Lay for the Day 31st January

1915: poison gas is used on the field of battle for the first time, by the German army on the Eastern Front. The freezing temperatures make their chlorine gas shells largely ineffective, however, and the innovation goes unrecorded by the Russian forces against whom it is launched. Gas made a more catastrophic appearance on 22nd April of the same year, when a five-mile long cloud of chlorine is released from cylinders against French and Algerian troops on the Western Front. In the whole course of the First World War, however, it is the Russians who will suffer worst from gassing, with 56,000 soldiers dying from it.

This song is on The Children’s first CD, Play:

Next Millennium

An end to hunger, an end to greed,
An end to warfare, an end to need,
The full potential of every person freed,
But hell – oh well,
Maybe next millennium.

An end to terror, an end to waste,
An end to conflicts of creed and race,
Time for meditation and not a world of haste,
But hell – oh well,
Maybe next millennium.

Now I remember in a book I read
The poet Thomas Hardy said,
After two thousand years of mass
We’ve got as far as poison gas.

No more pollution and no hard sell,
No dying seas, no forests felled,
No cynical leaders with no more lies to tell,
But hell – oh well,
Maybe next millennium.
But hell – oh well,
How ’bout next millennium?
But hell – oh well,
Maybe next millennium.

Words and music by The Children

The Lay Reader: an archive of the poetic calendar