STONE SOLDIERS

STONE SOLDIERS BY LAURA PAYNE

Usually there are poppies but today there were roses, neatly
planted, nodding, softest red roses in the watery autumn sun.

Once there was blood and bog and bones and bodies.

Now there are silent stones of the purest angel white, sentinelled
in orderly rows. A heavenly testament to what?

That in Life after Death an empire can create controlled
perfection of order in peace that it chose in the chaos of war to ignore?

‘We might have killed
your sons but look! We can provide for you the comfort that in death their
platoons and brigades and divisions will be given true military respect’.

Not a blade of grass dare disobey or weed show its dastardly
head. Pristine precision shall be the VC Order of the day – now and forever.
Amen.

The numbers flood over you.

Twenty thousand dying in just one day on the Somme,
thousands in just one skirmish in some nameless woods at the order of a general
who’d never visited the Front and yet whose decisions decided the fate of
millions in that hell.

And the vagaries of peace, purest and simplest of peace,
when a handful of men from both sides, one Christmas think, ‘What the heck?
Lets play football instead,’ and are threatened with execution for daring to challenge
the concept of war and plans of Imperial economic right, parading as Imperial Military Might.

And today in some corner of a foreign field the tractor
trudged and bayoneted a rich earth that poet soldiers had seeded with haunting
words and whose comrades’ dust now fed chomping cows -

And us - a silent milky host, a cheese wafer sacrifice.

Churning, turning ploughed ruts, glistening in the weak sun
like a line of silvered mortar shells, or a turnip harvester chucking out
cannoned veg as the soldiered stones wait silently, bearing witness that new
life goes on.

I tredged through hacked long grass, dying limp grey-green,
in fields where many young blades were mown nearly one hundred years ago.

Fields where men had once been caught in the thicket of
barbed metallic thorns by Abram or Isaac ridge, and sacrificed.

Now, alongside, ordered, bordered walls, verdant, short,
sharp manicured turf springs to attention at cemeteries like Tyne Cot.

We looked to process greed, and shame and guilt and fear and
anger, and what else hidden in that mask of pride, now paraded as perfected
order?

The kernel of the General in all of us?

Or some sweetness like love, peace and simple joy in respect
for those who’d come before and would come again?

And as the drum took up the heartbeat of all us present at the
new cemetery of Fromelles, the church bells rang out
their anthem, for those who died as cattle; to be joined by Sunday sporting
guns, an eerie echo of an earlier, more painful tune.

Because here, nearly hundred years on, DNA-ed bodies and
bones are still pushing their shoots to the surface to be discovered and
replanted in newly dug soil.

Because here new stones have been born to hold old names,
long since forgotten but recently brought back to life.

What had we come to share – our own greed and shame and
guilt and fear and anger? Masked as what? What had we come to unpack from that
insistent thick, cloying earth? Honour? Glory? Respect? Or Grief and Pain?

And still the ghosts of men and boys line the streets, man
domestic porches, gardens, steps and window sills in new built homes that lead
to Ypres and wait faithfully each evening,
bathed in bloody dregs of dying sun for that sweet sound.

Pausing and contemplating what might have been.

Remembering those that were.

Maintaining still their Last Post.

And as the Menin bugles sound out over the rich dead and
crowds are hushed to silence and school children clutching wreaths, wonder and
sense something older and larger than their fresh young hearts can muster,

the waiting ghostly men rise to salute an ancient, undying
story of a waiting Earth and its swallowed glory.

A bizarre brief Resurrection until Reveille and an ironic
return to sleep until tomorrow when the recurring Last Post will sound again
and call them back to attention.

Finally at Talbot House we climbed the steep worn attic
stair half a million men had trod in that house of rest before to face the
altar of their god.

On those greying wooden floor boards of that lofty chapel
regimental kneelers had cushioned aching bodies bent in prayer. Bible’s well
thumbed pages now left open at Job’s incredulous despair: Why do the righteous
suffer?

We too did not presume to come this, thy sacrificial table,
merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness but in something deeper,
newer.

Not a repeat of some old birdsong where your warriors wield
sacrificial swords as an ending of pain - but a new refrain.

And in that brief moment we understood what we had come to
bear. A new covenant of love and hope and healing that all mankind can share.

LAURA PAYNE©

Last Updated on Wednesday, 09 November 2011 14:50