Thiepval* by Micca (May 2002) Its Halloween** midnight in the low lands of Flanders A cold pale fog on the land it is spread And out of the mist, come a marching and singing Long gaunt files of men near a hundred years dead They stand, parade order, by the building at Thiepval And at the command each steps up and stands tall And receives in his turn from the ghost Colour Sergeant His name rank and number removed from the wall Their spectral Officer call the dismissal And grey NCOS give each man his paybook They salute and depart from the grim fields of Flanders Without a glance sideways or a backward look They march away and their singing is fading But long before dawn their home places they've found And finally back, after nearly a century Each man with relief can sink into home ground And all over Blighty*** their names are erasing From column, memorial and empty tomb The lost and the missing that have no known resting place Returning to lie in their dark native womb And now here at Thiepval there stands a cold monument Blank and unmarked made of pale Portland stone Because all the men it was made to memorial Have all returned home, to sleep still with their own "There's a long, long trail a winding into the land of my dreams Where nightingales are singing and a pale moon gleams" *Thiepval: A monument to WW1 dead in Flanders on which the names, ranks and numbers of 75,026 men are inscribed who have no known resting place **Halloween: It is believed in some cultures that at Halloween, when the veil between the dead and the living worlds are thin, every 100 years those that met with sudden or violent death are allowed back to correct a wrong or right an injustice. ***Blighty: WW1 slang for Britain (or home) to "cop a Blighty", was to get wounded badly enough to be invalided home Copyright M.A. Patterson, May 2002
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