my morning poem,,,

The Song of the Modern Mars
By Herbert Cadett

Three miles of trench and a mile of men,
  In a rough-hewn, slop-shop grave;
Spades and a volley for one in ten –
  Heres a hip! hurrah! for the brave.
A flash from the front that shames the sun,
  The crash of a bursting shell,
And the rat-tat-tat of the Maxim gun –
  A machine-made funeral knell...

Thrice twenty men in a bomb-proof pit,
  A flash and a sudden roar;
Thrice twenty dead – and their blood has writ
  The story of modern war.
Scarlet spray on the rugged stones,
  And salty spume in the air;
Fragments of flesh and splinters of bones,
  But never a whole man there.

Infantry dodging from rock to rock,
  And gunners from peak to peak,
Rifle-shots playing at postman’s knock,
  And soldiers at hide and seek.
Crimson flecks on a sand-coloured mound,
  Like rays of the rosy morn,
And splashes of red on a khaki ground,
  Like poppies in fields of corn....

I hope you read the verses above rather than skipping to the main part of the blog. If you did, did you assume they were written about the First World War? The iconography of that hideous conflict is observable in the poem: the trenches, shells, machine guns, the appalling number of dead – and most resonant of all, the blood-red poppies. In fact, the conflict depicted is the Boer War,