Poetry in a WWI dugout

On our way through France
I say to my best friend
"What d'you think's our chance?
Of making it to the end?

He didn't say, he didn't know
and in the dugout we lay
thirty feet below, below,
left to wait and pray.

The hospital beds are red,
lingering with dread,
"Fight on," our sergeant said - I thought:
some day we'll be "millions dead."

Many went crazy there,
driven to insanity.
artillery shells and bullets fly
before we're forced to spree.

I kill a man from fifty yards
and never knew his name.

The pounding sound drives my friend insane
and he runs across No Man's Land.
I have no emotions, no hope,
for him.

Suddenly,
I WANT TO DIE,
when...

the artillery's
stopped,
i must run
to
the machine gun.


---


This poem starts out with an ABAB rhyme scheme, but quickly disintegrates. The poem itself matches with the emotions a soldier in a WWI dugout was likely to experience. At the beginning of the bombardment, the mental state of soldiers is relatively stable. As time goes on, and so also the poem, it begins to crack. The poem loses its rhyme scheme (as the soldier loses his mind) and thoughts become fragmented.

The third stanza in particular notes that "some day we'll be 'millions dead.'" This refers to the fact that today we read back over wars and proclaim that "millions died" in battle. But we know nothing of those people, nor do we think about how the deaths of each and every one of those men affected their families. We simply call them "millions dead."

The narrator of the poem sees his friend run across No Man's Land, the area between two trenches, and feels no emotion. At this point he is beyond the point of feeling hope or emotion. After seeing so many of his close comrades die, he is simply waiting for his turn.

During a bombardment, the narrator begins to lose his saneness in the dugout. He proclaims he wants to die. Not because his friend perished, or the war seems pointless, but because the threat of death being so imminent each day has finally taken its toll.

The ending of the story describes the tactical aspect of trench warfare. After bombing the other side the entire day, the other side then rushes the opposing trench after ceasing artillery fire. The other side must therefore climb out of their dugouts and reach their mounted machine guns before the other side does. Their only clue the other side is coming is when they stop firing shells. Our narrator is left with only this animal-like instinct in the end of the poem. He only wishes to reach the machine gun, so he can kill, rather than be killed. He is reduced to something less than human, a product of war.