This is a poem about the British Army of the Rhine in the early seventies facing shortages of almost everything in the face of a Warsaw Pact threat just down the road. Our solution was to give our politicians 48 hours or so to negotiate something before we went ‘tactical nuclear’, for we knew we didn’t have the resources to withstand a full-on attack from the east. We used to exercise on the Luneburg plain near to Bergen Belsen, the death camp. It is difficult to grasp that this was taking place 28 years after the end of the second world war and that we are now more than 45 years from the events depicted in this poem. It is a bit of modern history – as am I, as are we all.
This is a poem about the British Army of the Rhine in the early seventies facing shortages of almost everything in the face of a Warsaw Pact threat just down the road. Our solution was to give our politicians 48 hours or so to negotiate something before we went ‘tactical nuclear’, for we knew we didn’t have the resources to withstand a full-on attack from the east. We used to exercise on the Luneburg plain near to Bergen Belsen, the death camp. It is difficult to grasp that this was taking place 28 years after the end of the second world war and that we are now more than 45 years from the events depicted in this poem. It is a bit of modern history – as am I, as are we all.
Cold War Warriors
How quickly we forget, that existential threat
The sabre rattling, political prattling
That made a generation fear the worst
By which all ideology was cursed
Armies on borders, fending off marauders
Spies among the upper classes, patriots to the working masses
Those romantic days of post-war treason
The moral maze and search for reason
So-called defence of an illogical fence
We used to think our lives on the brink
Of conflict expressed as a view of the world
Not just allegiance to a flag unfurled
So we practised retreat and conventional defeat
On Germany’s plains, near death-camp remains
Called out in the icy depth of night
An imaginary, immoral enemy to fight
We knew all was lost, as we counted the cost
Of redundant equipment and shortage of shipment
Economic reality forced us to accept
That our salvation lied in our nuclear threat
Sterling’s doom and bust and boom
Raised the expense of the whole pretence
On which political parties would never agree
Cold war warriors of the west were we