Pilgrimage To Flanders Field-10th November 1998. Poem by Margery Rehman

Crying out through the years,
The echoes of the dead seem to resound
As we trudge through that muddy, wintry ground.
Cold, rain -sodden, hungry, silent,
Each shrouded in our personal response,
Unwilling to acknowledge each other.

Water-swamped, flat, grey, miserable land
Traversed by cemeteries and ploughed black fields.
The sparse woods still cratered.
Unseen to the eye, bits of guns and war waste lie
Beneath the grass, feeding the saplings.
Under our feet, everywhere lie trenches
Criss-crossing-a monstrous labyrinth of death
Still active as fields throw up their litter
To kill some hapless ploughman
Year after year, eighty years on.
Or a road caves in to reveal
Three German officers round a table,
Or an allied officer's bones
But his pipe and whisky bottle intact.

Mutely, we pay our humble homage to the dead,
Numbed, not just by frozen rain, but by unshed tears,
Pity for a generation we never knew
But whose graves shriek out at us
'We lived; we were young;
We thought we mattered;
But see how we died.'
And we are filled with an indescribable despair
That binds us in a silent chain of grief.