MY GRANDFATHER'S POEM - ANZAC
Ah, well, we're gone -
We're out of it now; we've something else to do.
But we look back from the transport deck to the land line, far and blue.
Shore and valley are faded; fading are the cliff and hill;
The land-line we called "Anzac" - and we called it
"Anzac" still.
This last six months, I
reckon, 'll be most of my life to me-
Trenches and shells and snipers, and the morning light on the sea;
Thirst is the broiling mid-day, shout and gasping cries;
Big guns talk from the waters, and - flies, and flies, and flies.
And all our trouble's
wasted - all of it gone for "nix".
Still, we kept our end up, and some of the story sticks.
Fifty years on, in Australia, they'll tell of our first big fight,
And men in little old, blind old England, possible someone might.
But seeing we had to
clear, for we couldn't get on no more,
I wish that, instead of last night, it had been the night before:
Yesterday, poor Jim stopped one. Three of us buried Jim.
I know a woman in Sydney that thought the world of him.
She was his mother.
I'll tell her - broken with grief and pride-
"Mother!" was Jim's last whisper - that was all - and died.
Brightest and best of us all, none could help but love him,
And now - he lies there under the hill, with a wooden cross above him.
That's where it get me
twisted. The rest of it I didn't mind,
But it don't seem right for me to be off, and to leave old Jim behind.
Jim - just quietly sleeping - and hundreds and thousand more;
For graves and crosses are mighty thick from "Quinn's Post"
down to the
shore.
Better there than in
France, though with the German's dirty work:
I reckon the Turks respect us - and we respect the Turk.
Abdul's a good, clean fighter - we 've fought and we know;
And we've left him a letter behind us to tell him we found him so.
Not just to say
precisely, "Good-bye", but "Au-revoir".
Somewhere or other we'll meet again before the end of the war.
But I hope it'll be in a wider space, with a lot more room on the map,
And the airmen over the fight that day "II see a bit of a
"scrap".
Lord! They're miracle workers - and fresh ones every day.
My word, those mids in the cutters, aren't they properly keen!
Don't ever say England's rotten - not to us, who've seen.
Well, we're gone - we're out of it all, we've somewhere else to fight.
And we strain our eyes
from the transport deck, but "Anzac" is out of sight.
Valley and shores are vanished - vanished are cliff and hill;
And we'll never fo back to "Anzac" - but I think that some of
us will
-Dvr. B. C. Heddle,
A.S.C., France.