Remember me when I'm gone

A Poem by Stuart Watson

What am I doing here in this place,
A place full of horror always in your face.
There is mud, lice and also rats
They get on your food and in your tin hats..

The rats crawl around eating anything they find
They have got very bold it drives you out of your mind.
They eat so much some grow as big as cats
It's when they eat your fallen comrades how I can't stand that.

It makes me sick and angry too
Their are so many of them what can you do.
Standing here in the rain
Smoking what could be my last cigarette
Before going over the top again.

Bayonet's ready the whistle blows
Up the ladder to what no-one knows.
Out into no-mans land full of dread
Through decaying bodies of the dead.

Through the barbed wire
Your boots caked in mud
Into the face of the enemy
My nerves are a flood.

Will I survive in this place
Or will it be my last day in the human race.
Will I be remembered on Flanders Field
Or will I be forgotten where once I kneeled.
One hundred years on the poppies grow.

All the white crosses here on show,
Where all the young men were a band of brothers
Leaving girlfriends, wives and their mothers.
So remember me and tell the young
About me and fallen comrades and what we have done.