A TANK
Cambrai, June 1917.
A tank
Was a crawling clanking cacophonous coffin
And stank
Of rank, fear and petrol, cordite and sweat.
And the men inside
Had a bumpy old ride
And yet
It promised an end to the need to send
Un-armoured men
In their hopeless thousands
To die on the wire in the killing ground waste of machine-gunned
No man's Land.
So they sent the tanks
Hundreds of tanks
Rank after rank of clanking tanks
Roaring and spitting and crushing the wire
Guns from their sponsons all belching fire
But a lot of them stopped
Dead in their tracks
Nose-down in ditches
Mechanical hitches
Shattered by shells
Abandoned in holes
At impossible angles
Their contents mangled
Shocked or stunned
Unable to shoot
Their impotent guns
It had seemed such a good idea at the time
( Leonardo da Vinci's clever design )
To keep the men safe
Behind armour-plate
And to thunder right over the Hindenburg Line.
But we didn't quite
Get it right
We'd 400-odd tanks
Cannons barking from mud-splattered flanks
Crawling and roaring - a terrible sight
Nevertheless
The Boche came off best
And the battle itself was a terrible mess
So in the end the trenches won
And the land still lay under
The unending thunder
Of guns.
© nigel hallworth 2014