MINQAR QAIM, 1942

It was an inauspicious beginning. Freyberg caught

shell shrapnel in the neck.

The advance east

was late, but the scruffy trucks fell like a summer storm

on the German positions;

the storm became

a shattered mirror of trucks aflame,

overhead

the videogame fireworks of tracer fire like shooting stars

and chrysanthemums of green phosphorus,

tank noise and empyreumatic

(your ten bob word) stench:

a slow motion ecstasy of training and duty.

Snout to tail like Piccadilly,

full throttle, pedal to the metal, the Kiwis burst through

a German medical post, First Battalion of

104 Rifle Regiment, 21 Panzer HQ.

The enemy

were slaughtered like mutton as they stirred

from their tents (so many in pyjamas in the desert).

The wounded were finished off with bayonets.

Rommel called them ‘gangsters’. In war

no hand remains entirely clean for long, but England

could not be disappointed.

The expression ‘friendly fire’ hadn’t been invented yet

(Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori),

but there was that in spades in the chaos of the melee.

The wadi was opened in minutes.

The Germans rallied at noon

from the laagered survivors of 21 Panzer.

The Kiwis burst through like Ezekiel in a ball of fire.

History pivoted slightly in a tense twenty-four hours;

mosquito bites distracting from the eastern front

and all for the sake of a horseshoe nail.