Subject: Lyr Add: THIEPVAL
From:
Micca
Date: 11 Nov 02 - 08:47 AM
Bugger, after I had posted to a thread I realised that I should have put this up as an add as well. and just done a link from the thread, Bugger!! There is a tune written by Linda Kelly
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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sj
