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...