Nine lines, no punctuation, not a single capital letter: «War-time» looks as if it has been stripped down for a hard journey. Its three stanzas move from the public to the private. First comes the logic of money and power, then the failure of a clever fix, and finally a speaker alone with fear. The central idea is bleak and sharply put. In war the powerful do not solve scarcity by feeding people. They would rather redesign the people who need feeding, and when even that fails, nothing is left but private terror.
The first stanza turns on a grim joke. "The master of money" pairs a feudal word with a financial one, and the m-m alliteration gives it the ring of a title. Then comes "must give the poor", and the line break plays a trick. For a moment "give" sounds generous. The next line cancels that: "some other stomach." The problem, it seems, is not that the poor are hungry but that they have the wrong kind of stomach. "Must" sounds like a law of nature, which makes the cruelty administrative rather than angry. The poem never raises its voice, and that calm is what chills.
The second stanza introduces "the new contrivance", the most abstract and bureaucratic phrase in the poem, suggesting something engineered and artificial. What it consists of is odd: "king and sandwich." Pairing a crown with one of the humblest foods is absurd, and the poem lets the absurdity stand. The word "sandwich" also happens to be named after an English nobleman, so it carries a faint aristocratic echo, though the poem never leans on this. What matters more is what the word does on the page. "Sandwich" contains "sand", and two words later the contrivance "broke down into sand". The word itself crumbles in front of us. "Broke down" works twice, as a machine failing and as food being digested, so the stomach from the first stanza is still in play. Sand suggests grit in the mouth, an hourglass running out, and the old proverb about building on sand. All of these fit a scheme that was never solid.
The last stanza drops the third-person distance of "the poor" for "our" and "I". "Our sin matters little" can be read as consolation or as despair. Either way, ordinary moral bookkeeping has been suspended, since survival outranks conscience. Then comes the poem's strangest and most memorable image: "fear is the only wife now / with whom I lie." Marriage, the most intimate institution, has shrunk to a single partner, and that partner is dread. "Only" implies that everything else has gone, and "now" ties the line back to the title's war-time. The final word is a pun. The speaker lies in bed beside fear, and also lies, perhaps to himself and perhaps in the sense that the whole arrangement of king, money and sandwich was a falsehood. The poem stops there, with no full stop to close it.
The sound and rhythm are quiet but deliberate. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, and its lines run from about four to eight syllables, so it reads like clipped statements rather than song. The short last line, "with whom I lie", lands almost as a whisper after the longer line before it. Look at where each stanza ends: "stomach", "sand", "lie". These move from body to ground to bed, a descent that mirrors the poem's drift from policy to flesh to the dark. The lack of punctuation helps too, because each statement sounds like a maxim overheard rather than an argument made.
The poem is significant because of how much it compresses. The title and text name no war, no country and no ruler, so the poem works as a kind of fable. Its images of the stomach, the sandwich and the bed bring huge abstractions down to the smallest, most bodily scale. It suggests that the cost of war is paid in what a person can eat and in who or what shares their bed at night, as well as on battlefields. A reader finishes the poem a little hungry and a little afraid, which seems to be the point.