You had been doing F.O.O. that day; (The Staff knows why we had an F.O.O.: One couldn’t flag-wag through Trônes Wood; the wires Went down as fast as one could put them up; And messages by runner took three hours.) I got the wind up rather: you were late, And they’d been shelling like the very deuce. However, back you came. I see you now, Staggering into “mess”--a broken trench, Two chalk-walls roofed with corrugated iron, And, round the traverse, Driver Noakes’s stove Stinking and smoking while we ate our grub. Your face was blue-white, streaked with dirt; your eyes Had shrunk into your head, as though afraid To watch more horrors; you were sodden-wet With greasy coal-black mud--and other things. Sweating and shivering, speechless, there you stood. I gave you whisky, made you talk. You said: “Major, another signaller’s been killed.” “Who?” “Gunner Andrews, blast them. O my Christ! His head--split open--when his brains oozed out, They looked like bloody sweetbreads, in the muck.” And you’re the chap who writes this claptrap verse! Lord, if I’d half _your_ brains, I’d write a book: None of your sentimental platitudes, But something real, vital; that should strip The glamour from this outrage we call war, Shewing it naked, hideous, stupid, vile-- One vast abomination. So that they Who, coming after, till the ransomed fields Where our lean corpses rotted in the ooze, Reading my written words, should understand This stark stupendous horror, visualize The unutterable foulness of it all.... I’d shew them, not your glamourous “glorious game,” Which men play “jesting” “for their honour’s sake”-- (A kind of Military Tournament, With just a hint of danger--bound in cloth!)-- But War,--as war is now, and always was: A dirty, loathsome, servile murder-job:-- Men, lousy, sleepless, ulcerous, afraid, Toiling their hearts out in the pulling slime That wrenches gum-boot down from bleeding heel And cakes in itching arm-pits, navel, ears: Men stunned to brainlessness, and gibbering: Men driving men to death and worse than death: Men maimed and blinded: men against machines-- Flesh versus iron, concrete, flame and wire: Men choking out their souls in poison-gas: Men squelched into the slime by trampling feet: Men, disembowelled by guns five miles away, Cursing, with their last breath, the living God Because he made them, in His image, men.... So--were your talent mine--I’d write of war For those who, coming after, know it not.