POETRY. --s--
BOARDED OUT.
I'm sitting here in Bristol Town beside the Severn Sea, But my head's a.ring with foreign names that once were naught to me.
I can't forget the road I walked that leads from Armenteor,
By Tougnet Berthe and Plugstrect Wood and takes you to Au Cheer.
They've kept my job, I'm back again es I was are war began, With nothing more than a limp to show, Oh I'm the lucky man 1 But I can't forget the Bristol Trench the old Battalion made, Nor I can't forget the work we did with sandbag and with spade, From Figuet House to the Hampshire T Hedge, Trench and Enfilade.
And when I hear the hooters call across the sleeping town, I think of the morning orders, "Day Sentries" and " Stand down"; The tot of treacly ration rum, the coke and bacon smell,
The first good pull at your Woodbine, and the yarns your comrades tell, When the whole long time stands easy from the mountains to the sea, And you clean youearms and emit your dead and boil your morning tea, While you watch an early aeroplane, like a big black dragon-fly, Swing circling down the empty peace of a pearl and opal sky, Where the Arehies look like thistle-heads the wind drives floating by.
Isar°lied across the Demurs last night (for Wine Street's dark and drear And you get .a dozen days in quod if you stand your mate a beer). There was just a slip of a pale new moon and a slow wet wind from the sea, A smell like earth from a new-made grave and you couldn't tell man from tree ; And shadows and sounds and feel o' the air and the suck of my boots in the mire, They 'minded me of the No-Man's-Land patrolling the Bird-cage wire. Well, Pm out of it now; it'll fade away, growing fainter year by year, But there's just one spot I shu'n't forget twist Plug Street and Au Gheer- Where the little brown crosses stand a row by the. road from Armenteer.
J. Kteromr-Aniros, Capt. •
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