To Hell With Hamelyn Poem by Tony Jolley

Arras.
Ypres.
Somme.
Verdun and
Vimy Ridge:
Roadsigns to yesteryear and the former frontlines
Echoing a deeply and deathly-familiar refrain
From the fading pages of a history
Scarcely spoken by its own dramatis personae.
Names to conjure grainy images in black and white,
Of mud-caked men and machine-stoked might
Jerking and flickering awkwardly across
The cathode-tubed Nomansland of time
Like marionettes whose strings are strung
To some mad fool’s sick and arthritic fingers,
Evoking pride and pity,
Reverence and repulsion,
Gung-Ho and going to a Hell
Even Danté at his darkest couldn’t have conceived –
Entire empires of Hamelyns pied-piping
Their youngest, ripest, strongest and brightest
Like Lemmings to the slaughter:
Enticed over the cliffs of imperial vainglory
By ‘Duty to country’, ‘Defence of the family’,
‘Home before Christmas! ’, (or so lied the story) ,
To be murdered in their untold, un-graved millions,
Not by Maxim guns and mass-produced machinery,
But by the all too casual machinations and chicanery
Of the powers behind The Powers that Be
(Powers that should have long been …. and gone)
Playing ‘Political Poker’
In the dim-lit, after-dinner Smoking Rooms of our stately homes:
Men’s lives just a convenient, expendable ‘stake’ in their gruesome game:
“See your Company and raise you a Division”
The full-house sending the short-straight to hell.
Read them and let someone else weep.
Can’t you hear? ….
They’re weeping still.