The Last Veteran Poem by Roy Ballard

Of Great War warriors the last has died

and it is said that where he rests his head

all pomp and circumstance should be applied.

With high-faluting, royal-saluting pride

we should at the last accommodate the past.

They all are gone. Old Simm and Powell and Jones

who had the luck to live through fire and muck,

shot, shell and hell and make at last old bones

and talk about the war in undertones.

We did not understand, we shielded folk,

Powell, Jones and Simm recalling times so grim,

so intimate the language that they spoke

of legions vanished, swept away like smoke,

how they were left to bear until the last

a sad, survivor's guilt which never passed.