of all that’s beautiful or green. Not even worms would think it worth their while. For this, his life was swindled from him, so he thought, as in his hole he felt it drain away: but in the end, when twenty thousand lives like his were not enough to pay the mortgage on that land, not even swindled, merely stolen.
Tim Taylor has published two poetry collections, Sea Without a Shore, and LifeTimes, both with Maytree Press, and two novels. His poems have won, or been shortlisted in, a number of competitions and appeared in magazines such as Acumen, Orbis and Pennine Platform and various anthologies. Tim lives in Yorkshire, UK, and teaches Ethics part-time at Leeds University. He enjoys playing the guitar and walking up hills (not usually at the same time).
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