Out of the depths of bleak despair,
Rising inexorably as the stars at night,
Give honour sway!
Exquisite, new, emotion rare,
Giving new hope and a glimpse of a promised light.
We'll show the way.

If victory means a future gain,
Peace is the guerdon which governed our sacrifice.
Tyranny lose!
Let justice be the nation's aim,
Make war-years' hatred and chaos themselves suffice.
Victory's whose?

Enemy see and friends behold,
Industry joy, together with faith will fly.
Let nothing halt!
In harbours safe from hatred's cold,
Where national aims on a communal base rely,
Mankind exalt!

How can they know, of what their future's made,
Effects of deeds no vision impending gives.
On danger's death, necessity's heroes fade,
An end to war, and naught but poverty lives.

What have they seen, whose youth thro'war has fled?
Naught recompenses time so wasted, flown.
Nothing she does recalls a nation's dead.
How bring them back to peace, who've slaughter known?

Better to see a nation's soldiers dead,
Than bring them back to help to make a peace
Steeped in hatred, to kill as babes they're bred,
Their poisoned influence halts a life's new lease.

Ended is strife! Let nations wreak their will,
Learn now the joys that peace alone can give.
Let brothers know that love endureth still,
Though frontiers sever tongues, let honour live.

These poems were written by Lieutenant Douglas Berneville-Claye, originally with the West Yorkshire Regiment, but captured by the Afrika Korps in December 1942, while serving with the SAS behind enemy lines.
He wrote them in Oflag 79 Brunswick, Germany prisoner-of-war camp in late 1944 or early 1945, as well as the poems to his family on the previous page.