Grave Goods

For Armistice Day here is a tale both beautiful and chilling. Mr Hagan tells us he was inspired to take up his pen after reading about the Butte de Warlencourt, an ancient burial mound incorporated into German fortifications on the Western Front during the Great War. Grave Goods could equally well have been a short story, perhaps, but Mr Hagan is a master of verse and I feel sure HPL would have approved of his choice -- and of his imaginative talent.

by John Hagan

Once the barrow stood in fields of red,
But before our guns, the flowers have fled;
Where Empires spend lives without tally,
Warlencourt Hill rises over the valley.

Into this mountain, of the mouldering dead,
The living once wisely feared to tread,
But now we tunnel with martial intent,
Clay and chalk into wheelbarrows sent,
We young men, of the Kaiser’s hosts,
Laughing at curses, and stories of ghosts,
Electric torches like lightening spears,
Scattering rats, and banishing fears.

This ancient place our digging wrenches,
Into the future, our city of trenches,
Bunkers are carved by our tomb-raid,
Out of the chambers where lie displayed,
Dragon-slayers in their eternal rest,
Kings and Queens with cobwebs dressed,
Swords of glory proud at their sides,
But their names forgotten, only rust abides.
We who’ve seen so many dead,
Friends’ faces when their life has fled,
How could we spare a fleeting thought,
For the ancient bones our spade-tips caught?

And yet I paused, by that final grave,
No place of honour for a mere girl-slave,
Whilst the lord upon his dais still lay,
Dressed in glory for resurrection day.

I saw her form in white bones, traduced,
A life into a twisted sigil reduced,
Skeletal shards, unshriven and broken,
No final words for her were spoken.

Her body tattooed with their book of the dead,
In the tomb she was sealed, to in darkness be read,
Sealed in the dark, just another grave-good,
To best serve her Kaiser, with her living blood,
A sacrifice for an eldritch maw,
That plump royal souls it might ignore,
And though our God lives not underground,
I prayed to what hearing could be found.

Even as Fritz from the royal graves stole,
A necklace which marked a queen’s high role,
Links forged of metal, or so it seemed,
Alloyed with light, that from the moon once beamed,
That haunter’s moon, more gold than white,
That in equal parts, weighs love and spite.

Upon that necklace, an amber jewel shone,
A stone which burned with dawns long gone.
“Beats an Iron Cross!” My comrade crowed,
And his eyes with fame and fortune glowed,
Until next day a Tommy sniper’s gun,
Punctured a hole through which his brains did run,
And to the shallow graves, where the old bones had been laid,
The necklace I returned; not to the queen, but to her maid.

Now every day I feel, her presence edging near,
In this jagged border land, razor- sharp with fear,
The polished metal of my gun, in a flash reflects her face,
At the corner of my eye, but turning there’s no trace,
And every day I listen, for the softness of her breath,
In this jagged border land, steps away from death.

Amidst the stench of war, to which our guns give vent,
Comes now to my nostrils, her secret witching scent,
Amidst cordite, corpses and kerosene oil,
A stroke of the air, from which I do not recoil.

Once the barrow,
Raised from chalk was white,
And then by grass,
Green-hid from sight,
But now as shells,
Our cannons trade,
White again its skull is flayed,
Deafening howl the British guns,
And silently the dead,
Watch us with unblinking eyes,
As the sky falls on our head.

She came to me in darkness, my last breath I gave to her,
As from all around came shouting, and cries of grim despair,
Her lips I taste with mine, her kiss does our souls tether,
As this time, she is buried, not alone, but together.