Suicide in the Trenches

I KNEW a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
. . . .
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Siegfried Sassoon

In Memoriam.

IN MEMORIAM: G.R.Y.T.

(Killed in action, April 23, 1917)

I spoke with you but seldom, yet there lay

Some nameless glamour in your written word,

And thoughts of you rose often - longings stirred

By dear remembrance of the sad blue-grey

That dwelt within your eyes, the even sway

Of your young god-like gait, the rarely heard

But frank bright laughter, hallowed by a Day

That made of Youth Right's offering to the sword.

So now I ponder, since your day is done,

Ere dawn was past, on all you meant to me,

And all the more you might have come to be,

And wonder if some state, beyond the sun

And shadows here, may yet some completion see

Of intimacy sweet though scarce begun.

- Vera Brittain

Poetry from the Eastern Front.

BEFORE ATTACK

When soldiers go to death they sing,
but just before it
                          one may cry.
In battle, the most fearful thing
is when you know you soon may die.
The snow's ploughed up with mortar shells
no longer white, but black with dust.
Whizz - goes one,
                      and a friend lies dead,
and I'm alive - death's hurtled past.
Next turn is mine -
                            so beastly near.
It's me they're aiming at, I know.
It's 41,
          the grimmest year
infantry frozen in the snow.
A magnet's what I seem to be
Attracting every shell that flies.
But once again death misses me -
a blast,
           and my lieutenant dies...
But now we've grown too tense to wait
And crouching, out of trenches get,
driven along by icy hate
that goads us like a bayonet.

It wasn't long, the skirmish.
                                  Then
we swilled cold vodkas, lashed by gales
and scraped the blood of other men,
unruffled,
               from beneath our nails.

- Semyon Gudzenko
   (1942)
  translated by Dorian Rottenberg
(from Immortality - Verse by Soviet Poets who laid down their lives in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945)


Another translation of the poem available here.