Vandaag in Zondag
Frontpoëziedag het gedragen gedicht Counter-Attack
van goeie ouwe Siegfried Sassoon. Gewoon
om het niet af te leren
.
Wed gained our first objective hours
before
While dawn broke like a face with blinking
eyes,
Pallid, unshaven and thirsty, blind with
smoke.
Things seemed all right at first. We held
their line,
With bombers posted, Lewis guns well
placed,
And clink of shovels deepening the shallow
trench.
The place was rotten with dead; green
clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along
the saps
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking
mud,
Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely
filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the
plastering slime.
And then the rain began,the jolly old
rain!
A yawning soldier knelt against the bank,
Staring across the morning blear with fog;
He wondered when the Allemands would get
busy;
And then, of course, they started with
five-nines
Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud.
Mute in the clamour of shells he watched
them burst
Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts
from hell,
While posturing giants dissolved in drifts
of smoke.
He crouched and flinched, dizzy with
galloping fear,
Sick for escape,loathing the strangled
horror
And butchered, frantic gestures of the
dead.
An officer came blundering down the
trench:
Stand-to and man the fire step! On he
went ...
Gasping and bawling, Fire-step ...
counter-attack!
Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right
Down the old sap: machine-guns on the
left;
And stumbling figures looming out in
front.
O Christ, theyre coming at us! Bullets
spat,
And he remembered his rifle ... rapid fire
...
And started blazing wildly ... then a bang
Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked
him out
To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he
choked
And fought the flapping veils of
smothering gloom,
Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and
groans ...
Down, and down, and down, he sank and
drowned,
Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had
failed.
17-03-2019 om 04:36
geschreven door janhuijbrechts
