A Signaller's Poem


I stood at dawn's first lighting
Upon the barrack square
My bugle clutched so tightly
In khaki gloved hand

The snow fell ever lightly
On Yorkshire's clovered fields
And soldiers slumbered onward
Waiting the morning's yield

The first notes of reveille
Echoed over Uniacke's square
The sound dulled but just slightly
By the snow that gathered there

In spiders all around me
ATs roused up from there slumber
And donned the uniform of men
Who always would be soldiers

Signallers first, and soldiers second
These men would always toil
In the service of there country
And the service of their Queen

I knew this as I stood there
In the silence and the snow
And as the bugle's last notes faded
I felt a warming glow

Because I knew I shared committment
Of a huge and glorious kind
That would never leave us Signallers
That would always be in our mind.

David C. Berry, duty bugler, January 14, 1962, AAS, Harrogate.