大象传媒

INFANTRYMAN, AT SANTA MARIA

He will move no more from his left side to his right side,
His blood all over the place but mostly in the ditch.
Yet you can see at once he is not dead.
Now something happens in his eyes, half-understood.
His boots push, his shoulders twitch.
The trouble is, he can't quite get his head
Out of the universal puddle of his blood -
So waggles a finger of grey hand, instead.

[In November 1943 this village above the river Sangro in Italy formed part of the German 'winter line'.]

THE 'FALAISE GAP'

He had been so long companion-critic
Of dead men, this afternoon they answered

Humanly back, so he 'went sick', saying
They shared his rations, tea-mug, loving dreams.

How many lively dead? A hundred on the grass,
Clear-eyed still and china-cheeked, in clean

Grey for the infantry, black for the tank-crews.
Team-horses jumbled in the bloody wreck of their guns.

[In July 1944, the greater part of a German army trapped near Falaise, in Normandy, was destroyed with extraordinarily heavy loss of life.]

DUTCH RESISTANCE GIRL

Artillery makes fun of the church tower,
Bombs blacken bread, turn the milk sour
Among the wounded and the already dead
I saw you turn, to comb your small neat head.

[Somewhere near Weert, Holland, September 1944.]

LET NOT THOSE KIND F-WORDS BE LOST

All lost?
The heroes dead?
Troy gate swings useless on its post
Where Hector in full sun
Fell, while his blood played and shone

Though Troy crack, seven walls burn,
Let not those words be lost
Which Paris, lacking Greek,
Fumbled into Helen's breast
While worlds grew warm.

Let not those kind F-words be lost
Of Aubrey Cullum at Primasole Bridge:
Of my friend Hugh Bishop on the Sangro
Delicately shrapnel-wounded in the tank, soon dead.
Ken Sinden, serious drinker, young Robin Anderson
The Scot, companions brewing merrily in petrol-engined
Sherman tank, in Normandy, July, Hill One-One-Two.
Jack Thorogood at St Oedenrode; Len Williams
Joking, wounded, pipe in hand, with Benny Shaw.
"No word of theirs is lost," the padre hazarded.
"No lie unsaid," they laughing all replied.

[In tribute to the 230 men, mostly Bristolians, of the 44th Royal Tank Regiment ('Black Desert Rats') killed in North Africa and Europe, 1941-45.] (This poem was in fact written many years later.)

[漏 Denis Knight]

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