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1. Dover Beach

I share a first-floor billet
looking out onto the harbour
with Lance-Corporal Dalrymple.

Some people would pay a lot
for a room and a glitter like this
if it weren’t for the shells.

In the night we hear them whumping
but the salvoes are short
and we hardly wake.

The few townsfolk left
sleep in the white caves
but bed is better.

Some days I feel Matthew Arnold
looking over my shoulder
at the Sophoclean sea.

We must, he says, love one another
and I’d like to
but I’ve no one to love.

2. Arris

Arris is absent without leave much of the time.
Much of the time he’s in the Glass House.
He’s dark, almost black, with a ferine gleam.

His teeth are sharp, white, seen between
trees in a jungle, his wink’s demonic — 'Oo,
soon slip up and down inside er...

Women are easy meat. They love him. Even our
dour major has a soft spot, smiles, would like to
rehabilitate Arris. Guts, I see, gain you admiration.

I visualise him on a dark night, creeping into
an enemy trench, cutting a throat, and creeping away
unnoticed. Men made for killing don’t take orders easily.

3. Triplane

An air-sea rescue triplane's in trouble.
Parked on the promenade, it needs
protection.

The lance-corporal and private detailed
to stand guard are easy meat for Calais.
A shell hits them

and the two men and the plane explode.
Someone in authority
ought to have realised

that people
are a poor protection
against high explosives.

4. Thought in the Ranks

The infantry makes you too fit to think:
muscles use up the blood intended for the brain.

But the brain's sluiced by sea air. It recalls
a you you were, as you witness seagull and sky.

One by one, nearly the whole platoon
has taken me aside and told me their story —
their childhood, how their wife betrayed them,
and I wonder, do they tell it to everyone?

Do they sense I’m bookish, wondering
what to write? Never sure what constitutes

good writing, I sneak to the Dover library,
study Horizon, share the little

fat man's self-absorption in my own swap for a life.

5. Roll Me Over in the Clover

Out of the cold channel-wind, and the blackout,
and roasting by the fire in the pub,

I watch a three-chord man banging at the piano
with a permanently-renewing pintglass on the lid.

The ATS contingent's even hotter than the blaze:
Roll me over, they're roaring, in the clover,

Roll me over, lay me down and do it again.
If only they were appetising, and I fancied them.

I do want it. A corporal asks me, When you do it,
do you pull it out or like to let it soak?

I ponder. I've never been inside a woman.
I like to let it soak, I say. He grins and winks:

We’re in the same team: That’s it, he says.
The only way. Just lovely. Let it soak.
6. Shells

The CSM is marching us up and down
the sea front. Over in Calais
a Hun is studying us through a telescope.

He lays a clutch of eggs
inside the harbour wall, just inside,
and we start to duck for cover.

The CSM doesn’t like this show of arse.
He stands up straight and calls us to attention:
Parade, shun! And the roll is shouted.

It’ll be nice to know who was here
when we’re in heaven. And Britons
never never let the Hun see arse.

More eggs are laid
in the centre of the harbour.
Then more, now closer still.

Then silence. They’ve no shells left.
In my mind’s eye a Nazi officer’s dancing:
Dummkopfen! Donner und blitzen! Scheisse!

Later, the CSM is posted to France
and is killed at once. He was short on
using his loaf and the indispensable cowardice.

Or, could be, his own men killed him.

7. War Literature

Lance-corporal Dalrymple's a potential officer:
bespectacled, courteous, quiet and pimpled.

We’ve a luxury boarding-house view of pebbles and harbour walls,
with twenty-four hours on and twenty-four off.

We guard the coast, and it gives us time
to talk about books in our little arbour.

Lance-corporal Dalrymple’s smoky eyes glow
as he nurses and recommends Howard Spring’s Shabby Tiger.

I can’t work out why it’s not a good book, or why
the dirty songs we sing on marches aren’t better than Wordsworth.

It’s the first popular novel I’ve read, and the worst,
since I suffered through shelves of Rice Burroughs at the age of twelve,

loving an egg-laying Goddess of Mars
and fighting her red wars.

8. June 6

The ditches and roadsides
are lined with soldiers,
all quiet, resting in full gear.

It’s as if legions of angels
have suddenly been summoned,
though they smoke and drink tea.

They know where they’re going
and it makes them quiet. Soon
we know: they’re splashing and falling

up the French coast and we’re a transit camp.
One of ours puts his rifle in his mouth
and blows his head off with a 303.

9. A Red Light in the Night

June 12, 1944

Duty corporal, I’m nodding
as my sentry alerts me.
There’s a plane that’s coming
and showing a red light.

Sure enough, up there
in the night sky
there’s a red glow
and it’s not on fire.

Who’s this, haring from France?
Hitler with peace terms?
Someone escaping —
knowing it’s not working?

Over our eyebrows
it buzzes inland,
till suddenly silent.
Long pause: a loud bang.

Whatever he wanted to say
he won’t say now.
I wake the company CO.
He believes me and rings HQ.

It wasn’t Hitler, we hear,
but a plane with no pilot.
Now we call it the buzz bomb.
It’s when it stops its buzzing that it stings.

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