Key Quotes

• The poem opens with the phrase “For years afterwards...”, which suggests that the horror of war, and this particular tragedy still affects us.
• The language, such as “china plate”, “broken bird’s egg of a skull”, the broken “mosaic of bone” used suggests that the soldiers were vulnerable and fragile.
• The poem’s stanzas alternate between ideas to do with the land, “the earth stands sentinel” and imagery to do with the bones of the dead soldiers. The earth is a witness to the tragedy.
• The imagery evokes the horror of war. The “socketed heads tilted back at an angle” brutally visualises the moment the men were shot and their screams of pain.
• “their absent tongues”, suggests that the soldiers have finally found a voice. The final stanza combines both elements of the alternating stanzas and suggests that the poem is about offering redemption or justice, both for the dead and the land.