Sydney Dobell: The Army Surgeon

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

British writers on peace and war

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Sydney Dobell
The Army Surgeon

Over that breathing waste of friends and foes,
The wounded and the dying, hour by hour, –
In will a thousand, yet but one in power, –
He labours thro’ the red and groaning day.
The fearful moorland where the myriads lay
Moved as a moving field of mangled worms.
And as a raw brood, orphaned in the storms,
Thrust up their heads if the wind bend a spray
Above them, but when the bare branch performs
No sweet parental office, sink away
With hopeless chirp of woe, so as he goes
Around his feet in clamorous agony
They rise and fall; and all the seething plain
Bubbles a cauldron vast of many-coloured pain.