THE GATE
Many thousand booted feet
Passed through the portals
Taking the men
Into the salient.
Feet that endured
The sinking mud
The filth and stench of death.
Feet that carried
A Nation's hopes,
A Nation's youth,
Ordered by aged incompetents
To hold the line,
To storm the dispatchers
Of rattling death
Through fields of clinging wire.
The portals opened
To receive the boots, returning,
Some wounded, some blind, some insane,
All hopes dashed and disillusioned
And old before their time.
But not in the thousands
That had gone before.