Are we down-hearted?

In Competition No. 2423 you were invited to write a poem in the voice of a fed-up soldier, of any country or date, far from home.

I was apprehensive that most of you would use this invitation to vent your feelings about the unhappy war in Iraq, but I was pleasantly surprised by the variety in time and space of your fractious servicemen (there was only one servicewoman) — a tribesman from the steppes bored in Rome, a redcoat on St Helena after Napoleon’s death, a conscript from Clerkenwell stuck in Wales during Edward I’s campaign, a French quartermaster in Egypt with Napoleon, a German soldier not enjoying Stalingrad…. The prizewinners, printed below, are awarded £25 each, and Keith Norman takes the bonus fiver. A happy new year to you all.

As a member of a hand-picked fighting force
You’ll find no keener man than me.
Yet here I am inside a bloody horse,
Bored stiff and bursting for a pee.

The Trojans were the bad guys, we the good:
The gods, they said, were on our side.
I fear we have to face the likelihood
That we’ve been taken for a ride.

I grant you that a fellow feels quite sore
When someone runs off with his wife.
But does that justify a ten-year war?
And is it worth one single life?

What brass-necked liar could be so thick-skinned
As still to claim our cause is just?
Is one who’d trade his daughter for a wind
The kind of guy a chap can trust?
Keith Norman

I long for old Cheapside, the tavern, the ale
And the merry, late-night revels,
Away from the wet and the ghostly wail
Of the wind on the Somerset levels;
Who’d be a Roundhead, chilled to the core,
With frozen, waterlogged feet,
Stuck in the sludge and slime on a moor
In a world of withies and peat?
And where are the Royalists? Nobody knows,
Nobody here, in the mire;
They’re probably sheltering, toasting their toes
In front of blazing fire;
Oh give me a tavern, a tankard, a song,
A meal and a maid and a romp,
Cheapside in London is where I belong,
Not here on this desolate swamp!
Alan Millard

The sand reaches right from here to the sky,
I’m in Iraq and I’m not sure why.
They’ve