They buried him darkly, at the dead of night,
head first in the wall of the trench.
The whole front was fetid with death,
so he'd hardly add to the stench.
For five weeks now they'd been under fire.
Friends were a part of the smell,
lying out in no-man's-land,
festering where they fell.
From the officers' dugout their captain came,
under his oxter a cane.
He came, and he whipped his boot and said,
'Just look at the filth of you men!'
Two Ulstermen, it was, on that stretch,
one of them Granda's brother.
He stepped forward and fixed his eyes
on the sheen of polished leather.
'If it's filth you're after, sir,' says he,
'We're not as black as we're painted,
but we'll make sure that you and filth
can get more closely acquainted.'
Firing his rifle from the hip
he shot his captain dead -
one shot lost in the snarling host
of tracers overhead.
Ashes to ashes, dirt to dirt.
They laughed as they rammed him home,
at this one true blow they'd struck their foe
in all their time on the Somme.
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©Renate Mitchell. May not be reproduced in any form online or offline without explicit written permission.