No-Man's-Land

There's a zone
Wild and lone
None claim, none own,
That goes by the name of No-Man's-Land;
Its frontiers are bastioned, and wired, and mined,
The rank grass shudders and shakes in the wind,
And never a roof nor a tree you find
In No-Man's-Land.

Sprung from hell
Monsters fell
Invisible
Await who venture through No-Man's-Land,
Like a stab in the dark is the death they deal
From an eye of fire in a skull of steel
When the echoes wake to their thunder-peal
In No-Man's-Land.

They that gave
Lives so brave
Have found a grave.
In the haggard fields of No-Man's-Land,
By the foeman's reddened parapet,
They lie with never a head-stone set,
But their dauntless souls march forward yet
In No-Man's-Land.

Major 'H.D'A.B.'