Edgar Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967). Counter-Attack and Other Poems. 1918.

1. Prelude: The Troops

DIM, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom

Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals

Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots

And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky

Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down

The stale despair of night, must now renew

Their desolation in the truce of dawn,

Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace.

Yet these, who cling to life with stubborn hands,

Can grin through storms of death and find a gap

In the clawed, cruel tangles of his defence.

They march from safety, and the bird-sung joy

Of grass-green thickets, to the land where all

Is ruin, and nothing blossoms but the sky

That hastens over them where they endure

Sad, smoking, flat horizons, reeking woods,

And foundered trench-lines volleying doom for doom.

O my brave brown companions, when your souls

Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead

Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,

Death will stand grieving in that field of war

Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.

And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass

Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;

The unreturning army that was youth;

The legions who have suffered and are dust.