The Grimsby Chums Poem by John F. McCullagh

From their farms and their villages, they answered the call;
of King and Country, to the great game of war.
They drilled and they practiced to work as a team,
then were shipped to the Somme, July,1916.

A film of their training was made to be shown
to their sisters and mothers and lovers back home.
It was screened one time only, to standing acclaim
by the unwitting widows who carried their names.

Like ripe wheat at the harvest felled by the scythe,
the chums led the assault and half paid with their life.
Lincolnshire wept when the casualties were read.
That first day at the Somme saw twenty Thousand dead.

Those that returned to their village or farm
Thereafter oft woke from their sleep in alarm.
They were changed men and broken, who returned from the fray,
And who bore their survivor guilt to their own dying day.