Axis & Allies - damowords

Monte Cassino
From white morning mists rose the Ausini,
Weaving his magick Lord Sol clear’d the scene,
Spreading thro the streets of Saint Germani
The Allies pressed in khaki, beige & green;
Such handsome men
Met that crack mountain troop,
Again, again, again returning with a stoop.
Altho the abbey pleach’d sublime
Above the battle’s terrors
Centuries shatter’d in short time
By waves of Allied bombers,
Twas heinous this human crime
Repeated thrice before…
Those tons of dust thrown up settl’d to show
Batter’d monks weeping for Gregorio.
They left this bastion of faith
Like rippers leave a whore
Some ruin’d wraith, stone sunk in Lethe,
Til she will rise once more,
A mass of grey stone sleeping in the trail of Total War.
Italy
Feb 16 th
1944
Escape in the Jungle
Shane Slater sat cracking his teeming lice
Emaciated, weakend with fatigue,
Sustain’d by friendship & handfuls of rice,
Laying this damn’d railway league after league;
“You are cowards!”
Brave men told ev’ry day,
Ramm’d home with fists & swords slicing ensanguin’d spray.
Poor Alfred, half dead with disease
(most thought he’d nearly had it),
Was shown some rocks, “Coward! move these!”
He tried but could not do it,
So tied between two supple trees,
A sweep… the rope is split ‐
Terribly tearing his torso in two
Back upright went those bent trunks of bamboo.
Shane snapt, ghost looking on aghast,
Soul sharing his friend’s pain,
He broke & dasht, the bullets pass’d
A bee’s dick from his brain,
Three miles of jungle flasht by ‘fore he saw his thigh’s
bloodstain…
Thailand
March
1944