To Any Dead Officer by Siegfried Sassoon.

Well, how are things in heaven? I wish you'd say, because I'd like to know that you're all right.

Tell me, have you found everlasting day? Or been sucked in by everlasting night? For when I shut my eyes,

your face shows plain. I hear you make some cheery old remark. I can build you in my brain, though you've gone out patrolling in the dark.

You hated tours of trenches. You were proud, of nothing more than having good years to spend,

longed to get home and join the careless crowd.

Of chaps who work in peace with time for friend, that's all washed out now, you're beyond

the wire.

No earthly chance can send you crawling back.

You're finished with machine gun fire, knocked over in a hopeless dud attack.

Somehow I always thought you'd get done in, because you were so desperate keen to live.

You were all out to try and save your skin, well knowing how much the world had got to give.

You joked at shells and took the usual shop, stuck in your dirty job and did it

fine, with Jesus Christ, when will it stop? Three years. It's hell unless we break their line.

So when they told me you'd been left for dead, I wouldn't believe them, feeling it must be true.

Next week the bloody roll of honour said,

Wounded and missing, that's the thing to do when lads are left in shell-holes,

dying slow, with nothing but blank skyeer and wounds that ache,

moaning for water till they know it's night, and then it's not worth while to wake.

Goodbye, old lad.

Remember me to God and tell him that our politicians swear

they won't give in till Prussian rules been trod.

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