News at Eleven: [It's a Queer Time]

It's hard to know if you're alive or dead
When steel and fire go roaring through your head.
One moment you'll be crouching at your gun
Traversing, mowing heaps down half in fun:
The next, you choke and clutch at your right breast--
No time to think--leave all--and off you go . . .
To Treasure Island where the Spice winds blow,
To lovely groves of mango, quince and lime--
Breathe no good-bye, but ho, for the Red West!
It's a queer time.

You're charging madly at them yelling "Fag!"
When somehow something gives and your feet drag.
You fall and strike your head; yet feel no pain
And find . . . you're digging tunnels through the hay
In the Big Barn, 'cause it's a rainy day.
Oh, springy hay, and lovely beams to climb!
You're back in the old sailor suit again.
It's a queer time.

Or you'll be dozing safe in your dug-out--
A great roar--the trench shakes and falls about
You're struggling, gasping, struggling, then . . . hullo!
Elsie comes tripping gaily down the trench,
Hanky to nose--that lyddite makes a stench--
Getting her pinafore all over grime.
Funny! because she died ten years ago!
It's a queer time.

The trouble is, things happen much too quick;
Up jump the Boches, rifles thump and click,
You stagger, and the whole scene fades away:
Even good Christians don't like passing straight
From Tipperary or their Hymn of Hate
To Alleluiah-chanting, and the chime
Of golden harps . . . and . . . I'm not well today . . .
It's a queer time.

• Robert Graves: The Centenary Selected Poems (Carcanet Press)

from The Guardian: First World War: Robert Graves' It's a Queer Time
also The Guardian: First World War: Richard Aldington's Bombardment
also The Guardian: First World War: Madeline Ida Bedford's Munition wages
also The Guardian: First World War: Ivor Gurney's On Somme
also The Guardian: First World War: John McCrae's In Flanders Fields
also The Guardian: First World War: Wilfred Owen's Dulce Et Decorum Est
also The Guardian: First World War: Siegfried Sassoon's Suicide in the Trenches
also The Guardian: First World War: Siegfried Sassoon's Memorial Tablet

~~~~~~~~~~~