“On les Aura!”
Soldat Jacques Bonhomme Loquitur
See you that stretch of shell-torn mud spotted with
pools of mire,
Crossed by a burst abandoned trench and tortured
strands of wire,
Where splintered pickets reel and sag and leprous
trench-rats play,
That scour the Devil’s hunting-ground to seek their
carrion prey?
That is the field my father loved, the field that once
was mine,
The land I nursed for my child’s child as my fathers
did long syne.
See there a mound of powdered stones, all flattened,
smashed, and torn,
Gone black with damp and green with slime?—Ere
you and I were born
My father’s father built a house, a little house and
bare,
And there I brought my woman home—that heap of
rubble there!
The soil of France! Fat fields and green that bred my
blood and bone!
Each wound that scars my bosom’s pride burns deeper
than my own.
But yet there is one thing to say—one thing that pays for all, Whatever lot our bodies know, whatever fate befall, We hold the line! We hold it still! My fields are No Man’s Land, But the good God is debonair and holds us by the hand. “On les aura!” See there! and there I soaked heaps of huddled, grey! My fields shall laugh—enriched by those who sought them for a prey.