Remembrance Sunday

Reminiscences of a Desert Rat on Remembrance Sunday

Last November on the way to Church, the War came back,

Anointed with Old Spice, Brylcreemed, in trilby and Mac

I paused. An amber haze from the lamp set in the wall

Did something to my eyes. It seemed to me a pall

Of mist drifted amongst the quiet lichened graves

And coalesced into a shape, an animal, a dog, Dave's

Dog, a yellow scrawny tyke, that arrived

From out the desert somewhere near Tobruk. How it survived,

God only knows. It had a taste for rotten meat

A bit like Dave, we joked. She licked his feet,

Size twelve, he didn't seem to mind.

They were, we all concurred, two of a bloody kind.

~

Rita, he called her, she sat in the truck

On the retreat to Alamein. Said she brought him luck.

At Hellfire Pass strafed by a one-o-nine

They emerged without a scratch. Later, a mine

Went off by the truck. Bert Allsop got the blast

Dave and Rita were unscathed, Bert didn't last.

Rita sniffed Bert's ruined guts. Dave grinned,

Nerves, I suppose, tugged Rita back. The wind

Blew tyre smoke in our faces as we buried Bert,

Digging by the roadside, deep in the 'gyptian dirt,

Beyond the reach of dogs, of foxes, flies.

Poor Bert, a fine spin bowler, rests under foreign skies.

~

We got to Alamein where the War turned round,

Followed the tanks, recovered our lost ground.

We left Dave in the cab, heard him talk to her,

He seemed to forget she was a scabby, desert cur.

At Mersa Matruh, we got shelled by eighty eights

One hit the Mess tent, smashed five of my mates.

That night we couldn't find Dave. He'd gone,

Over the scrub, towards the German lines alone.

I had a shufti, found Dave, well what was left of him

He'd trod on a debollicker, been ripped limb from limb.

Found Rita too, well she'd got a tasty treat…

I stabbed her with my bayonet, made sure she was dead meat.

~

The bell had ceased to toll as I approached the gate,

I heard the murmur of the organ, I was bloody late,

Not like me, I thought, and thought of Dave and Bert,

The mist had dispersed, but not the bloody hurt.

The church door opened and I took my musty pew

I knelt on my dusty hassock and prayed to start anew.

This poem is dedicated to my Dad who never told me what he saw in North Africa in the war.

---

I am using the Free version of SPAMfighter.
SPAMfighter has removed 4838 of my spam emails to date.

Do you have a slow PC? Try free scan!