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Siegfried Sassoon - Prelude: The TroopsSiegfried Sassoon - Prelude: The Troops
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Dim, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom   Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals   Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots   And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky   Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down The stale despair of night, must now renew   Their desolation in the truce of dawn,   Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace.     Yet these, who cling to life with stubborn hands,   Can grin through storms of death and find a gap In the clawed, cruel tangles of his defence.   They march from safety, and the bird-sung joy   Of grass-green thickets, to the land where all   Is ruin, and nothing blossoms but the sky   That hastens over them where they endure Sad, smoking, flat horizons, reeking woods,   And foundered trench-lines volleying doom for doom.     O my brave brown companions, when your souls   Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead   Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge, Death will stand grieving in that field of war   Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.   And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass   Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;   The unreturning army that was youth; The legions who have suffered and are dust.
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