Uncommon Valour

Uncommon Valour

By Got Guanxi
May 29, 2017

Soldier of fortune making moves on the battlefield,
Chess checking chances,
Suntzu advances,
As the sun moves and dances.

Creeping in trenches, sleeping in shifts,
Bullets fly overhead as you hope that they'll miss,
Butterflies in the rose fields,
Butchered guys in the poppy fields.

Broken dreams, decimated teams,
Regiments unravelled at the seems,
Unrivalled scenes that you could never believe,
Superhuman movements and medals achieved.

Let go and breath,
Silently amongst violence and tryrants.

No man planned, for no man's land,
The best laid plans lead to mass graves,
Massacres last for days,
It's hard to understand.

Tactics underhand, gas masks steal identies,
You must move fast to counteract the effects of,
Mustard gas and hidden identities,
Popup cemetries, innovative remedies.

Death strikes at any moment,
Yet it's hard to keep focus,
Don't lose your mind,
Mistakes of mankind, repeated in time.

Baby faced freshmen, turn to hard face veterans,
In the spaces of seconds,
Replaced in moments with conscripted kids,
Deplaced from happy homes.

Men never found and no chance to atone,
Warmongers amongst them that soon change there tones,
Railway children leave villages in rubble,
Cornered and in trouble as the bodycount doubles.

Dark nights spent in candlelight,
Children sleep in there bed,
As bombers glide overhead,
The bleek reality goes over their heads.

The blitz is a travesty that decimates architecture,
And leaves structures in travesty,
Calamities in the evening and in the morning,
A start clarity of the destructive reality.

Hindsight in bombsites, mortuaries from mortar shells,
Instructions to give them hell,
You believe them less as each days passes,
Bodies piled up in masses, teardrops without caskets.

Only dog tags identify the men in the body bags,
Men treated worse than dogs,
The living skip over the corpses of fallen comrades.

Peace will not come fast,
Hard to run fast with rations and rucksacks,
Bullets start to wizz past,
As they proceed to fulfill dumb tasks.

Whiskey in hip flasks,
Trying to shoot back,
Wishing you just get a lift back,
Home to the motherland.

Fighting in foreign lands,
Your mother holds her head in her wrinkled hands,
Her husband holds her close,
He's been there before you.

Fought in the great war too,
And lived through to tell the tale,
And ironically see history repeating itself,
A picture of their son sits on the shelf,
He lies wounded in battle, needing there help.

Oh well,
Give them hell,
It's just one of many stories to tell.