Drawing and poem by David Jones

  

          You can hear the silence of it;
you can hear the rat of no-man’s-land
rut-out intricacies,
weasel-out his patient workings,
scrut, scrut, sscrut
harrow out-earthly, trowel his cunning paw;
redeem the time of our uncharity, to sap his own amphibious paradise.

   You can hear his carrying-parties rustle our corruptions through the
night-weeds – contest the choicest morsels in his tiny conduits,
bead-eyed feast on us; by a rule of his nature; at night-feast on the 
broken of us.    Those broad-pinioned;
blue-burnished, or brinded-back;
whose proud eyes watched
          the broken emblems
droop and drag dust,
suffer with us this metamorphosis. 

—extract from In Parenthesis, 1937. The drawing is Dugout Rats, 1916; made whilst in the trenches of the Somme.