Siegfried Sassoon: They

 

The Bishop tells us: “When the boys come back

“They will not be the same; for they’ll have fought

“In a just cause: they lead the last attack

“On Anti-Christ; their comrades’ blood has bought

“New right to breed an honourable race,

“They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.”

 

“We’re none of us the same!” the boys reply.

“For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind;

“Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;

“And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find

“A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.”

And the Bishop said: “The ways of God are strange!”

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: