"On Passing the New Menin Gate", by Siegfried Sassoon

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the Guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate, .

Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudeley renewed, the Salient holds its own,
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

Here was the world's worst wound. And her with pride
"Their name liveth for evermore" the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerbably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime;
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.


INFORMATION

"Salient" a network of fortifications, earthworks and trenches. The Ypres Salient was a famous focus for intense fighting for much of the war.

"paid" here used with heavy irony: there is, in fact no way of repaying such unaccidental deaths.

"their name liveth forever more": 'their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for everymore' is a line from Ecclesiasticus (c200AD), a book with the collection of biblical writings known as the Apocrypha. It comes from a well-known passage "Let us now praise famous Men", and also observes, 'some there be which have no memorial; who are presished as though they have never been'.

'immolation'; sacrifice

'slime': the poet chooses a word associated with the hellish and disgusting to refer to the mud of the Flanders battlefields.