They told us about a boy who disappeared <br />when the convoy went through. Search <br />as they might there was no sign until word <br />was sent of ‘residue’ between the wheel and the wheel-arch. <br /> <br /> * <br /> <br />News arrived of the woman who went mad, <br />who kicked-in the windows of every billet, <br />who ran shrieking through the Street of Locks, who shed <br />their semmits and stays to dance a carcan in the market. <br /> <br /> * <br /> <br />This one’s got legs: the man who went down to the river <br />under fire, searching among that day’s dead for his only brother, <br />turning the bodies, one by one, to discover <br />his wife, son, uncles, sister, father, mother. <br /> <br /> * <br /> <br />The Surgeon General, they say it was, who went back <br />to drink the last of his Roffignac, to sit in a dry bath <br />and open a vein: a man, for sure, on the right track. <br />One for the road. One for the primrose path. <br /> <br /> * <br /> <br />Hardly a day goes by but someone boasts <br />of having been there when those men downed weapons <br />with hardly a word, and walked through their own lines, <br />later reported as slips of the tongue, or ghosts. <br /> <br /> * <br /> <br />How’s this for a tale of slaughter: <br />a man who slew his herd, then drew a hood <br />over the trembling head of each blonde daughter <br />and shot them where they stood? <br /> <br /> * <br /> <br />Word of mouth has a gut-shot man walk all of ten <br />miles from the front to his own front-door, lift the latch, <br />find them dead, dig seven graves, fire the thatch, <br />fill his bottle, sling his gun, walk back again. <br /> <br /> * <br /> <br />Here’s one about the raw recruit who crawled out from beneath <br />the corpses of his comrades, like a dinner guest <br />emerging from a bun-fight scrum, to charge the machine-gun nest <br />armed with only a shovel, with only a trowel, with only a toothpick, with only his teeth.<br /><br />David Harsent<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/chinese-whispers-3/
