Three War Poems That Stick with Me

107th Infantry Memorial, Central Park New York City (Steve Harris Photo)

To Germany

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,
And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
But, gropers both through fields of thought confined,
We stumble and we do not understand.
You only saw your future bigly planned,
And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,
And in each other's dearest ways we stand,
And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.

When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each other's truer form,
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm,
We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But, until peace, the storm,
The darkness, and the thunder and the rain.

Charles Hamilton Sorley, Suffolk Rgt., Killed at Loos, 1915
(Sorley was studying in Germany when war broke out.)

Guard Duty 

A star frightens the steeple cross
a horse gasps smoke
iron clanks drowsily
mists spread
fears
staring shivering
shivering 
cajoling
whispering
You! 

August Stramm, German Army, KIA Eastern Front 1915

Harbonnières to Bayonvillers: Picnic (a Sonnet)

A house marked Ortskommandantur—a great
sign Kaiserplatz on a corner of the church,
and German street names all around the square.
Troop columns split to let our sidecar through.
“Drive like hell and get back on the main road—it’s getting late.”
“Yessir.”
The roadway seemed to reel and lurch
through clay wastes rimmed and pitted everywhere.
“You hungry?—Have some of this, there’s enough for two.”
We drove through Bayonvillers—and as we ate
men long since dead reached out and left a smirch
and taste in our throats like gas and rotten jam.
“Want any more?”
“Yes sir, if you got enough there.”
“Those fellows smell pretty strong.”
“I’ll say they do,
but I’m too hungry sir to care a damn.”

John Allan Wyeth, 33rd Division AEF, Survived War
From: This Man’s Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets, 
Available from the University of South Carolina Press