And thus for years, with cold,
relentless zeal,
With fiendish
science both sides fought and watched,
From loop-holes or from clouds
which half conceal,
Or in deep tunnels
all their skill was matched.
On sentry in the firebay,
or the hov’ring ’plane,
Mining and countermining yet
again.
And far behind such scenes,
great engineers
Pondered o’er
problems without parallel.
And planned with wisdom of
a thousand years,
To blow the other
to eternal Hell.
Their calculations left no
callous scheme untried,
To slaughter hundreds of the
other side.
But hush! the whole machinery’s
complete,
All plans are
folded and the great work’s done,
The work of building up to
cause defeat—
The lever’s
pulled, and, lo! a new work has begun.
The task of falling on a shattered
foe,
And doing things undreamed-of
years ago.
Hush! hark! A mighty
rumbling roar breaks thro’,
And see! Her crest-line
leaps into a flame,
The foul disease within her
bowels she blew
High into the
air to rid her of her shame;
In one huge vomit she now
flings her filth,
Far o’er the country
in a powdered ‘tilth.’
And so the vassals of a fiendish
foe
Are scattered
far and wide into a dust.
Those who have revelled as
they wreaked red woe,
A shattered sample
of their own blood-lust.
Whilst from our hill-crest
and its catacomb,
A new life comes a-pouring
from the tomb.
Eager, and burning with the
zeal of youth,
Our Second Anzacs
sprang from out the ground,
Bound by their mateships and
their love of truth,
The Third Division
its new soul has found;
Straight o’er the top
amidst a hail of shell
To their objective which they
knew so well.
On, on, thro’ poison
gas and rattling roar,
Past ulc’rous
craters, blackened foul and deep,
These comrades ‘stuck’
as ne’er they had before.
And kept together
in their rushing sweep;
Deafened and rattled, hung
up in the wire,
Helping each other thro’
such fearful fire.
On still until they reached
the furthest goal,
There to dig in
and hold the new-won line.
By linking up each torn and
shattered hole—
By no means easy,
but their grit was fine—
They fought and worked like
demons till the dawn,
Harried and pestered by the
‘Kaiser’s spawn.’
And, baffled from his gun-pits
far away,
Low-down, well
south, an angry foe doth roar,
He opens out again upon another
day
And rakes the
slope with shrapnel as before.
But only working parties on
the top are found,
The rest, save A.M.C., are
underground.