I have a dug-out
corrugated iron overhead
wire netting and sand bags for a bed
an empty bomb box for a table
for light a candle in a whisky bottle
and mud, mud, God, what mud! - in it,
outside it, all round it

I have a picture in my dug-out
not much of a picture
one of Valentine's coloured post cards
but it's bonny, oh it's bonny
when I smoke my pipe and look at it
in fancy free I'm trudging
through the woods
among the bracken
along the granited roads
in the clean, snell air of a
Scottish morn

It's just a broken old tree
mute symbol of our frailty
buffeted by many a storm
throned on a hill-top with silent courtiers
tall, feathery grasses bending before the wind
fleecy cloudlets scurrying along above
I smell the mud no longer
my lungs are filled with the wind
which blows o'er that wild upland

There is a dark wood in my picture
and there I oft-times go
when the fir trees smell with sweetness after rain
brown bracken fringes the wood
and joyous, I plunge into it;
my clothes glistening with silvery cobwebs
as tho' adorned with gems of Araby.
There's a clearing in my wood
a dark, damp clearing
No! I won't think of it
it's too like Flanders to be wholesome
I always see the wooden crosses there

Then I clamber to the hill-top
and stand amid the sweet smelling gorse
how wonderful, how beautiful!
The grey mists in the valley
the dusky purple of the heath-clad hills

But out here
the landscape is no picture
it's an ugly travesty of Nature.
Shell holes, stinking shell holes
rotting bodies, hungry rats
and mud, mud - what hellish mud!
All around us like a sea of slime

William Richard Torvaney

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/my-picture-from-the-trenches/