He marched through dawn on weary feet,  
A rifle gripped, the cold his seat.  
The earth, torn open, black and bare,  
Breathed smoke and death into the air.  

The trenches deep, both home and cage,  
A narrow pit of fear and rage.  
Where rats grew fat and hope grew thin,  
The war was fought, but none would win.  

The whistle blew; the time had come,  
Through choking gas and deaf’ning drum.  
He climbed the ladder, stepped to hell,  
Where bullets rained and comrades fell.  

The mud, the blood, the shattered cries,  
A world reduced to shattered skies.  
The wire snagged, the shells would scream,  
As life became a fleeting dream.  

His letters home, in shaky hand,  
Spoke little of the wasted land.  
“Dear Mother, I am keeping well,”  
A lie he wrote, as friends he’d knell.  

The nights were cold, the silence loud,  
As stars looked down through gunpowder cloud.  
The cries of wounded, lost and maimed,  
Filled no man’s land, where none were named.  

And yet he fought, through months, through years,  
Through frozen nights and unseen tears.  
For love of home, for brother’s side,  
For reasons lost where millions died.  

When war was done, and peace declared,  
The scars he bore were never shared.  
The fields of France, the blood-soaked plain,  
Were planted deep within his brain.  

So here we stand, and here we mourn,  
For soldiers’ lives the earth has worn.  
Their sacrifice, their names unsaid,  
Beneath the soil where poppies red.