General Chat

As a tribute to Henry Allingham on the day of his funeral I thought I would share a poem I wrote about the futility of World War One. It was originally dedicated to my grandfather William Blazeby, who also 'survived' the conflict:

Over the Top

We walked across land that was no-mans that day,
No running, no bunching, the officers say.
The shelling has stopped and the silence appalling,
Then jerking and twisting, the men started falling.
The bullets like bees in a swarm, round us flying,
And boys barely grown, grew no more, slowly dying.
There was Harry and Tommy and Jimmy and Bill,
We were comrades back then; they are part of me still.
They were boys trying desperately hard to be men,
But no more would they ever see loved ones again.
So what was it for, how much mud did we gain?
Did those thousands of men lay their lives down in vain?
Please don’t say it was pride in their country of birth,
For don’t all of us live on one planet, one Earth!

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Colin