DUPORTH CAMP : SEPTEMBER, 1940
THEY will come no more home to field and byre,
Our roads will not see them waiting at the corner for their girl, the beaches watch them stripping for a bathe laughing and chaffing their comrades as they dress and smoke their after-a-swim cigarette : Their sweethearts will wait for them in vain when the sun goes down, take to bed with them an image and stretch out their hand in the night to a shade: The children they begot will never know their fathers, Nor the land feel the labour of their bodies, the coves and quiet places hear their voices on parade, the challenge of the sentries, their quick step going up and over the hill to fade away and be heard no more upon what field of Spain?
Yet, there are those who will not forget, who will remember at each turn 'of the day : at sunrise when the bugles blow reveille over the bay, at midday " Come to the cook-house door, boys "; the silence of afternoon upon the camp as if everybody had suddenly gone away, received his marching orders, shouldered his kit and gone—as one has gone today ; Sunset and the bugles blowing over the western trees.
When all that is far behind, and ordered life has resumed its usual sway, This place for one will be a place of ghosts.
Perhaps there will come this way one who was here for a time and went away, leaving no memorial of himself, nothing to remember him by save that he would say, looking out to sea : "That is a thing that I could never understand, why anybody should break their heart about me "
A. L. ROWSE.
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