Arras. <br />Ypres. <br />Somme. <br />Verdun and <br />Vimy Ridge: <br />Roadsigns to yesteryear and the former frontlines <br />Echoing a deeply and deathly-familiar refrain <br />From the fading pages of a history <br />Scarcely spoken by its own dramatis personae. <br />Names to conjure grainy images in black and white, <br />Of mud-caked men and machine-stoked might <br />Jerking and flickering awkwardly across <br />The cathode-tubed Nomansland of time <br />Like marionettes whose strings are strung <br />To some mad fool’s sick and arthritic fingers, <br />Evoking pride and pity, <br />Reverence and repulsion, <br />Gung-Ho and going to a Hell <br />Even Danté at his darkest couldn’t have conceived – <br />Entire empires of Hamelyns pied-piping <br />Their youngest, ripest, strongest and brightest <br />Like Lemmings to the slaughter: <br />Enticed over the cliffs of imperial vainglory <br />By ‘Duty to country’, ‘Defence of the family’, <br />‘Home before Christmas! ’, (or so lied the story) , <br />To be murdered in their untold, un-graved millions, <br />Not by Maxim guns and mass-produced machinery, <br />But by the all too casual machinations and chicanery <br />Of the powers behind The Powers that Be <br />(Powers that should have long been …. and gone) <br />Playing ‘Political Poker’ <br />In the dim-lit, after-dinner Smoking Rooms of our stately homes: <br />Men’s lives just a convenient, expendable ‘stake’ in their gruesome game: <br />“See your Company and raise you a Division” <br />The full-house sending the short-straight to hell. <br />Read them and let someone else weep. <br />Can’t you hear? …. <br />They’re weeping still.<br /><br />Tony Jolley<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-hell-with-hamelyn/
