Skirting Delville Wood

Skirting Delville Wood in the early morning and a small war in bigger wars takes breath from thousands, walking hand-in-mind together towards a future they know they might not reach. And they never ask themselves or each other for what. And exactly for what? We should take our cue from them and never ask. It happened and it is done. We cannot go back and ask questions about it other than what can we do to stop petty belligerences getting that far again. Revolutions are the answer for some, skirting the wood by firing squad and no stealth, the heroes you watched stolen and designed out of their true existence and then years later you find they were thugs, murderers in extremis, no heroes to me. Some ignore the inevitable and pretend the bad things happen to other people and for a while they do, until the smoke drifts out of the trees and over their green and pleasant land. And then they are all dragged in, standing up and refusing to fight for all they believe in - peace - religion - pure and devout cowardice - the yellow streak that we all have brought out by gun metal and marching. There is the old lie and we stole it back.

Skirting Delville Wood and on to Germany. That's the way boys! Show 'em what we came for and what we mean to take back. The wife and kids back home deserve this and we can show 'em. On to Germany boys!

Skirting Delville Wood and in the old days we had drums with us as we walked forwards - the bullets flew singly, not like the lead curtains thrown at us these days. Pray one day they get machines to fight each other and we can stand back, smoke a cigarette and laugh with our enemy, beligerence by proxy. Walk the moon with billions at your back and have a cold war. In the old days, a time of battle we have forgotten, no memorial before that eleventh day and soon they will forget that one as well. We forget and never learn but remembrance is stronger in those who were gassed. We don't gas people any more and so we forget. And there are the obscene treaties we make to outlaw tiny variations of all those clever weapons they invent back there in Glendale. Outlaw a cluster bomb here, redefine a hollow point there and that makes you think you are civilised. Someone set out one day to make a bullet that does as much damage as possible as it passes through flesh but degree is only degree; it means no more than a sleek pin that slips into the folds of the fragile human body and makes its way through, cutting and destroying, leaving nothing intact. Call me a child and a child is all I am but a piece of paper that says how you can kill people is a defiance of anyone's god.

Skirting Delville Wood and we all die boys. Fight to the end and if any of you get back to the new country, kiss my girl and tell her that I died happy. And when she asks what I died for, shrug like I shrug if anyone asks me, embarassed at the words duty and for the boss. I fight because they tell me to and who says that is stupid? I'll fight him as well any day you like. And at the sentry points, they lie at rest but awake and alert for the gentle movements out on the field, in the mud, the last shaking and the approaching darkness, an inverse dawn. It's glory boys, it's glorious, a fight to bring tears to eyes at the desperate risks we take just for the hell of it, to feel alive and all the while to welcome death when it happens. And years later who is anyone to tell us we are mad? I could not go back to the quiet of our house, the sun streaming in over the front door, lighting the tiles on the floor and making shadows with the plants on the hall table. Once you have the ecstasy of this place, nothing is enough to make you feel alive anymore. Maybe I am wrong, maybe it will come back to me as this glory fades and we march on.

Skirting Delville Wood and the Sat Nav breaks down, its idea of where it is destroyed by something in the air. We came to find the grave of our great-grandfather, and this seems strange, a sort of fade-out of all the technology until all we have is the white of the headstones stretching into the trees and the brightness of the monument in the distance. We finish on foot. Now we can touch the graves, and feel the connections with ones we never met. Skirting Delville Wood is forgetting.