He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear, Sick for escape,--loathing the strangled horror And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.
An officer came blundering down the trench: "Stand-to and man the fire-step!" On he went.... Gasping and bawling, "Fire-step ... counter-attack!" Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left; And stumbling figures looming out in front. "O Christ, they're coming at us!" Bullets spat, And he remembered his rifle ... rapid fire ... And started blazing wildly ... then a bang Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom, Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans.... Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned, Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.
"The effect of our bombardment was terrific. One man told me he had never seen so many dead before."
"_He'd never seen so many dead before._" They sprawled in yellow daylight while he swore And gasped and lugged his everlasting load Of bombs along what once had been a road. "_How peaceful are the dead._" Who put that silly gag in some one's head?
"_He'd never seen so many dead before._" The lilting words danced up and down his brain, While corpses jumped and capered in the rain. No, no; he wouldn't count them any more.... The dead have done with pain: They've choked; they can't come back to life again.
When Dick was killed last week he looked like that, Flapping along the fire-step like a fish, After the blazing crump had knocked him flat.... "_How many dead? As many as ever you wish. Don't count 'em; they're too many. Who'll buy my nice fresh corpses, two a penny?_"
Lost in the swamp and welter of the pit, He flounders off the duck-boards; only he knows Each flash and spouting crash,--each instant lit When gloom reveals the streaming rain. He goes Heavily, blindly on. And, while he blunders, "Could anything be worse than this?"--he wonders, Remembering how he saw those Germans run, Screaming for mercy among the stumps of trees: Green-faced, they dodged and darted: there was one Livid with terror, clutching at his knees.... Our chaps were sticking 'em like pigs.... "O hell!" He thought--"there's things in war one dare not tell Poor father sitting safe at home, who reads Of dying heroes and their deathless deeds."