'ROUNDED UP BY A POSSE': A NEW FIRST WORLD WAR POEM BY PETE RAY...

Rounded Up By A Posse…

Avoiding invasive

And yet wholly understandable

Questions from rather annoying,

Although admittedly caring parents and siblings

Whose demands I find cloying,

I slip out of the back door,

My destination arguable…

Feeling pensive

And yet oddly vulnerable,

Sensations of warfare clinging,

Although barely healing the mental wounds,

Whose demands I feel wringing:

I cannot grieve yet but abhor,

My devastation unenviable…

I venture across a field

Unhindered by shell holes,

Unspoilt by the dead,

Yet with anguish unconcealed,

My nightmare unfolds

In the depths of my head…

I glare at a river,

Not discoloured by blood,

Not blighted by slaughter;

Yet an involuntary shiver

Cascades like a flood,

As I stare blankly at the water…

I am held fast by the hands,

An indiscriminate arrest:

A shirker? Degraded, disbelieved;

I am confused by demands,

I am on leave, taking rest,

I have no proof though and am justly aggrieved… 

I am taken by force:

Offended, branded, suspected,

Held for hours and interrogated;

No registration card, of course,

Left at home, as instructed,

This infantryman was thus castigated…

I am finally released

By the posse’s grand mission,

Nerves shaken to the core;

Better to be deceased,

Than suffer the suspicion,

For there’s no embarrassment in war…

Shaking, passive

And yet wholly fallible,

Recriminations of mistrust intriguing,

Although blindly I head for home drifting,

Whose demands I’d shed by fleeing:

I now feel shame all the more,

My desolation incomparable… 

Pete Ray

October 2016

World War One…

Written about the police and military posse groups, who rounded up men of obvious military age and interrogated them as to why they had not enlisted, demanding proof…

Soldiers had been told in March 1916 not to carry their registration cards with them when on leave…

Rail stations, football grounds, parks and other public places were watched.

The legality of the ‘round up’ was surely questionable and a number of men were detained, suspected and degraded, their lives disrupted without warning. 

Autocratic? Foolish? A waste of time?