57267: Dead Man's Dump
Creators: name: Project Team, First World War Poetry Digital Archive
Publisher: name: University of Oxford
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 430304
subject: British history
classificationCode: 430308
subject: European history (excl. British, classical Greek and Roman)
classificationCode: 430316
subject: International history

description: The plunging limbers over the shattered<br> track<br> Racketed with their rusty freight,<br> Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,<br> And the rusty stakes like sceptres old<br> To stay the flood of brutish men<br> Upon our brothers dear.<br> The wheels lurched over sprawled dead<br> But pained them not, though their bones<br> crunched,<br> Their shut mouths made no moan.<br> They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,<br> Man born of man, and born of woman,<br> And shells go crying over them<br> From night till night and now.<br> Earth has waited for them,<br> All the time of their growth<br> Fretting for their decay:<br> Now she has them at last!<br> In the strength of their strength<br> Suspended---stopped and held.<br> What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?<br> Earth! have they gone into you!<br> Somewhere they must have gone,<br> And flung on your hard back<br> Is their soul's sack<br> Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.<br> Who hurled them out? Who hurled?<br> None saw their spirits' shadow shake the<br> grass,<br> Or stood aside for the half used life to pass<br> Out of those doomed nostrils and the<br> doomed mouth,<br> When the swift iron burning bee<br> Drained the wild honey of their youth.<br> What of us who, flung on the shrieking<br> pyre,<br> Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,<br> Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,<br> Immortal seeming ever?<br> Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,<br> A fear may choke in our veins<br> And the startled blood may stop.<br> The air is loud with death,<br> The dark air spurts with fire,<br> The explosions ceaseless are.<br> Timelessly now, some minutes past,<br> These dead strode time with vigorous life,<br> Till the shrapnel called 'An end!'<br> But not to all. In bleeding pangs<br> Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,<br> Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.<br> Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your<br> bowel<br> Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love,<br> The impetuous storm of savage love.<br> Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in<br> chemic smoke,<br> What dead are born when you kiss each<br> soundless soul<br> With lightning and thunder from your<br> mined heart,<br> Which man's self dug, and his blind fingers<br> loosed?<br> A man's brains splattered on<br> A stretcher-bearer's face;<br> His shook shoulders slipped their load,<br> But when they bent to look again<br> The drowning soul was sunk too deep<br> For human tenderness.<br> They left this dead with the older dead,<br> Stretched at the cross roads.<br> Burnt black by strange decay<br> Their sinister faces lie,<br> The lid over each eye,<br> The grass and coloured clay<br> More motion have than they,<br> Joined to the great sunk silences.<br> Here is one not long dead;<br> His dark hearing caught our far wheels,<br> And the choked soul stretched weak hands<br> To reach the living word the far wheels said,<br> The blood-dazed intelligence beating for<br> light,<br> Crying through the suspense of the far<br> torturing wheels<br> Swift for the end to break<br> Or the wheels to break,<br> Cried as the tide of the world broke over<br> his sight.<br> Will they come? Will they ever come?<br> Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,<br> The quivering-bellied mules,<br> And the rushing wheels all mixed<br> With his tortured upturned sight.<br> So we crashed round the bend,<br> We heard his weak scream,<br> We heard his very last sound,<br> And our wheels grazed his dead face.