Poems: The Sentry by Wilfred Owen — Read

We'd found an old Boche dug-out, and he knew, / And gave us hell, for shell on frantic shell / Hammered on top, but never quite burst through. / Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime / Kept slush waist high, that rising hour by hour, / Choked up the steps too thick with clay to climb. / What murk of air remained stank old, and sour / With fumes of whizz-bangs, and the smell of men / Who'd lived there years, and left their curse in the den, / If not their corpses. / There we herded from the blast / Of whizz-bangs, but one found our door at last. / Buffeting eyes and breath, snuffing the candles. / And thud! flump! thud! down the steep steps came thumping / And splashing in the flood, deluging muck -- / The sentry's body; then his rifle, handles / Of old Boche bombs, and mud in ruck on ruck. / We dredged him up, for killed, until he whined / "O sir, my eyes -- I'm blind -- I'm blind, I'm blind!" / Coaxing, I held a flame against his lids / And said if he could see the least blurred light / He was not blind; in time he'd get all right. / "I can't," he sobbed. Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids / Watch my dreams still; but I forgot him there / In posting next for duty, and sending a scout / To beg a stretcher somewhere, and floundering about / To other posts under the shrieking air.

Those other wretches, how they bled and spewed, / And one who would have drowned himself for good, -- / I try not to remember these things now. / Let dread hark back for one word only: how / Half-listening to that sentry's moans and jumps, / And the wild chattering of his broken teeth, / Renewed most horribly whenever crumps / Pummelled the roof and slogged the air beneath -- / Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout / "I see your lights!" But ours had long died out.