Free Voices of Silence by Vivien Noakes Page A

we’re getting pretty near:
    And we haven’t been in Trenches, but we’re just upon the brink,
    And when I write again, you need not be surprised to hear
    We’ve been at ’em with the bayonet, and been dabbling in the pink.
    Well, whatever comes, keep smiling, for, whatever comes, I’m true,
    And so are all the Glosters and they’re not the boys to shrink,
    And when the Kaiser’s busted, I’ll be racing back to you,
    And trust as [I] shall find you as this leaves me – in the pink.
    Sign Posts
    There’s a line that runs from Nieuport down into Alsace Lorraine,
    Its twists and turns are many, and each means a loss or gain;
    Every yard can tell a story, every foot can claim its fee,
    There the line will stay for ever from Lorraine up to the sea.
    Places memorised by symbol, little things that caught the mind,
    As at Loos ’twas but a lone tree which in mem’ry is enshrined;
    Perhaps at Wipers ’twas a corner, shell-bespattered, held our sight,
    Or a nightingale at Plug Street, sending music through the night.
    Little things, yet each implanted when the nerves are tension high,
    And in years to come remembered how, while gazing, death passed by;
    So the line for all has sign posts, and a dug-out oft can hold
    Little memories to haunt one as the future years unfold.
    Though this line will be behind us as we push on to the Spree,
    Yet to all it will be sacred, mud-encased though it may be;
    In the future dim and distant they will tell the tale again –
    The ghosts of those who held the line from Nieuport to Lorraine.
    War
    Take a wilderness of ruin,
    Spread with mud quite six feet deep;
    In this mud now cut some channels,
    Then you have the line we keep.
    Now you get some wire that’s spiky,
    Throw it round outside your line;
    Get some pickets, drive in tightly,
    And round these your wire entwine.
    Get a lot of Huns and plant them
    In a ditch across the way;
    Now you have war in the making
    As waged here from day to day.
    Early morn the same old ‘stand to’
    Daylight, sniping in full swing;
    Forenoon, just the merry whizz-bang,
    Mid-day oft a truce doth bring.
    Afternoon repeats the morning,
    Evening falls then work begins;
    Each works in his muddy furrow
    Set with boards to catch your shins.
    Choc-a-block with working parties,
    Or the rations coming up;
    Four hours scramble, then to dug-out,
    Mud-encased, yet keen to sup.
    Oft we’re told, ‘Remember Belgium’
    In the years that are to be;
    Crosses set by all her ditches
    Are our pledge of memory.
    Macfarlane’s Dug-out
‘This is the house that Mac built’
    Since the breed that were our forebears first crouched within a cave,
    And found their food and fought their foe with arrow and with stave,
    And the things that really mattered unto men were four, or three:

    Shelter, and sustenance; a maid; the simple right to be;
    And Fear stalked through the forest and slid adown the glade –
    There’s been nothing like the dug-out that Macfarlane made!
    When Mac first designed his dug-out, and commenced his claim to peg,
    He thought of something spacious in which one might stretch a leg,
    Might lie out at one’s leisure, and sit up at one’s ease,
    And not be butted in the back by t’other fellow’s knees;
    Of such a goodly fashion were the plans the builder laid,
    And even so the dug-out that Macfarlane made.
    He shored it up with timber, and he roofed it in with tin
    Torn from the battered boxes that they bring the biscuits in –
    (He even used the biscuits, but he begs I should not state
    The number that he took for tiles, the number that he ate!) –
    He shaped it, and secured it to withstand the tempest’s shocks –
    (I know he stopped one crevice with the latest gift of socks!) –
    He trimmed it with his trenching-tool, and slapped it with his spade –
    A marvel was the dug-out that Macfarlane made.
    He lined the walls with sand-bags, and he laid the floor with wood,
    And when his eye beheld it, he beheld it very good;
    A broken bayonet in a chink