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WE’D gained our first objective hours before
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While dawn broke like a face
with blinking eyes,
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Pallid, unshaved and thirsty,
blind with smoke.
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Things seemed all right at
first. We held their line,
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With bombers posted, Lewis guns
well placed,
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5
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And clink of shovels deepening
the shallow trench.
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The place was rotten
with dead; green clumsy legs
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High-booted,
sprawled and grovelled along the saps
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And trunks, face
downward, in the sucking mud,
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Wallowed like
trodden sand-bags loosely filled;
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10
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And naked sodden
buttocks, mats of hair,
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Bulged, clotted
heads slept in the plastering slime.
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And then the rain
began,—the jolly old rain!
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A yawning soldier knelt against
the bank,
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Staring across the morning blear
with fog;
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15
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He wondered when the Allemands would get busy;
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And then, of course, they
started with five-nines
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Traversing, sure as fate, and
never a dud.
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Mute in the clamour
of shells he watched them burst
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Spouting dark earth and wire
with gusts from hell,
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20
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While posturing
giants dissolved in drifts of smoke.
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He crouched and flinched, dizzy
with galloping fear,
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Sick for escape,—loathing the
strangled horror
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And butchered, frantic gestures
of the dead.
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An officer came blundering down
the trench:
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25
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‘Stand-to and man the
fire-step!’ On he went...
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Gasping and bawling, ‘Fire-step
... counter-attack!’
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Then the haze
lifted. Bombing on the right
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Down the old sap:
machine-guns on the left;
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And stumbling figures looming out in front.
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30
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‘O Christ, they’re
coming at us!’ Bullets spat,
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And he remembered his rifle ...
rapid fire...
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And started blazing wildly ...
then a bang
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Crumpled and spun him sideways,
knocked him out
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To grunt and wriggle: none
heeded him; he choked
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35
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And fought the flapping veils of
smothering gloom,
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Lost in a blurred confusion of
yells and groans...
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Down, and down, and down, he
sank and drowned,
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Bleeding to death. The
counter-attack had failed.
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