Pozières
Murderous bombs rain down their relentless shower of dread,
Ploughing the farmers’ fields to a sea of brown earthen waves,
Drowning the calls of the wounded and bodies of bloated dead,
Scattered there on broken earth or waiting in shallow graves.
Men rendered deaf or mindless by a cacophony of exploding shells,
Dig pitiful shelters from the guns’ deadly wares,
The distant thunder sounding a thousand warning knells,
For men trapped in the charnel fields of Pozières.
I gaze across those fields now green with maize,
Where once the guns sowed this land’s nadir,
Yet I sense here a wraith no harvest will erase.
It speaks to me and in its voice I hear,
The murmur of a thousand unheeded prayers
Of men still lost beneath the fields of Pozières.
Frank Meredith
July 2008
In the battle of Pozières, July-September 1916, Australian troops suffered the most intensive artillery barrage of the First World War. The historian Charles Bean wrote, “Pozières ridge is more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth.” Australians killed were estimated to be 6800; many thousands were never found or identified and still lie beneath the fields of Pozières. I drafted this sonnet when visiting Pozières in 2008. Lest We Forget.
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IMAGE: Pozières. ART41019, Australian War Memorial (cropped).
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