‘Come On, Come Back’

Incident in a future war

Left by the ebbing tide of battle

On the field of Austerlitz

The girl soldier Vaudevue sits

Her fingers tap the ground, she is alone

At midnight in the moonlight she is sitting alone on a round flat stone.

Graded by the Memel Conference first

Of all human exterminators

M.L.5.

Has left her just alive

Only her memory is dead for evermore.

She fears and cries, Ah me why am I here?

Sitting alone on a round flat stone on a hummock there.

Rising, staggering, over the ground she goes

Over the seeming miles of rutted meadow

To the margin of a lake

The sand beneath her feet

Is cold and damp and firm to the waves’ beat.

Quickly – as a child, an idiot, as one without memory –

She strips her uniform off, strips, stands and plunges

Into the icy waters of the adorable lake.

On the surface of the water lies

A ribbon of white moonlight

The waters on either side of the moony track

Are black as her mind,

Her mind is as secret from her

As the water on which she swims,

As secret as profound as ominous.

Weeping bitterly for her ominous mind, her plight,

Up the river of white moonlight she swims

Until a treacherous undercurrent

Seizing her in an icy-amorous embrace

Dives with her, swiftly severing

The waters which close above her head.

An enemy sentinel

Finding the abandoned clothes

Waits for the swimmer’s return

(‘Come on, come back’)

Waiting, whiling away the hour

Whittling a shepherd’s pipe from the hollow reeds.

In the chill light of dawn

Ring out the pipe’s wild notes

‘Come on, come back.’

Vaudevue

In the swift and subtle current’s close embrace

Sleeps on, stirs not, hears not the familiar tune

Favourite of all the troops of all the armies

Favourite of Vaudevue

For she had sung it too

Marching to Austerlitz,

'Come on, come back.'