You have to wonder why one old ram will step out
along the turf bank on the far side of Killeshil
his feet raw from a bad case of rot
while another stays hunched under his cape of sack cloth
or untreated sheepskin
That memory's urgent as a scale from my big toe nail
or a nick in my own ear
drawing me back to a bog hole
where black water swirled and our blaze-faced mare
sank to her hocks
For even as I grasped a camouflaged net
hanging over the dressing station in Clairfaye Farm
I thought of the holt and lame
who later today must be carried along a trench named Royal Avenue
Who'll find themselves entrenched no less physically than politically
I think now of young O'Rawe the Royal Irish Rifles
barely out of step
though he digs with the wrong foot
I see him on Hodges Farm of a winter morning
the sun hinting like a tin of bully beef
from a high shelf in the officers' quarters
A servant boy, tugging at the hayrick for an armful of fodder
At least we'll be spared the backbreaking work of late August
in a flax dam
The stink unfurled like a banner across the moor
where greated coated bodies rot
I think of Giselle
her flaxen hair in a net
who served me last week in a village cafe
teaching me the game of the goose
even as she plucked the gander's cape
At a table in Giselle's cafe, one orderly was painting a landscape
in yellow ochre, raw sienna and raw umber
pausing once in a while to gnaw at a trench of thick-skinned Camembert
Something about that estaminet
where I had tried a soupcon of gin
from an eggcup made of Delft
made me intolerably homesick
The music the orderly played on the Victrola
was Offenbach's Overture from Orpheus in the Underworld
It was as if a servant girl from Vermeer was pouring milk
to steep the bread for panade
Giselle lighting my cigarette
as Hodge himself once set a flame to a paraffin lamp
in the cow shed
on that valuable farm of land in [inaudible]
Later this morning I'll show them my firearm
and fall in as a royal recruit with the veterans
who'd followed the Boers from the Cape of Good Hope
to the Orange Free State
like rats following the Pied Piper of Hamelin
in search of gold and pelf
That officer from the Rifles carried a blackthorn stick
The wound on his back brought to mind a puppy, of all things
Something has curled up and died in the quagmire of the trench
named Sandy Row
down which the boys will surely step on the 12th of July
It's a shame it was only last week I met Giselle
and fell into her amorous net
You have to wonder at the zeal with which some drive a bayonet
through a straw-stuffed effigy of Lundy
It'll be no distance to Clairfaye farm from Thiepval Wood
It'll be one step forward into no-man's land
between the Ghibelline and Guelphs
with their little bags of tricks, "Ich, Ich"
one step forward, two steps back towards the Schwaben Redoubt
I noticed how O'Rour twirled his moustache
as he sang Thom Moore's
Commanding officers in sheepskin capes
are under orders not to leave the trench
and go over the top
It's the duty of the rest of us to seek fame and fortune
The needle had stuck in a rut on the Victrola
halfway through a foxtrot
The blaze-faced mare Hodge bought from a farmer
in Ardstraw
The ram from a farmer in Tydavnet
It seems now everywhere I go there's a trench
that's precisely as tall and thin as my own good self
and through which if I march double quick
I may yet find my way back to bounteous Killeeshil
the bog from which I was hurled into this bog
There's a strong chance that Giselle, mon amour,
will hold me hostage in my bed at Clairfaye Farm
and simply not allow me to escape
For the moment, I must concentrate on taking aim
as I adjust my helmet and haversack
and mount the firing step