Battlefield Casualty Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Battlefield Casualty
Poem inspired by the Letters of Lieutenant Norman Cecil Down,1 / 4 Gordon Highlanders, during the 1914-1918 War

Moonlight
A yawning hole,50 feet deep
The dead stretched on its sides
Like Vesuvius victims

Inner gas explosions
Cause one or two bodies to twitch
Sliding into the butcher's shambles
Down at the mired base
The whine of bombs and battle draws ever nearer

Through the driving snow on the rutted path below
The pipers march, playing ‘The Athol Highlanders'
Behind them, the struggling, muddy tail of
Gunners, snipers, bombers
Civis learning the bloody games of war
And mules dragging supplies,
Their hot breath white in the air

The ghosts of these battalions
Linger on, in Calais, the Menin Road
The heights of Hooge,
The slaughterhouse of Sanctuary Wood
Hill 20 and the Bluff,
The mist of ruins shattered in yesterday's Ypres.

My father's cousin John died in this place
Caught mid-joke, blown into obliteration
No funeral costs, a name upon a wall