Mud, Rightly Considered
Posted By Randy on January 14, 2018
Our title today paraphrases G. K. Chesterton’s observation that, “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” The poem was inspired by a combination of current meteorological realities here in Nova Scotia, and some reading I’ve been doing on daily life of British and Commonwealth soldiers in the trenches of World War 1. You may enjoy an example of the latter here.
Our unofficial Clan motto is that you can always tell how much fun you had doing a thing by how dirty you got doing it. There’s a dose of that here too.
More Mud Than Glory
By LFM
Late O-seventeen
Was a big freeze and blow,
That turned dirt into concrete,
With bugger all snow.
With twenty-eighteen
Came a warm spell and rains
That tore a small thaw as
It choked all the drains.
By the time the rain stopped
All the earth was laid bare,
Slicked over with mud
Under warm humid air.
While some folks complained
How the water and mud
Turned their yards into lakes
And their basements to flood.
Stiff drinks in our hands
We looked out from our lair,
And instead of mud ugly
Saw ambience there.
So we bought some provisions,
And invites were sent
To twelve hearty guests
For our “war themed” event.
Then we buried some mines
And we dug a latrine.
We added some trenches
With barbed wire between.
Had six vet’ran soldiers
For three hours, non-stop
Firing live ammunition
Straight over the top.
We served bully beef
Eaten straight from the can,
And “rat-au-van” — rat
That’s been killed by a van.
The doneness of bacon
Was never in doubt.
It was cooked with a candle
That kept blowing out.
The tea that we served
Flavoured water abused,
Delivered in petrol cans,
Most of them used.
When armistice came
To our trench of delight,
We called for some cocktails
To round out the night.
Brought up to “the front”
By the Rum Ration bloke
Was a jug of rough trade,
And we all took a choke.
Then our guests were demobbed
And drove home on a lorry
That bore on its sides
The words, “More Mud Than Glory”.
this is by turns, spectacular, sobering and some respects, heartbreaking;
Spectacular composition – the kind of superb writing that has come to be expected by yourself;
Sobering – to compare what we consider hardship to what our ancestors endured and triumphed over, for millennia, facing obstacles that we will never dream of in our worst nightmares;
Heartbreaking when we reflect on the horror, the suffering and pain that made wreckage of so many lives of the young in that hell on earth, and to this day, I still do not comprehend the reason for it all.
PS- I had NO idea that Mister Bean was in the service then!!!
To the Laureate of Lunenberg
Well done and specifically so, that when I was but a tyke, the amount of mud and shit we got on our clothes was significantly indicative of the amount of fun we did have, much to the chagrin of Moms who had to throw all the mess into a hand crank washer at the time and then wring dry them all with a mangle (for those of you lucky enough to remember such things.)