John Samuel Tieman: Passchendaele

A party of ‘A’ Company men passing up to the front found … a man bogged to above the knees.   The united efforts of four of them with rifles beneath his armpits made not the slightest impression, and to dig, even if shovels had been available, would be impossible, for there was no foothold.   Duty compelled them to move on up to the line, and when two days later they passed down that way the wretched fellow was still there; but only his head was now visible and he was raving mad.

Major C. A. Bill

Fifteenth Battalion

Royal Warwickshire Regiment

—

A man raves against God.   And war

among its faces

turns just one to you, the face

which is your own, your own.

It’s not the kind of place that would worry

you in the usual June, your uniform manly,

your brass polished, sharp, so proud you

would recite your unit’s history as if

it were a canto in its own Iliad.

But that was 1914, when freedom was measured

in the medals instead of the dead.

To look at it, there isn’t much

of a ridge to speak of, 250 feet high,

its only claim to fame being

a splendid view of Flanders for which

544,897 die (maybe 4,700 a day)

give or take a half-dozen divisions.

What you have heard is true.

3:10 AM, 7 June 1917, Messines Ridge.

In preparation for the larger offensive,

1,000,000 lbs. of TNT detonated

along 5 mi. of galleries dug

under the Germans.   By 3:11 AM,

20,000 dead.   Survivors

mindless, infantile, gibbering.

The opening round.   Then Passchendaele,

a funeral cadence of muffled drums —

Hill 60, The Death Trench, Blood Chapel,

Ypres, Whitesheet, Hill 70, Goldfish

Chateau, the Vlamertinghe-Wipers Road —

a map no longer than a Mass card, requiem,

the litany of the dead angel of lead.

4,250,000 artillery shells fired

during the 1st 19 days alone.   Alone.

A fact.   And the fact of the matter is

simple: God is not on your side tonight.

And a man raves against God, earth,

man.   To think of you decomposing

even as you speak, humus once more,

once more a few pounds of ground,

earth, the many faces of earth, one

of which is a tomb and the tomb is

at once both earth and man.

Like vertigo, you twist into the earth

and beg the sun to blind you.   Instead

a sun spot burns a hole in a vision

you would kill if only you could

hang on till your mind gets right.

Who but a madman?   Who but a madman?

Who but a madman would have imagined mud

enough to die in?   Who but a madman would

put guns in the hands of all God’s children,

tell them stories of glory then kill them?

Who but a madman would imagine Ypres salient?

A man raves against God.   And war

among its faces

turns just one to you, the face

which is your own, your own.

Your captain has his gas mask on,

standing near the sniper’s nest,

advising the sergeant-major never

to show his face here again.

Your sniper has no face, no mask.   You

too will learn to burn out your eyes,

to take it like a man, to smother

under mud, to go mad like a man.

But what you thought was only darkness

has its own kind of light, like being

caught in a flare where the only terror

belongs to you: a German mortar crew

with nothing better to do than take aim

at you, just you, only you — there.

Besides the madness, there’s the woman,

there’s always the woman, delicate as a lie,

clean and white, someone the mud doesn’t touch,

not someone who runs like the meaning

of speech, but a woman, a woman, your woman,

the one woman in the world who could save you.

The one woman in the world you wish to die with.

Adrenaline.   The word burns the very marrow.

In a moment no longer than a flare,

in the time it takes a scream to reach

Sweet Jesus, among a hundred dead, another,

another man trapped in mud, another man then

another, another sniper takes aim, another

bullet goes astray and finds a home, the heart,

and the bullet will burst like a mortar in the gut

and the gut will turn to lead and the lead

to the rain, always a slow assault of a rain,

speechless as incest, shrapnel like a rapist,

definite as barbed wire, permanent as the front,

always the past turns its face to ebony rain

and tomorrow will be just like today.

__________

Note:

Following the capture of Messines Ridge, the Battle Of Passchendaele, also known as the Third Battle Of Ypres, properly began on 31 July 1917 with a British push toward the Belgian coast.   After four months, the British penetrated a total of only five miles into the German lines, this end point being the village of Passchendaele.   The Germans recaptured all this within six months.   The British pronounce this place “Passiondale”.

—-

John Samuel Tieman served in Vietnam with the army’s 4th Infantry Division during 1970.

Published by permission of the author.