This poem was inspired by a recent trip to France/Belgium to retrace my Grandad’s steps whilst he was fighting there during WW1. My parents and I visited the site of the Battle of Delville Wood, part of the Somme campaign where Grandad fought in the Machine Gun Corps alongside various South African and Scottish regiments. Today it is owned and maintained by the South African government, mostly as a wood re-grown, but also containing a beautiful memorial and small museum. Lest we forget!
During the battle Delville Wood was completely destroyed, with the exception of a single Hornbeam tree that stands there to this day. Today the tree is surrounded by relatively young trees planted after the war ended, some seeded by acorns brought there by South Africans. It is a beautiful old tree and the story of how it came to be there is one of my abiding memories of the trip. I knew it would inspire me to write a poem, but this seemed all the more pressing when, two days after we returned from our trip, the horrific terrorist attacks took place in New York and Washington. Apart from the obvious shock and upset, I’m sure you can imagine that this felt all the more poignant because of our recent experiences visiting WW1 battlefields.
What would it say, this Hornbeam tree,
The solitary survivor of Delville Wood?
Tales of men fighting to be free?
Tales of destruction in the name of good?
From beneath its boughs what has it heard?
The agonised cries of men in pain,
Machine guns cackling their deadly word,
Shells exploding their terrorising rain.
From its many eyes what has it seen?
Men falling, plunging, to their deaths,
Lips forming lover’s names in their dying breaths,
In Delville Wood that was once so green.
Now stained with the blood of many a creed,
Misshapened stumps are all that remain.
Our Hornbeam watches the countryside bleed,
Reflecting the scale of humanity’s pain.
Our Hornbeam tree spreads its limbs wide,
Resisting the urge to bow down and hide.
Some good must come of this pain and mourning,
As it drinks in the life of a new day dawning.
And slowly, surely, as time goes by,
Acorns are planted, seeds are sown.
Delville Wood does death defy,
And decades thence is completely regrown.
Our Hornbeam tree has new friends and neighbours,
Bearing witness to humanity’s labours.
But its very presence ensures that no-one could
Forget what happened in Delville Wood.