The ancient emblems of Christ’s death
have become now strangely shrunk.
The forest whence the cross was hewn is no more:
a treeless, birdless, muddy waste stands in its place;
its wood cut into shorter pit-prop lengths
to hold the weight of sandbag and of earth.
The nails are now recast in two-inch lengths
that hug the sides of rifled tubes.
The lance, truncated as a bayonet,
is fit not just for the piercing of a lifeless corpse
but for the cut and thrust of hand-to-hand combat.
Pilate’s placard that proclaimed Christ King
is blasted from its perch and lost to mud.
All these are, I say, reduced, excepting only this: the Crown of Thorns
– now grown barbarous in length, industrial in strength,
line after wretched line of wire, wreathing half a continent in blood.
The young lions stagger, weighed down not by wooden beams
but by the heavy packs decreed by donkeys safely in the rear.
Their backs are lacerated not by whips
but by the modern scourge of withering machine-gun fire.
Here they find their Calvary, not this time a hill
but just as much a place of skulls, these Flanders’ fields.
And here dies Christ, not once but a million times and more,
in those impaled and draped upon the wire, and more agonisingly,
in those condemned to live a whole life long,
remembering this inhuman passion
and the crucifixion of their hope.
“Passiondale” by Fr Rob Esdaile
