ARABLE ENTRENCHMENTS...

 Arable Entrenchments…

Fields lay before Canadian troops, the livelihoods

Of a French farming community.

Arable, fertile land with such care tended, 

 Soon to yield war, threat and atrocity.

And at the pervading inconvenience and rape,

Arms were raised in futile frustration

At the trespassers who would plough

Deep furrows across their smallholdings,

Trenches in which to plant corpses, not corn

And bring an indefensible war to a peaceful landscape

With all the clamour and furore

Of senseless death and destruction…

Pete Ray

12th July 2022  

This scene was written about by a Canadian soldier, Private Victor Wheeler in October 1914, who was disturbed by having to destroy arable fields in order to dig trenches.

Some of the soldiers had raised grain on the western prairie back home and felt huge sympathy for the farm workers as they stood by and watched their livelihoods disappear into fields of death…

At this time, Canadian soldiers were involved in fighting in the Salient at Ypres and suffered from the effects of the first Great War poison gas attacks…