{"id":14528,"date":"2013-05-27T06:44:51","date_gmt":"2013-05-27T10:44:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2013\/05\/27\/14528.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:06:18","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:06:18","slug":"memorial-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2013\/05\/27\/memorial-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Memorial"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“His Mate”<\/strong>
by Rev. G.A. Studdert Kennedy\n

\nThere’s a broken battered village
  Somewhere up behind the line,
There’s a dug-out and a bunk there,
  That I used to say were mine.\n

I remember how I reached them,
  Dripping wet and all forlorn,
In the dim and dreary twilight
  Of a weeping summer dawn.\n

All that week I’d buried brothers,
  In one bitter battle slain,
In one grave I laid two hundred.
  God! What sorrow and what rain!\n

And that night I’d been in trenches,
  Seeking out the sodden dead,
And just dropping them in shell holes,
  With a service swiftly said.\n

For the bullets rattled round me,
  But I couldn’t leave them there,
Water-soaked in flooded shell holes.
  Reft of common Christian prayer.\n

So I crawled round on my belly.
  And I listened to the roar
Of the guns that hammered Thiepval,
  Like big breakers on the shore.\n

Then there spoke a dripping sergeant,
  When the time was growing late,
‘Would you please to bury this one,
  ’Cause ’e used to be my mate?’\n

So we groped our way in darkness
  To a body lying there.
Just a blacker lump of blackness.
  With a red blotch on his hair.\n

Though we turned him gently over,
  Yet I still can hear the thud.
As the body fell face forward.
  And then settled in the mud.\n

We went down upon our faces,
  And I said the service through,
From ‘I am the Resurrection’
  To the last, the great ‘adieu.’\n

We stood up to give the Blessing,
  And commend him to the Lord,
When a sudden light shot soaring
  Silver swift and like a sword.\n

At a stroke it slew the darkness,
  Flashed its glory on the mud,
And I saw the sergeant staring
  At a crimson clot of blood.\n

There are many kinds of sorrow
  In this world of Love and Hate,
But there is no sterner sorrow
  Than a soldier’s for his mate.<\/blockquote>\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger was unaware of the story of Woodbine Willie<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[199],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-litchrachoor"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14528"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16698,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14528\/revisions\/16698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}