Arthur Graeme West
Over the top! The wire’s thin here, unbarbed
Plain rusty coils, not staked, and low enough:
Full of old tins, though — “When you’re through, all three,
Aim quarter left for fifty yards or so,
Then straight for that new piece of German wire;
See if it’s thick, and listen for a while
For sounds of working; don’t run any risks;
About an hour; now, over!”
And we placed
Our hands on the topmost sand-bags, leapt, and stood
A second with curved backs, then crept to the wire,
Wormed ourselves tinkling through, glanced back, and dropped.
The sodden ground was splashed with shallow pools,
And tufts of crackling cornstalks, two years old,
No man had reaped, and patches of spring grass.
Half-seen, as rose and sank the flares, were strewn
The wrecks of our attack: the bandoliers,
Packs, rifles, bayonets, belts, and haversacks,
Shell fragments, and the huge whole forms of shells
Shot fruitlessly — and everywhere the dead.
Only the dead were always present — present
As a vile sickly smell of rottenness;
The rustling stubble and the early grass,
The slimy pools — the dead men stank through all,
Pungent and sharp; as bodies loomed before,
And as we passed, they stank: then dulled away
To that vague fœtor, all encompassing,
Infecting earth and air. They lay, all clothed,
Each in some new and piteous attitude
That we well marked to guide us back: as he,
Outside our wire, that lay on his back and crossed
His legs Crusader-wise: I smiled at that,
And thought on Elia and his Temple Church.
From him, at quarter left, lay a small corpse,
Down in a hollow, huddled as in a bed,
That one of us put his hand on unawares.
Next was a bunch of half a dozen men
All blown to bits, an archipelago
Of corrupt fragments, vexing to us three,
Who had no light to see by, save the flares.
On such a trail, so light, for ninety yards
We crawled on belly and elbows, till we saw,
Instead of lumpish dead before our eyes,
The stakes and crosslines of the German wire.
We lay in shelter of the last dead man,
Ourselves as dead, and heard their shovels ring
Turning the earth, then talk and cough at times.
A sentry fired and a machine-gun spat;
They shot a glare above us, when it fell
And spluttered out in the pools of No Man’s Land,
We turned and crawled past the remembered dead:
Past him and him, and them and him, until,
For he lay some way apart, we caught the scent
Of the Crusader and slide past his legs,
And through the wire and home, and got our rum.
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Analysis (AI Assisted)
This poem drags the reader straight into the thick of it—no buildup, no sentimentality, just orders barked and men moving forward. It’s a moment of war that isn’t dressed up, a scene that plays out in real time, as if the speaker is recounting something that happened just hours ago. There’s no reflection, no moralizing, just the details of a job that needs to be done.
The first lines are all function. *The wire’s thin here, unbarbed*—a practical observation. *Full of old tins, though*—a potential noise hazard. *Aim quarter left for fifty yards or so*—specific instructions. It’s not until they go *over the top* and start moving that the reality of their surroundings sets in. The ground is *sodden*, pools of water everywhere, old corn stalks left unharvested for two years. Everything is abandoned, decaying. The battlefield is a place where life has been interrupted. But more than that, it’s a place where death lingers.
The dead aren’t just present—they are *always present*. The poem hammers this home. The corpses are everywhere, so constant they become part of the landscape, so many that they become landmarks. The smell is inescapable. The speaker doesn’t need to describe their faces or their wounds to make them horrific. It’s enough that they *stank through all, pungent and sharp*. Even the mud and the grass can’t mask it. The dead men become guides—*as he, outside our wire, that lay on his back and crossed his legs Crusader-wise*. The image is absurd, but instead of reacting with horror, the speaker makes an unexpected mental leap—to Elia, to the Temple Church. A moment of literature, of history, of civilization intrudes into the filth of No Man’s Land. And then it’s gone.
The bodies are everywhere, but the worst is *a bunch of half a dozen men all blown to bits, an archipelago of corrupt fragments*. That phrase—*an archipelago*—is disturbing in how matter-of-fact it is. The speaker isn’t reacting with shock anymore. He’s cataloging. They are landmarks, obstacles, hazards to crawl around in the dark. The men aren’t named, their stories aren’t told. They are just what remains.
And then there’s the mission itself. They reach the German wire. They lie still, *as dead*, and listen to the enemy working, coughing, talking. A sentry fires, a machine gun spits, but it’s nothing unusual. Just another night at war. And when it’s time, they turn and go back the way they came. Past the dead. Past the Crusader. Through the wire. Home.
And then the last line—*and got our rum*. That’s it. That’s the end of the poem. No reflection, no resolution, no deeper meaning. They finish the job and they get their drink. It’s a brutal ending, but it’s also fitting. There’s no time for grief, no time for thinking too hard about what they just did or what they just saw. They survived. That’s enough.