The Third Battle Of Ypres, Passchendaele Poem by Roy Ballard

The Royal West Kents went in by night
across the duckboard track.
They were unconscious of their plight
until the dawn attack.
Shell craters touched and overlapped
as far as eye could see;
where many tanks and guns lay trapped,
drowned in a slimy sea
with rotting corpses, blackened bones
of many thousand men
who died so their respective thrones
could rule the world again.
The Royal West Kents pressed on ahead
to lie in khaki heaps, new-dead.





(As remembered by Lance Corporal Vic Cole,1897-1995)