A Soldier in the Great War
William Heath
1 A Trip to Flanders
In Flanders the poppies bloom
blood-red, the cornflowers blue,
fields of wheat and barley
cover the hills where farmers
in season harvest their crops,
and milk cows graze on grass.
True, sometimes a plow exposes
bones of long-lost soldiers, a buried
dud explodes, on rainy days the smell
of rusty iron is strong, and we can see
remnants of zigzagging trench lines,
scattered ponds of old bomb craters.
Near a brick bunker by a canal
where doctor-poet John McCrae
did his life-or-death work,
identical white stone crosses
in neat rows honor the fallen
by name and date—when they can.
One is dedicated to a boy who
lied about his age, lived to fifteen,
but most repeat the same words:
A Soldier in the Great War.
The body, like thousands of
other war dead, has no name.
In the walled old weaving town
of Ypres, we walk beneath
a large marble arch carved
with the names of some
fifty-five-thousand British troops
whose bodies are never found.
Names without bodies,
bodies without names,
this is what it meant to be
a soldier in the Great War.
2 Passchendaele
Passchendaele is a pretty town
with red-tile roofs and bright flowers
in window boxes. The paved
streets dry quickly after rain.
The battle plan is simple enough,
drive the enemy from the little village
on a nearby hill, until a steady heavy
downpour transforms the ground
into a soggy morass where pressing
frward is out of the question.
Men bog down in thigh-high mud
and can not move or be rescued.
Some die standing in place,
many of the wounded crawl
into shell holes for safety’s sake
to slowly drown in rising water.
This battle in the mud slogs on
for months, corpses blown to bits
are hit again, spewing a putrid mist,
a rain within the rain, of human flesh.
Here in a flooded crater a flotilla
of bloated bodies, an empty helmet,
a boot that isn’t, a medley of dead
soldiers from both doomed sides.
Several hundred thousand men die
to take, and lose, and take again
this village with a name the soldiers
can not pronounce. Ypres they call
“Wipers,” Passchendaele is simply
known as “Hell.”
3 The General
He believed the Germans could not
withstand a thundering frontal assault
by a hard-charging line of cavalry,
each man brandishing a gleaming saber,
supported by shoulder-to-shoulder ranks
of troops advancing with fixed bayonets.
The moral force of such splendid courage
would unnerve the enemy, deflect his aim,
and cause a pell-mell retreat, a total rout.
Instead the foe kept a steady pull
on machine-gun triggers, mowed
his brave boys down in swaths.
The general was elated: how inspiring
it was to watch his gallant lads
maintain perfect discipline all the way
to the coiled barbed-wire entanglements
where like unstrung puppets they threw
frantic hands in the air and fell in heaps.
After losing half his force, not one
man reached the German trenches,
the general described the action as brisk.
4 No Man’s Land
The notorious Ypres Salient creates
a bulge of several miles into German lines,
leaving the Allies exposed on three sides
to relentless artillery shelling. Soldiers
dig their own graves and call them trenches,
the deeper the better. No safe place exists.
The two opposing forces are divided by
No Man’s Land, an expanse of stinking mud
protected by barbed-wire entanglements
on both sides. All hardwood trees are
reduced to splinters, what then are the chances
in this forlorn waste space of a man’s flesh?
When the troops are asked (ordered actually)
to up ladder and over the top into the thick
of it, they do as they are told. Not much
is required in the way of rehearsals.
All a man has to do is slog forward,
negotiate some barbed-wire brambles,
and take out a cement block emplacement
harboring an enemy machine-gun nest.
Worse yet, at Ypres the Germans
first use chlorine gas, men foam
at the mouth, collapse in convulsions.
Livestock fall in the fields.
At the start everyone wants to get in,
as if the war were a swimming pool,
but only the rats, grown to a grotesque
fatness, prosper in No Man’s Land.
5 Over There
When the poet-soldiers of England
venture forth to fight in Flanders,
they believe in honor and glory,
but the horrors of trench warfare
make them say goodbye to the
eternal verities—industrialized death,
an unspeakable wholesale slaughter
that drags on year after year,
neither side able to advance or willing
to retreat, is simply too absurd.
No leaders try to stop the folly.
As millions die so does the romance
of war, there are no heroes only
shell-shocked survivors. Our concept
of irony, Paul Fussell states, is born
on the Western Front. Yet wars
persist, the young still march off
as if mass murder makes sense.
6 Remembering the Great War
After the shell is planted
among us everything is roses
and poppies, I hope to never
again see such a blooming.
Skulls mushroom from muck,
rats’ eyes take our measure,
bees flash by with a leaden buzz,
lice are our only lovers.
A gassed asthmatic, I keep
on the wall a fading map webbed
with lines, I run my fingers along
where friends were last seen.
William Heath
1 A Trip to Flanders
In Flanders the poppies bloom
blood-red, the cornflowers blue,
fields of wheat and barley
cover the hills where farmers
in season harvest their crops,
and milk cows graze on grass.
True, sometimes a plow exposes
bones of long-lost soldiers, a buried
dud explodes, on rainy days the smell
of rusty iron is strong, and we can see
remnants of zigzagging trench lines,
scattered ponds of old bomb craters.
Near a brick bunker by a canal
where doctor-poet John McCrae
did his life-or-death work,
identical white stone crosses
in neat rows honor the fallen
by name and date—when they can.
One is dedicated to a boy who
lied about his age, lived to fifteen,
but most repeat the same words:
A Soldier in the Great War.
The body, like thousands of
other war dead, has no name.
In the walled old weaving town
of Ypres, we walk beneath
a large marble arch carved
with the names of some
fifty-five-thousand British troops
whose bodies are never found.
Names without bodies,
bodies without names,
this is what it meant to be
a soldier in the Great War.
2 Passchendaele
Passchendaele is a pretty town
with red-tile roofs and bright flowers
in window boxes. The paved
streets dry quickly after rain.
The battle plan is simple enough,
drive the enemy from the little village
on a nearby hill, until a steady heavy
downpour transforms the ground
into a soggy morass where pressing
frward is out of the question.
Men bog down in thigh-high mud
and can not move or be rescued.
Some die standing in place,
many of the wounded crawl
into shell holes for safety’s sake
to slowly drown in rising water.
This battle in the mud slogs on
for months, corpses blown to bits
are hit again, spewing a putrid mist,
a rain within the rain, of human flesh.
Here in a flooded crater a flotilla
of bloated bodies, an empty helmet,
a boot that isn’t, a medley of dead
soldiers from both doomed sides.
Several hundred thousand men die
to take, and lose, and take again
this village with a name the soldiers
can not pronounce. Ypres they call
“Wipers,” Passchendaele is simply
known as “Hell.”
3 The General
He believed the Germans could not
withstand a thundering frontal assault
by a hard-charging line of cavalry,
each man brandishing a gleaming saber,
supported by shoulder-to-shoulder ranks
of troops advancing with fixed bayonets.
The moral force of such splendid courage
would unnerve the enemy, deflect his aim,
and cause a pell-mell retreat, a total rout.
Instead the foe kept a steady pull
on machine-gun triggers, mowed
his brave boys down in swaths.
The general was elated: how inspiring
it was to watch his gallant lads
maintain perfect discipline all the way
to the coiled barbed-wire entanglements
where like unstrung puppets they threw
frantic hands in the air and fell in heaps.
After losing half his force, not one
man reached the German trenches,
the general described the action as brisk.
4 No Man’s Land
The notorious Ypres Salient creates
a bulge of several miles into German lines,
leaving the Allies exposed on three sides
to relentless artillery shelling. Soldiers
dig their own graves and call them trenches,
the deeper the better. No safe place exists.
The two opposing forces are divided by
No Man’s Land, an expanse of stinking mud
protected by barbed-wire entanglements
on both sides. All hardwood trees are
reduced to splinters, what then are the chances
in this forlorn waste space of a man’s flesh?
When the troops are asked (ordered actually)
to up ladder and over the top into the thick
of it, they do as they are told. Not much
is required in the way of rehearsals.
All a man has to do is slog forward,
negotiate some barbed-wire brambles,
and take out a cement block emplacement
harboring an enemy machine-gun nest.
Worse yet, at Ypres the Germans
first use chlorine gas, men foam
at the mouth, collapse in convulsions.
Livestock fall in the fields.
At the start everyone wants to get in,
as if the war were a swimming pool,
but only the rats, grown to a grotesque
fatness, prosper in No Man’s Land.
5 Over There
When the poet-soldiers of England
venture forth to fight in Flanders,
they believe in honor and glory,
but the horrors of trench warfare
make them say goodbye to the
eternal verities—industrialized death,
an unspeakable wholesale slaughter
that drags on year after year,
neither side able to advance or willing
to retreat, is simply too absurd.
No leaders try to stop the folly.
As millions die so does the romance
of war, there are no heroes only
shell-shocked survivors. Our concept
of irony, Paul Fussell states, is born
on the Western Front. Yet wars
persist, the young still march off
as if mass murder makes sense.
6 Remembering the Great War
After the shell is planted
among us everything is roses
and poppies, I hope to never
again see such a blooming.
Skulls mushroom from muck,
rats’ eyes take our measure,
bees flash by with a leaden buzz,
lice are our only lovers.
A gassed asthmatic, I keep
on the wall a fading map webbed
with lines, I run my fingers along
where friends were last seen.
