CHAPLAIN Four shells on four yards Of trench in the stripped wood The Somme July 1916 "O horrible most horrible" Trapped him in a dugout With three fusiliers who cursed Their bad luck first, but prayed With him later, panting, Words a flat hiss On poison air. The next barrage tore bright strips >From their eyes: the sky opened Over the foul death-trench. In gaseous day, in the childish Whine of the unseen wounded, they joked About the priest's hair, turned white By that four hours' burial. After the hospital morphine They sent him to teach boys Mathematics and History Far behind the lines. They let him grow dahlias and banks Of rhododendron in the rich loam Of the school's Pleasure Grounds. The boys called him Thatch or Shakes Behind his back; but they liked it When he took them to help with his flowers. -- James J. McCauley (be. Dublin) This poem touched me as my own English-Irish uncle (Alfred George Ford) who loved to play the violin and tend his great garden in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, had been "injured by mustard gas in the war." In some photos at a relatively young age he is carrying a cane. Jean