The Battle of The Fog

Some said they wouldn’t celebrate Christmas

but when it came, wreathed in mist,

meltwater dripping from the leaning snow pines,

landing with clicks on our guns

pattering in the muddy trench water,

of course we did. 

Ironically, like young men will,

we sang carols with bawdy lyrics

and someone passed me a flask of cheer

and I thought of you, Kitty, and mum,

and wondered what I was doing here

lying in the mud in a forest in the fog

looking across the treetops to Madrid

ready to kill.

Jock told a story about a pig he’d seen

when he’d gone for a piss. Huge, it was - 

size of a cow, ugly as sin. And Hugh,

whose glasses were steamed up, squinted

and stammered about the goose his aunt cooked

and Sid told us what he did in Staines

and someone said, ‘What about you, Father?’

and looked at me. ‘Him?’ Fred grinned - 

‘He’d be working. He prefers this!’

‘Why’d you become a priest anyway?’

a young lad - Charlie - asked. 

‘To say thanks, I think,’ I replied.

I’d often wondered. Now, since this break,

since this decision to act, what I once was had vanished.

I was no longer a man of the cloth but a soldier

and I had killed. I was bloodied, hellbound

and glad. ‘Yes. To say thanks.

That’s it.’

The day before we’d been in a small hamlet:

Las Rozas, in candlelight, eating bread, and a woman

with auburn eyes had broken through all the layers

wrapped around my soul, my life, and had connected.

I thought of her as the enemy materialised

up ahead, in the mist, stepping through the foggy shroud

like wraiths. Encroaching, we opened fire

and came an explosion behind. White light

I’d never be unable to forget. In the brightness

a raisin-faced woman in a dark shroud - an old, old arab mother - 

who smiled with pious grace

and great, great pity.

When I stand here now, my tri-leg shadow crooked,

long, and Ana by my side, what do I know?

‘This is where Sid, Hugh and Jock died.

I think this is the tree that saved my life.’

I touch the gnarled bark and feel its secret eyes.

She knows me. We do this at Christmas-time.

‘Come on, you’ll get cold’. And we leave

over the pines to the road. To turrón,

grapes, away from the fog and memories yet

into the fog, always; through the fog 

because we can, because we could.