On Friday, I watched and listened to the ceremonies marking the centenary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. With sadness, of course. But also with mounting anger as it dawned on me throughout the day that those leading the ceremonies, those delivering the speeches, those orchestrating the events were the descendants of the very men who also orchestrated the carnage – and were never punished. They were the same fucking people. The same elite.
My first impulse was to write an expletive-filled post about this colossal travesty of justice. But I changed my mind and composed the following poem instead. I rarely do poetry, so it’s probably not very good. But it says what I wanted to say – without the expletives.
If the poem offends any Great War apologists who come across it, frankly my old Etonian, Oxbridge-educated, Sandhurst-trained dears, I don’t give a flying fuck.
No, not more shallow eulogies
Composed by nameless Palace clerks
To be read by pampered princes.
Nor fake flowers worn in lapels,
That puerile act of contrition
Hatched by the Butcher Haig’s lady.
Nor vigils, nor silent minutes,
Nor gun salutes, nor lone buglers.
They are but gestures to honour
The countless men who gave their lives
So needlessly on foreign fields
In the names of King and country;
Gestures to honour the slaughtered,
But not to avenge their murder;
Commemoration sans reproach,
Sans blame, sans recrimination.
So how should we avenge those deaths?
Like Baldrick, I’ve a cunning plan.
Go seek the graves of the culprits:
Of the Monarch, the Cabinet
And the Generals – all of them,
But Butcher Haig’s first, always first.
Then dig up their bones and pile them
In a higgledy-piggledy heap.
Cart the pile of bones to London,
Where at the gates of the Palace
Dig a deep pit, the Pit of Shame,
In which to deposit the bones.
Leave the pit open for all time
To fester and to putrefy,
Its stench carried in the four winds
To the nostrils of the elite.
Then invite the working people
From the Great War recruiting grounds
Across this disunited land
To journey to the Pit of Shame,
There to spit on the rotting bones,
Great gobs of phlegm rained down on them
For all generations to come;
The carnage avenged, brave, dead boys!
My first impulse was to write an expletive-filled post about this colossal travesty of justice. But I changed my mind and composed the following poem instead. I rarely do poetry, so it’s probably not very good. But it says what I wanted to say – without the expletives.
If the poem offends any Great War apologists who come across it, frankly my old Etonian, Oxbridge-educated, Sandhurst-trained dears, I don’t give a flying fuck.
No, not more shallow eulogies
Composed by nameless Palace clerks
To be read by pampered princes.
Nor fake flowers worn in lapels,
That puerile act of contrition
Hatched by the Butcher Haig’s lady.
Nor vigils, nor silent minutes,
Nor gun salutes, nor lone buglers.
They are but gestures to honour
The countless men who gave their lives
So needlessly on foreign fields
In the names of King and country;
Gestures to honour the slaughtered,
But not to avenge their murder;
Commemoration sans reproach,
Sans blame, sans recrimination.
So how should we avenge those deaths?
Like Baldrick, I’ve a cunning plan.
Go seek the graves of the culprits:
Of the Monarch, the Cabinet
And the Generals – all of them,
But Butcher Haig’s first, always first.
Then dig up their bones and pile them
In a higgledy-piggledy heap.
Cart the pile of bones to London,
Where at the gates of the Palace
Dig a deep pit, the Pit of Shame,
In which to deposit the bones.
Leave the pit open for all time
To fester and to putrefy,
Its stench carried in the four winds
To the nostrils of the elite.
Then invite the working people
From the Great War recruiting grounds
Across this disunited land
To journey to the Pit of Shame,
There to spit on the rotting bones,
Great gobs of phlegm rained down on them
For all generations to come;
The carnage avenged, brave, dead boys!