STONE SOLDIERS

STONE SOLDIERS

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©