I have a dug-out <br />corrugated iron overhead <br />wire netting and sand bags for a bed <br />an empty bomb box for a table <br />for light a candle in a whisky bottle <br />and mud, mud, God, what mud! - in it, <br />outside it, all round it <br /> <br />I have a picture in my dug-out <br />not much of a picture <br />one of Valentine's coloured post cards <br />but it's bonny, oh it's bonny <br />when I smoke my pipe and look at it <br />in fancy free I'm trudging <br />through the woods <br />among the bracken <br />along the granited roads <br />in the clean, snell air of a <br />Scottish morn <br /> <br />It's just a broken old tree <br />mute symbol of our frailty <br />buffeted by many a storm <br />throned on a hill-top with silent courtiers <br />tall, feathery grasses bending before the wind <br />fleecy cloudlets scurrying along above <br />I smell the mud no longer <br />my lungs are filled with the wind <br />which blows o'er that wild upland <br /> <br />There is a dark wood in my picture <br />and there I oft-times go <br />when the fir trees smell with sweetness after rain <br />brown bracken fringes the wood <br />and joyous, I plunge into it; <br />my clothes glistening with silvery cobwebs <br />as tho' adorned with gems of Araby. <br />There's a clearing in my wood <br />a dark, damp clearing <br />No! I won't think of it <br />it's too like Flanders to be wholesome <br />I always see the wooden crosses there <br /> <br />Then I clamber to the hill-top <br />and stand amid the sweet smelling gorse <br />how wonderful, how beautiful! <br />The grey mists in the valley <br />the dusky purple of the heath-clad hills <br /> <br />But out here <br />the landscape is no picture <br />it's an ugly travesty of Nature. <br />Shell holes, stinking shell holes <br />rotting bodies, hungry rats <br />and mud, mud - what hellish mud! <br />All around us like a sea of slime<br /><br />William Richard Torvaney<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/my-picture-from-the-trenches/
