‘A War Poem of Sorts’ for Remembrance Day, by Paul A. Freeman

A War Poem of Sorts

—to Robert Thomas Waldock, who died in 1983

The graveyard’s last but one dug hole was filled
by Robert Thomas Waldock who had fought
in Flanders, where so many men were killed,
and where the twentieth century was wrought.

His picture’s in a treasured album, seen
in Ashwell’s small museum. Robert stands
beside a plinth, in uniform, and keen
to bash the Bosch in fabled Gallic lands.

The teacher at the village school compiled
this album of his boys who went to war,
boys who would be boys, and sometimes riled,
but when enlisting, heroes to the core.

One in six were slaughtered on the field,
by bullet, bomb, disease, while others drowned
in gas, or mud-filled craters (Death’s due yield
’twixt trench and no-man’s-land) their lives unwound.

Those black-and-white and sepia portraits bear
the name of every pupil. If their fate
was death, they ‘fell’, for died’s no word to share,
and next to this he scrawled the tragic date.

A limestone cross’s pedestal recalls
the village men who died in World War One;
the farmhands, blacksmiths, servants in the halls
of country houses ere they faced the Hun.

The Waldocks feature large ’mongst names engraved
upon that war memorial, in bold
lead lettering. Yet those from Death’s scythe saved
in place of names saw faces never old.

A lifetime Robert lived beyond those pals;
a time to court, to wed, to pass on life
while future maiden aunts stayed spouseless gals
ordained to never be a loving wife.

And what of that last grave? When I last saw
where Robert lay, his neighbour was a child,
a victim of a vehicle’s hungry maw,
her three-score-and-ten-year-long span defiled.

What irony this little girl should rest
beside an aged warrior whose friends
died youthful, too, reminding us the best
amongst us sometimes meet untimely ends.

Paul A. Freeman is the author of Rumours of Ophir, a crime novel which was taught in Zimbabwean high schools and has been translated into German. In addition to having two novels, a children’s book and an 18,000-word narrative poem (Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers!) commercially published, Paul is the author of hundreds of published short stories, poems and articles.