Why,oh why?

During our recent meeting featuring the Resolven War Memorial one of the late Dai Blaina's poems on the futility of war was on display. The inspiration for the poem was a visit by Cor Meibion De Cymru to the battlefields of Northern France and Flanders including the Welsh memorial at Mametz Wood. The poem is reproduced in full below: 

Why, oh why ?

On the twenty seventh year of June

Côr Meibion De Cymru in full tune

Set out to commemorate

The Greatest loss of life to date .

More than a million gave their lives away

For all the world to sing today.

As we remember their greatest sacrifice

Thoughtless pens treat men like lice.

Generals with Haig behind the lines,

Intelligence vague,confused minds.

Attack! Attack! The signals flashed

Attack! Attack! The lives they smashed.

Battered by shot and shell

Shattered by this man-made hell.

A million and more of varied tongue

With supreme courage, but so young

Their silent graves throughout France

Hide the brave smiles of these lads

Why, oh why? did they have to die

Why, oh why? we still reason why.

As tears drop from those who mourn

The fields of those ‘neath granite stone

Surely as the huge mounds

All this land is sacred ground.

As we stood on the Dragon’s Hill

Facing Mametz Wood, all standing still.

Many thoughts cloud my heart and brain

Were all those tears dropped in vain.

Thoughts of the Somme, for moments lost

As I count again, another cost.

Still sacred beneath this sacred shrine

My thoughts steal back to thirty nine.

Six long years, two more than four,

The tears of Somme dry on the floor.

So confused I look to the sky

And ask again, oh why, oh why?

Still standing at the Mametz Wood

My prayer was answered as we stood.

The brutal chambers of the gas

The Burma roads that soil the maps .

Perhaps, a fool, I could not see

A child from school knows that we are free.

David Davies

(Dai Blaina)