Remembrance Week - The Trenches by Frederic Manning

I love this poem by the Australian Frederic Manning. It gives a real sense of what it must have been like on a cold frosty night on the Western Front:-


Endless lanes sunken in the clay,
Bays, and traverses, fringed with wasted herbage,
Seed-pods of blue scabious, and some lingering blooms;
And the sky, seen as from a well,
Brilliant with frosty stars.
We stumble, cursing, on the slippery duckboards,
Goaded like the damned by some invisible wrath,
A will stronger than weariness, stronger than animal fear,
Implacable and monotonous.

Here a shaft, slanting, and below
A dusty and flickering light from one feeble candle
And prone figures sleeping uneasily,
Murmuring,
And men who cannot sleep,
With faces impassive as masks,
Bright, feverish eyes, and drawn lips,
Sad, pitiless, terrible faces,
Each an incarnate curse.

Here in a bay, a helmeted sentry
Silent and motionless, watching while two sleep,
And he sees before him
With indifferent eyes the blasted and torn land
Peopled with stiff prone forms, stupidly rigid,
As tho' they had not been men.

Dead are the lips where love laughed or sang,
The hands of youth eager to lay hold of life,
Eyes that have laughed to eyes,
And these were begotten,
O love, and lived lightly, and burnt
With the lust of a man's first strength: ere they were rent,
Almost at unawares, savagely; and strewn
In bloody fragments, to be the carrion
Of rats and crows.

And the sentry moves not, searching
Night for menace with weary eyes.


(Frederic Manning was born in Sydney Australia in 1882. He attended Sydney Grammar School and at the age of 14 he went to England. During the First World War he served as a private in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry Regiment and fought on the Somme and Ancre. After the war he spent most of his time studying and writing. He died in 1935.)

For more information please see: Frederic Manning at Wikipedia &

Frederic Manning at the Australian War Memorial.