I was walking down the slight hill towards the goods yard
It was a trip that I made on most days as I worked there
My job was to supervise the loading and unloading of goods
The post was secure and the railway company left me alone
But on this day something was wrong as did not have a shirt
Indeed I was topless and felt a little uncomfortable about it
But nobody seemed to notice that I was not in uniform
The yard was empty when I arrived and I sat in the mess room
With George Alan Steve and Ruth chatting and drinking coffee
I then decided to borrow a shirt from Sam who was my height
Sam was in hospital with a broken leg after being struck by a car
It was only after I started my shift wearing poor Sam’s shirt
That I began to experience clearly the visceral terrors of his war
This made me feel ill and not suspecting it be the shirt I wept
I too had experienced terrible things during the late war
And had been involved in looting and the lazy executions of broken men
But I had put this behind me when I returned home and locked the box
My colleagues comforted me as they did Sam when the war terrors appeared
But little did they know that Sam had been a hero a fine and honourable soldier
Which was the opposite of my filthy war of greed violence and random killings
I had always wondered God’s punishment might be and now my eyes had been opened
Peter Gray