Cold War Warriors

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