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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=345853" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Any Soldier To His Son</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">What did I do, sonny, in the Great World War? <br>Well, I learned to peel potatoes and to scrub the barrack floor. <br>I learned to push a barrow and I learned to swing a pick, <br>I learned to turn my toes out, and to make my eyeballs click. <br>I learned the road to Folkestone, and I watched the English shore, <br>Go down behind the skyline, as I thought, for evermore. <br>And the Blighty boats went by us and the harbour hove in sight, <br>And they landed us and sorted us and marched us &quot;by the right&quot;. <br>&quot;Quick march!&quot; across the cobbles, by the kids who rang along <br>Singing &quot;Appoo?&quot; &quot;Spearmant&quot; &quot;Shokolah?&quot; through dingy old Boulogne; <br>By the widows and the nurses and the niggers and Chinese, <br>And the gangs of smiling Fritzes, as saucy as you please. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">I learned to ride as soldiers ride from Etaps to the Line, <br>For days and nights in cattle trucks, packed in like droves of swine. <br>I learned to curl and kip it on a foot of muddy floor, <br>And to envy cows and horses that have beds of beaucoup straw. <br>I learned to wash in shell holes and to shave myself in tea, <br>While the fragments of a mirror did a balance on my knee. <br>I learned to dodge the whizz-bangs and the flying lumps of lead, <br>And to keep a foot of earth between the sniper and my head. <br>I learned to keep my haversack well filled with buckshee food, <br>To take the Army issue and to pinch what else I could. <br>I learned to cook Maconochie with candle-ends and string, <br>With &quot;four-by-two&quot; and sardine-oil and any God-dam thing. <br>I learned to use my bayonet according as you please <br>For a breadknife or a chopper or a prong for toasting cheese. <br>I learned &quot;a first field dressing&quot; to serve my mate and me <br>As a dish-rag and a face-rag and a strainer for our tea. <br>I learned to gather souvenirs that home I hoped to send, <br>And hump them round for months and months and dump them in the end. <br>I learned to hunt for vermin in the lining of my shirt, <br>To crack them with my finger-nail and feel the beggars spirt; <br>I learned to catch and crack them by the dozen and the score <br>And to hunt my shirt tomorrow and to find as many more. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">I learned to sleep by snatches on the firestep of a trench, <br>And to eat my breakfast mixed with mud and Fritz's heavy stench. <br>I learned to pray for Blighty ones and lie and squirm with fear, <br>When Jerry started strafing and the Blighty ones were near. <br>I learned to write home cheerful with my heart a lump of lead <br>With the thought of you and mother, when she heard that I was dead. <br>And the only thing like pleasure over there I ever knew, <br>Was to hear my pal come shouting, &quot;There's a parcel, mate, for you.&quot; </div><div style="margin:10px 0">So much for what I did do - now for what I have not done: <br>Well, I never kissed a French girl and I never killed a Hun, <br>I never missed an issue of tobacco, pay, or rum, <br>I never made a friend and yet I never lacked a chum. <br>I never borrowed money, and I never lent - but once <br>(I can learn some sorts of lessons though I may be borne a dunce). <br>I never used to grumble after breakfast in the Line <br>That the eggs were cooked too lightly or the bacon cut too fine. <br>I never told a sergeant just exactly what I thought, <br>I never did a pack-drill, for I never quite got caught. <br>I never punched a Red-Cap's nose (be prudent like your Dad), <br>But I'd like as many sovereigns as the times I've wished I had. <br>I never stopped a whizz-bang, though I've stopped a lot of mud, <br>But the one that Fritz sent over with my name on was a dud. <br>I never played the hero or walked about on top, <br>I kept inside my funk hole when the shells began to drop. <br>Well, Tommy Jones's father must be made of different stuff: <br>I never asked for trouble - the issue was enough. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">So I learned to live and lump it in the lovely land of war, <br>Where the face of nature seems a monstrous septic sore, <br>Where the bowels of earth of earth hang open, like the guts of something slain, <br>And the rot and wreck of everything are churned and churned again; <br>Where all is done in darkness and where all is still in day, <br>Where living men are buried and the dead unburied lay; <br>Where men inhabit holes like rats, and only rats live there; <br>Where cottage stood and castle once in days before La Guerre; <br>Where endless files of soldiers thread the everlasting way, <br>By endless miles of duckboards, through endless walls of clay; <br>Where life is one hard labour, and a soldiers gets his rest <br>When they leave him in the daisies with a puncture in his chest; <br>Where still the lark in summer pours her warble from the skies, <br>And underneath, unheeding, lie the blank upstaring eyes. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">And I read the Blighty papers, where the warriors of the pen <br>Tell of &quot;Christmas in the trenches&quot; and &quot;The Spirit of our men&quot;; <br>And I saved the choicest morsels and I read them to my chum, <br>And he muttered, as he cracked a louse and wiped it off his thumb: <br>&quot;May a thousand chats from Belgium crawl under their fingers as they write; <br>May they dream they're not exempted till they faint with mortal fright; <br>May the fattest rats in Dickebusch race over them in bed; <br>May the lies they've written choke them like a gas cloud till they're dead; <br>May the horror and the torture and the things they never tell <br>(For they only write to order) be reserved for them in Hell!&quot; </div><div style="margin:10px 0">You'd like to be a soldier and go to France some day? <br>By all the dead in Delville Wood, by all the nights I lay <br>Between our lines and Fritz's before they brought me in; <br>By this old wood-and-leather stump, that once was flesh and skin; <br>By all the lads who crossed with me but never crossed again, <br>By all the prayers their mothers and their sweethearts prayed in vain, <br>Before the things that were that day should ever more befall <br>May God in common pity destroy us one and all!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Anonymous+English">Anonymous English</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=345853" data-title="Any Soldier To His Son de Anonymous English" data-description="What did I do, sonny, in the Great World War? 
Well, I learned to peel potatoes and to scrub the barrack floor. 
I learned to push a barrow and I learned to swing a pick, 
I learned to turn my toes out, and to make my eyeballs click. 
I learned th..."></div>
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