Dead Man’s Dump

The plunging limbers over the shattered trackRacketed with their rusty freight,Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,And the rusty stakes like sceptres oldTo stay the flood of brutish menUpon our brothers dear.

The wheels lurched over sprawled deadBut pained them not, though their bones crunched;Their shut mouths made no moan.They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,Man born of man, and born of woman;And shells go crying over themFrom night till night and now.

Earth has waited for them,All the time of their growthFretting for their decay:Now she has them at last!In the strength of their strengthSuspended—stopped and held.

What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?Earth! Have they gone into you?Somewhere they must have gone,And flung on your hard backIs their souls’ sack,Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass,Or stood aside for the half used life to passOut of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,When the swift iron burning beeDrained the wild honey of their youth.

What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre,Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,Immortal seeming ever?Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,A fear may choke in our veinsAnd the startled blood may stop.

The air is loud with death,The dark air spurts with fire,The explosions ceaseless are.Timelessly now, some minutes past,These dead strode time with vigorous life,Till the shrapnel called “An end!”But not to all. In bleeding pangsSome borne on stretchers dreamed of home,Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

A man’s brains splattered onA stretcher-bearer’s face;His shook shoulders slipped their load,But when they bent to look againThe drowning soul was sunk too deepFor human tenderness.

They left this dead with the older dead,Stretched at the cross roads.

Burnt black by strange decayTheir sinister faces lie,The lid over each eye;The grass and coloured clayMore motion have than they,Joined to the great sunk silences.

Here is one not long dead.His dark hearing caught our far wheels,And the choked soul stretched weak handsTo reach the living word the far wheels said;The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheelsSwift for the end to breakOr the wheels to break,Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight,“Will they come? Will they ever come?”Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,The quivering-bellied mules,And the rushing wheels all mixedWith his tortured upturned sight.

So we crashed round the bend,We heard his weak scream,We heard his very last sound,And our wheels grazed his dead face.