On Passing the New Menin Gate by Siegfried Sassoon. (1964)

From the August 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,
These doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones? 

Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp. 

Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride
“Their name liveth for ever," the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might die Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime. 

We thank Siegfried Sassoon for letting us publish his poem.