Shot at Dawn

For all the men and their families who were affected. I morphed several tragic stories into the poem you are reading.

Shot at Dawn

Conscientious and reliable, such a young man in his prime,
but suffering from shell shock, besmirched him for that crime.
He had witnessed many horrors from the consequence of war,
with endless days of anguish, relentless noise and gore.

He had been a labourer.

Injured from a leg wound, yet, deemed fit to fight again,
his memories of carnage were lodged inside his brain.
He remembered fallen comrades, snuffed out, as they lay dead
the sound of screams and gunfire ringing in his head.

He pleaded with his commanding officer that he was unfit to fight.

Panic –struck and terrified, frozen to the ground
a broken man of twenty three, fragility profound.
His glassy eyes were empty his spirit was destroyed,
crestfallen and dejected, no longer redeployed.

He could no longer follow orders.

Then dragged to his detention and his punishment severe,
condemned and judge a coward, a dishonoured mutineer.
No empathy or kindness, but a firing squad at dawn,
his body then was buried and no one there to mourn.

He was interred in a cold barren grave.

His young wife then was notified, no comfort in those words,
her husband termed coward, the sentences then blurred.
She sat in total disbelief, as she had known the man,
but now her troubles started, her fate was in her hand.

His own father had condemned him.

She knew her husband all too well, she loved him through and through,
a gentle man with a heart of gold, this man she truly knew.
Not a coward or a traitor, but a man, who kept his word,
until her death she loved him dear, never once was she deterred.

She died before the amnesty was given for the many men who suffered appalling ‘shell-shock’.

© Teresa Harrison-Best

November 2020.

Photo by John Allen ©