In The Ypres Trenches On Christmas Eve, 1914…
His languid form drugged by trench warfare,
The infantryman sits, feeling useless,
Gazing coldly from hollow eyes:
Spectral, haunted, mindless,
Worn, spirit torn and lifeless.
His countenance is sombre, yet listless,
Commanded by imminent death and unaware
Of his shadowy, shameless, exhausted stare…
His grimy fingers aching in evening frost,
The infantryman writes of his sadness,
Weeping boldly from sallow eyes:
Visceral, daunted, helpless,
Scorned, forlorn and seemless.
His encumbrance is borne, yet endless,
Confined by imminent grief and cost
By war’s tawdry, careless, blasted loss…
And then, rising above the bloody, smoky mire,
And the pain, the fear and the situation dire,
A haunting melody from German voices emanated
And like gas, crept towards the infantryman and infiltrated
His trench, so that his aching head slowly lifted
To the beauty of the singing which inexorably drifted
Across no man’s land to bring tears and some peace
On Christmas Eve and a kind of incongruous release.
The infantryman rasped his own words to this ironic pact:
‘Silent Night’, the harmony raw alongside ‘Stille Nacht’…
Pete Ray
December 2019
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