(It was on Craiglockhart Hill that the Craiglockhart War Hospital for Officers treated many victims of shell shock and other injuries, including the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.)
There are two hills here under the umbrella
Of a single name; sometimes a hill conceals
Another hill behind it, the real goal;
Hill-walkers complain of that illusion,
Believing they have reached the summit,
They discover it lies one layer beyond
The high ground they have just reached:
A familiar issue for most of us,
Even if our ambitions are more modest
Than those of sturdy Munro-baggers.
Craiglockhart Hill, like many a Scottish hill,
Has seen a private slice of history
Striated with pain; a century ago,
Young men wounded in body and spirit
Spent long months on the north face of this hill
Recovering from that great stramash of men
In broken, tortured Europe; they knew
The lie on all the public posters claimed,
The dolce et decorum call by those
Who never saw the trenches nor the blood
That broke men’s hearts, and their bodies too;
This hill hosted their hospital, a retreat
For the soul-injured, quiet, far from the guns,
Open to the winds that blow across the Forth,
Bearing the scent of gorse, and that of sea,
A wind to dry their tears, make whole again
The shattered and the saddened;
In these northern nights might men sleep once more,
Free from torment, from the anger of the guns,
Far from collective madness; if refuge
Can bring healing, then it must show to us
The image of love, through quietus glimpsed.