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SACHUSETTS BOSTON LIBRARY |
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A TREASURY OF WAR POETRY
A TREASURY OF WAR
POETRY
BRITISH AND AMERICAN POEMS
OF THE WORLD WAR
1914-1917
FIRST SERIES
EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES, BY
GEORGE HERBERT CLARKE
Professor of English in the University of Tennessee
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
SCO
T7
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY GEORGE HEREERT CLARKE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published October iqi'j
UNIV. OF MASSACHUSETTS \ AT BOSTON - LIBRARY
®o ail ®ijo$e WH\)0 ifigtit tor Jftee&om
"Hark! now the Drums beat up again, For all true Soldiers Gentlemen! "
— Corporal John Brown, Grenadier Guards, 1854.
" Life is no life to him that dares not die, And death no death to him that dares not live."
— Sir Henry Newbolt.
" We saw not clearly nor understood, But, yielding ourselves to the master-hand, Each in his part as best he could, We played it through as the author planned."
— Alan Seeger.
CONTENTS
I. AMERICA
Rudyard Kipling: The Choice 3
Henry van Dyke: "Liberty Enlightening the World" 4
Robert Bridges: To the United States of America . 5
Vachel Lindsay: Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight 6
Jeanne Robert Foster: The " William P. Frye " . 7
II. ENGLAND AND AMERICA
Florence T. Holt: England and America . . .11
Lieutenant Charles Langbridge Morgan: To
America 11
Helen Gray Cone: A Chant of Love for England . 12
Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley : At St. Paul's :
April 20, 1917 14
Rowland Thirlmere: Jimmy Doane 14
Alfred No yes: Princeton, May, 1917 . . . .17
III. ENGLAND
Sra Henry Newbolt: The Vigil ...... 21
Rudyard Kipling: " For All we Have and Are " . . 22
John Galsworthy: England to Free Men ... 23
Sir Owen Seaman: Pro P atria 24
George Herbert Clarke : Lines Written in Surrey,
1917 25
CONTENTS
IV. FRANCE
Cecil Chesterton: France 29
Henry van Dyke : The Name of France .... 30
Charlotte Holmes Crawford : Vive la France I . .31
Theodosia Garrison: The Soul of Jeanne d'Arc . . 32
Edgar Lee Masters: O Glorious France ... 35
Herbert Jones: To France 37
Florence Earle Coates: Place de la Concorde . . 38
Canon and Major Frederick George Scott: To
France 39
Grace Ellery Channing: Qui Vive? .... 40
V. BELGIUM
Laurence Binyon: To the Belgians 45
Edith Wharton: Belgium 46
Eden Phillpotts: To Belgium 47
Sir Owen Seaman: To Belgium in Exile .... 47
Gilbert Keith Chesterton: The Wife of Flanders . 48
VI. RUSSIA AND AMERICA
John Galsworthy: Russia — America .... 53
Robert Underwood Johnson : To Russia New and
Free 54
VII. ITALY
Clinton Scollard: Italy in Arms 59
George Edward Woodberry: On the Italian Front,
MCMXVI 61
CONTENTS xi
VIII. AUSTRALIA
Archibald T. Strong : Australia to England ... 65
IX. CANADA
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall: Canada to England . . 69 Wilfred Campbell: Langemarck at Ypres ... 69 Will H. Ogilvie: Canadians 73
X. LIEGE
Stephen Phillips: The Kaiser and Belgium ... 77 Dana Burnet: The Battle of Liege 77
XI. VERDUN
Laurence Binyos : Men of Verdun 83
Eden Phillpotts: Verdun 84
Patrick R. Chalmers: Guns of Verdun . . . .85
XII. OXFORD
Winifred M. Letts: The Spires of Oxford ... 89
W. Snow: Oxford in War-Time 90
Tertius van Dyke: Oxford Revisited in War-Time . 91
XIII. REFLECTIONS
George Edward Woodberry : Sonnets Written in the
Fall of 1914 95
Sir Henry Newbolt: The War Films .... 98
Alfred No yes: The Searchlights 99
Percy MacKaye: Christmas: 1915 101
xii CONTENTS
Thomas Hardy: "Men who March Away" . . .101
John Drinkwater: We Willed it Not .... 103
Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Ronald Ross: The Death
of Peace 104
Florence Earle Coates: In War-Time . . . 108
Laurence Binyon: The Anvil 109
Walter de la Mare: The Fool Rings his Bells . .110
John Finley: The Road to Dieppe 112
W. Macneile Dixon: To Fellow Travellers in Greece 115
Austin Dobson: " When there is Peace " .... 116
Alfred Noyes: A Prayer in Time of War . . .117
Thomas Hardy: Then and Now 118
Barry Pain: The Kaiser and God 119
Robert Grant: The Superman 121
Everard Owen: Three Hills 123
XIV. INCIDENTS AND ASPECTS
John Freeman: The Return 127
Grace Fallow Norton: The Mobilization in Brit- tany 127
Sir Henry Newbolt: The Toy Band . . . .130 Sir Owen Seaman: Thomas of the Light Heart . .131 Maurice Hewlett: In the Trenches . . . .132 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Guards Came Through 134
William Dean Howells: The Passengers of a Re- tarded Submersible 136
Laurence Binyon: Edith Cavell 138
Herbert Kaufman: The Hell-Gate of Soissons . . 141
George Herbert Clarke: The Virgin of Albert . 144
CONTENTS xiii
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: Retreat 145
Sir Henry Newbolt: A Letter from the Front . .145 Grace Hazard Conkling: Rheims Cathedral — 1914 . 146
XV. POETS MILITANT
Alan Seeger: I Have a Rendezvous with Death . .151
Lieutenant Rupert Brooke: The Soldier . . . 152
Captain Charles Hamilton Sorley: Expectans Ex-
pectavi 152
Lieutenant Herbert Asquith: The Volunteer . . 153
Captain Julian Grenfell: Into Battle .... 154
James Norman Hall: The Cricketers of Flanders . 155
Captain Charles Hamilton Sorley: "All the Hills
and Vales Along " 157
Captain James H. Knight-Adkin : No Man's Land . 158
Alan Seeger: Champagne, 1914-15 160
Captain Gilbert Frankau: Headquarters . . .162
Lieutenant E. Wyndham Tennant : Home Thoughts
from Laventie 164
Lieutenant Robert Ernest Vernede : A Petition . 166
Robert Nichols: Fulfilment 166
The Day's March 167
Lieutenant Frederic Manning: The Sign . . .169
The Trenches . . 170
Lieutenant Henry William Hutchinson : Sonnets . 171
Captain J. E. Stewart: The Messines Road . . 172
Private A. N. Field: The Challenge of the Guns . 174
Lieutenant Geoffrey Howard : The Beach Road by
the Wood 174
xiv CONTENTS
Sergeant Joseph Lee: German Prisoners . . . 176 Sergeant Leslie Coulson : " — But a Short Time to
Live" 176
Lieutenant W. N. Hodgson: Before Action . - 178 Lieutenant Dyneley Hussey: Courage .... 179 Lieutenant A. Victor Ratcliffe: Optimism . . 179 Major Sydney Oswald: The Battlefield . . . 180 Captain James H. Knight-Adkin : " On LesAura!" . 181
Corporal Alexander Robertson : To an Old Lady
Seen at a Guest-House for Soldiers .... 182
Lieutenant Gilbert Waterhouse : The Casualty
Clearing Station 182
Lance-Corporal Malcolm Hemphrey : Hills of Home 183
XVI. AUXILIARIES
John Finley: The Red Cross Spirit Speaks Winifred M. Letts: Chaplain to the Forces Eden Phillpotts: Song of the Red Cross Laurence Binyon: The Healers . . Thomas L. Masson: The Red Cross Nurses
. 187 . 188 . 189 . 190 . 192
XVII. KEEPING THE SEAS
Alfred Noyes: Kilmeny 195
Rudyard Kipling: The Mine-Sweepers . . . .196
Henry van Dyke: Mare Liberum 197
Lieutenant Paul Bewsher : The Dawn Patrol . . 198 Reginald McIntosh Cleveland: Destroyers off
Jutland 199
C. Fox Smith: British Merchant Service . . . .200
CONTENTS xv
XVni. THE WOUNDED
Winifred M. Letts: To a Soldier in Hospital . . 205 Wilfrid Wilson Gibson: Between the Lines . . 207 Robert Haven Schauffler: The White Comrade . 212
Robert W. Service: Fleurette 215
Robert Frost: Not to Keep 219
XIX. THE FALLEN
Lieutenant Rupert Brooke: The Dead . . . 223
John Masefield: The Island of Skyros .... 224
Laurence Binyon: For the Fallen 225
Captain Charles Hamilton Sorley: Two Sonnets . 226
Walter de la Mare: "How Sleep the Brave! " . . 227
Edward Verrall Lucas: The Debt 228
Canon and Major Frederick George Scott: Requi-
escant 230
Lieutenant Robert Ernest Vernede : To our Fallen 231
Katharine Tynan: The Old Soldier 232
Robert Bridges: Lord Kitchener 232
John Helston: Kitchener 233
Lieutenant Herbert Asquith : The Fallen Subaltern 234
F. W. Bourdillon: The Debt Unpayable . . .235 Wilfrid Wtilson Gibson: The Messages "... 236
G. Rostrevor Hamilton: A Cross in Flanders . . 237
Hermann Hagedorn: Resurrection 238
Oscar C. A. Child: To a Hero 239
Moray Dalton: Rupert Brooke (Jn Memoriam) . . 239
xvi CONTENTS
Francis Bickley: The Players 240
Charles Alexander Richmond: A Song . . . 240
XX. WOMEN AND THE WAR
Josephine Preston Peabody: Harvest Moon . . 243
Harvest Moon: 1916 . 244
Ada Tyrrell: My Son 245
Katharine Tynan : To the Others 246
Grace Fallow Norton: The Journey .... 247 Margaret Peterson : A Mother's Dedication . . 249
Eden Phillpotts: To a Mother 250
Sara Teasdale: Spring in War-Time .... 250
OCCASIONAL NOTES 253
INDEXES 263
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Editor desires to express his cordial apprecia- tion of the assistance rendered him in his undertaking by the officials of the British Museum (Mr. F. D. Sladen, in particular); Professor W. Macneile Dixon, of the University of Glasgow; Professor Kemp Smith, of Princeton University; Miss Esther C. Johnson, of Needham, Massachusetts; and Mr. Francis Bickley, of London. He wishes also to acknowledge the cour- tesies generously extended by the following authors, periodicals, and publishers in granting permission for the use of the poems indicated, rights in which are in each case reserved by the owner of the copyright: —
Mr. Francis Bickley and the Westminster Gazette : — "The Players."
Mr. F. W. Bourdillon and the Spectator : — " The. Debt Unpayable."
Dr. Robert Bridges and the London Times : — "Lord Kitchener," and "To the United States of America."
Mr. Dana Burnet and the New York Evening Sun : — "The Battle of Liege."
Mr. Wilfred Campbell and the Ottawa Evening Journal: — "Langemarck at Ypres."
Mr. Patrick R. Chalmers and Punch: — "Guns of Verdun."
Mr. Cecil Chesterton and The New Witness: — "France."
Mr. Oscar C. A. Child and Harper's Magazine: — "To a Hero."
Mr. Reginald Mcintosh Cleveland and the New York Times: — "Destroyers off Jutland."
xviii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
_
Miss Charlotte Holmes Crawford and Scribner's Magazine : — " Vive la France ! "
Mr. Moray Dal ton and the Spectator: — "Rupert Brooke."
Lord Desborough and the London Times: — "Into Battle," by the late Captain Julian Grenfell.
Professor W. Macneile Dixon and the London Times: — "To Fellow Travellers in Greece."
Mr. Austin Dobson and the Spectator: — "'When There Is Peace.'"
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the London Times : — "The Guards Came Through."
Mr. John Finley and the Atlantic Monthly : — " The Road to Dieppe"; Mr. Finley, the American Red Cross, and the Red Cross Magazine : — " The Red Cross Spirit Speaks." . ,
Mr. John Freeman and the Westminster Gazette : — ■ "The Return."
Mr. Robert Frost and the Yale Review : — " Not to Keep."
Mr. John Galsworthy and the Westminster Gazette : — "England to Free Men"; Mr. Galsworthy and the London Chronicle : — "Russia — America."
Mrs. Theodosia Garrison and Scribners Magazine : — "The Soul of Jeanne d'Arc."
Lady Glenconner and the London Times : — "Home Thoughts from Laventie," by the late Lieutenant E. Wyndham Tennant.
Mr. Robert Grant and the Nation (New York) : — "The Superman."
Mr. Hermann Hagedorn and the Century Maga- zine : — " Resurrection."
Mr. James Norman Hall and the Spectator : — "The Cricketers of Flanders."
Mr. Thomas Hardy and the London Times: — "Men Who March Away," and "Then and Now."
Mr. John Helston and the English Reviezv : — "Kitchener."
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xix
Mr. Maurice Hewlett: — "In the Trenches," from Sing-Songs of the War (The Poetry Bookshop).
Dr. A. E. Hillard:— "The Dawn Patrol," by Lieutenant Paul Bewsher.
Mrs. Katharine Tynan Hinkson: — "To the Oth- ers" and "The Old Soldier."
Mrs. Florence T. Holt and the Atlantic Monthly : — "England and America."
Mr. William Dean Howells and the North American Review: — "The Passengers of a Retarded Sub- mersible."
Lady Hutchinson: — "Sonnets," by the late Lieu- tenant Henry William Hutchinson.
Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson: — "To Russia New and Free," from Poems of War and Peace, pub- lished by the author.
Mr. Rudyard Kipling :—" The Choice"; "' For All we Have and Are'"; and "The Mine-Sweepers." (Copyright, 1914, 1915, 1917, by Rudyard Kipling.)
Captain James H. Knight- Adkin and the Spectator; — "No Man's Land" and "On Les Aura!"
Sergeant Joseph Lee and the Spectator : — " German
Prisoners."
Mr. E. V. Lucas and the Sphere : — "The Debt."
Mr. Walter de la Mare and the London Times : — "'How Sleep the Brave!'"; Mr. de la Mare and the Westminster Gazette: — "The Fool Rings his Bells."
Mr. Edward Marsh, literary executor of the late Rupert Brooke: — "The Soldier" and "The Dead."
Mr. Thomas L. Masson: — "The Red Cross Nurses," from the Red Cross Magazine.
Lieutenant Charles Langbridge Morgan and the Westminster Gazette: — "To America."
Sir Henry Newbolt : — " The Vigil"; "The War Films"; "The Toy Band," and "A Letter from the Front."
xx ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Mr. Alfred Noyes: — "Princeton, May, 1917"; " The Searchlights " (London Times), *' A Prayer in Time of War " (London Daily Mail), and " Kilmeny."
Mr.WillH.Ogilvie and Country Life: — "Canadians."
Mr. Barry Pain and the London Times: — "The Kaiser and God."
Miss Marjorie Pickthall and the London Times : — "Canada to England."
Canon H. D. Rawnsley and the Westminster Ga- zette : — "At St. Paul's, April 20, 1917."
Dr. Charles Alexander Richmond: — "A Song."
Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Ronald Ross and the Poetry Review : — "The Death of Peace."
Mr. Robert Haven Schauffler: — "The White Comrade."
Mr. W. Snow and the Spectator : — "Oxford in War- Time."
Mrs. Grace Ellery Channing-Stetson and the New York Tribune: — "Qui Vive?"
Mr. Rowland Thirlmere and the Poetry Review: — "Jimmy Doane."
Mrs. Ada Tyrrell and the Saturday Review: — "My Son."
Dr. Henry van Dyke and the London Times : — "Liberty Enlightening the World," and "Mare Liberum"; Dr. van Dyke and the Art World: "The Name of France."
Mr. Tertius van Dyke and the Spectator : — " Oxford Revisited in War-Time."
Mrs. Edith Wharton: — "Belgium," from King Albert's Book (Hearst's International Library Com- pany).
Mr. George Edward Woodberry and the Boston Herald: — "On the Italian Front, MCMXVI"; Mr. Woodberry, the New York Times and the North American Review: — "Sonnets Written in the Fall of 1914."
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xxi
The AtheruBum : — " A Cross in Flanders," by G. Rostrevor Hamilton.
The Poetry Review: — "The Messines Road," by Captain J. E. Stewart; " — But a Short Time to Live," by the late Sergeant Leslie Coulson.
The Spectator: — "The Challenge of the Guns," by Private A. N. Field.
The Westminster Gazette : — "Lines Written in Surrey, 1917," by George Herbert Clarke.
Messrs. Barse & Hopkins: — "Fleurette," by Rob- ert W. Service.
The Cambridge University Press and Professor William R. Sorley : — " Expectans Expectavi"; "'All the Hills and Vales Along,'" and "Two Sonnets," by the late Captain Charles Hamilton Sorley, from Marl- borough and Other Poems.
Messrs. Chatto & Windus: — " Fulfilment " and " The Day's March," by Robert Nichols, from Ar- dours and Endurances.
Messrs. Constable & Company: — "Pro Patria," "Thomas of the Light Heart," and "To Belgium in Exile," by Sir Owen Seaman, from War-Time; "To France" and " Requiescant," by Canon and Major Frederick George Scott, from In the Battle Silences.
Messrs. E. P. Dutton & Company: — "To a Soldier in Hospital" (the Spectator) ; "Chaplain to the Forces" and "The Spires of Oxford" (Westminster Gazette), by Winifred M. Letts, from Hallowe'en, and Poems of the War; "A Chant of Love for England," by Helen Gray Cone, from A Chant of Love for England, and Other Poems (published also by J. M. Dent & Sons,
Limited, London).
Lawrence J. Gomme : — " Italy in Arms," by Clinton Scollard, from Italy in Armsy and Other Poems.
xxii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
William Heinemann: — "To Our Fallen" and "A Petition" (the London Times), by the late Lieuten- ant Robert Ernest Vernede.
Messrs. Houghton Mifflin Company: — "To the Belgians"; "Men of Verdun"; "The Anvil"; "Edith Cavell"; "The Healers" and "For the Fallen," by Laurence Binyon, from The Cause (published also by Elkin Mathews, London, in The Anvil and The Win- nowing Fan); "Headquarters," by Captain Gilbert Frankau, from A Song of the Guns; "Place de la Concorde" and "In War-Time," by Florence Earle Coates, from The Collected Poems of Florence Earle Coates; "Harvest Moon" and "Harvest Moon, 1916," by Josephine Preston Peabody, from Harvest Moon; "The Mobilization in Brittany" and "The Journey," by Grace Fallow Norton, from Roads, and "Rheims Cathedral — 1914," by Grace Hazard Conkling, from Afternoons of April.
John Lane: — "The Kaiser and Belgium," by the late Stephen Phillips.
The John Lane Company: — "The Wife of Flan- ders," by Gilbert K. Chesterton, from Poems (pub- lished also by Messrs. Burns and Oates, London) ; "The Soldier," and "The Dead," by the late Lieutenant Rupert Brooke, from The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (published also by Messrs. Sidgwick & Jackson, London, in 191^, and Other Poems).
Erskine Macdonald : — The following poems from Soldier Poets: — "The Beach Road by the Wood," by Lieutenant Geoffrey Howard; "Before Action," by the late Lieutenant W. N. Hodgson (" Edward Mel- bourne ") ; " Courage," by Lieutenant Dyneley Hussey ; "Optimism," by Lieutenant A. Victor Ratcliffe; "The Battlefield," by Major Sidney Oswald; "To an Old Lady Seen at a Guest-House for Soldiers," by Cor- poral Alexander Robertson; "The Casualty Clearing Station," by Lieutenant Gilbert Waterhouse; and
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xxiii
"Hills of Home," by Lance-Corporal Malcolm Hem-
phrey.
The Macmillan Company: — "To Belgium "; " Ver- dun"; "To a Mother," and "Song of the Red Cross," by Eden Phillpotts, from Plain Song, 19U-1916 (pub- lished also by William Heinemann, London) ; "The Is- land of Skyros," by John Masefield; "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight," from The Congo and Other Poems, by Vachel Lindsay; "O Glorious France," by Edgar Lee Masters, from Songs and Satires; "Christmas, 1915," from Poems and Plays, by Percy MacKaye; " The Hellgate of Soissons," by Herbert Kaufman, from The Hellgate of Soissons; "Spring in War-Time," by Sara Teasdale, from Rivers to the Sea; and "Retreat," "The Messages," and "Between the Lines," by Wil- frid Wilson Gibson.
Messrs. Macmillan & Company: — "Australia to England," by Archibald T. Strong, from Sonnets of the Empire, and "Men Who March Away," by Thomas Hardy, from Satires of Circumstance.
Elkin Mathews: — "British Merchant Service" (the Spectator), by C. Fox Smith, from The Naval Crown.
John Murray: — "The Sign, " and "The Trenches," by Lieutenant Frederic Manning.
The Princeton University Press: — "To France," by Herbert Jones, from A Book of Princeton Verse.
Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons: — "I Have a Rendezvous with Death," and "Champagne, 1914- 1915," by the late Alan Seeger, from Poems.
Messrs. Sherman, French & Company: — "The William P. Frye" (New York Times), by Jeanne Robert Foster, from Wild Apples.
Messrs. Sidgwick & Jackson: — "We Willed It Not" (The Sphere), by John Drinkwater; "Three Hills" (London Times), by Everard Owen, from Three Hills, and Other Poems; "The Volunteer," and
xxiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
"The Fallen Subaltern," by Lieutenant Herbert As- quith, from The Volunteer, and Other Poems.
Messrs. Truslove and Hanson: — "A Mother's Dedication," by Margaret Peterson, from The Wo- men's Message.
INTRODUCTION
Because man is both militant and pacific, lie has expressed in literature, as indeed in the other forms of art, his pacific and militant moods. Nor are these moods, of necessity, incompatible. War may become the price of peace, and peace may so decay as inevit- ably to bring about war. Of the dully unresponsive pacificist and the jingo patriot, quick to anger, the latter no doubt is the more dangerous to the cause of true freedom, yet both are " undesirable citizens." He who believes that peace is illusory and spurious, unless it be based upon justice and liberty, will be proud to battle, if battle he must, for the sake of those foun- dations.
For the most part, the poetry of war, undertaken in this spirit, has touched and exalted such special qualities as patriotism, courage, self-sacrifice, enter- prise, and endurance. Where it has tended to glorify war in itself, it is chiefly because war has released those qualities, so to speak, in stirring and spectacular ways; and where it has chosen to round upon war and to upbraid it, it is because war has slain ardent and lov- able youths and has brought misery and despair to women and old people. But the war poet has left the mere arguments to others. For himself, he has seen and felt. Envisaging war from various angles, now romantically, now realistically, now as the celebrating chronicler, now as the contemplative interpreter, but always in a spirit of catholic curiosity, he has sung the
xxvi INTRODUCTION
fall of Troy, the Roman adventures, the mediaeval bat- tles and crusades, the fields of Agincourt and Water- loo, and the more modern revolutions. Since Homer, he has spoken with martial eloquence through the voices of Drayton, Spenser, Marlowe, Webster, Shake- speare, Milton, Byron, Scott, Burns, Campbell, Tenny- son, Browning, the New England group, and Walt Whitman, — to mention only a few of the British and American names, — and he speaks sincerely and power- fully to-day in the writings of Kipling, Hardy, Mase- field, Binyon, Newbolt, Watson, Rupert Brooke, and the two young soldiers — the one English, the other American — who have lately lost their lives while on active service: Captain Charles Hamilton Sorley, who was killed at Huiluch, October 18, 1915; and Alan See- ger, who fell, mortally wounded, during the charge on Belloy-en-Santerre, July 4, 1916.
There can be little doubt that these several minds and spirits, stirred by the passion and energy of war, and reacting sensitively both to its cruelties and to its pities, have experienced the kinship of quickened in- sight and finer unselfishness in the face of wide-ranging death. They have silently compared, perhaps, the normal materialistic conventions in business, politics, education, and religion, with the relief from those con- ventions that nearly all soldiers and many civilians ex- perience in time of war; for although war has its too gross and ugly side, it has not dared to learn that in- flexibility of custom and conduct that deadens the spirit into a tame submission. This strange rebound and exaltation would seem to be due less to the physical realities of war — which must in many ways cramp and constrain the individual — than to the relative spirit-
INTRODUCTION xxvii
ual freedom engendered by the needs of war, if they are to be successfully met. The man of war has an altogether unusual opportunity to realize himself, to cleanse and heal himself through the mastering of his physical fears; through the facing of his moral doubts; through the reexamination of whatever thoughts he may have possessed, theretofore, about life and death and the universe ; and through the quietly unselfish devotion he owes to the welfare of his fellows and to the cause of his native land.
Into the stuff of his thought and utterance, whether he be on active service or not, the poet-interpreter of war weaves these intentions, and cooperates with his fellows in building up a little higher and better, from time to time, that edifice of truth for whose com- pletion can be spared no human experience, no human
hope.
As already suggested, English and American liter- atures have both received genuine accessions, even thus early, arising out of the present great conflict, and we may be sure that other equally notable con- tributions will be made. The present Anthology con- tains a number of representative poems produced by English-speaking men and women. The editorial policy has been humanly hospitable, rather than aca- demically critical, especially in the case of some of the verses written by soldiers at the Front, which, how- ever slight in certain instances their technical merit may be, are yet psychologically interesting as sin- cere transcripts of personal experience, and will, it is thought, for that very reason, peculiarly attract and in- terest the reader. It goes without saying that there are several poems in this group which conspicuously sue-
xxviii INTRODUCTION
ceed also as works of art. For the rest, the attempt has been made, within such limitations as have been ex- perienced, to present pretty freely the best of what has been found available in contemporary British and American war verse. It must speak for itself, and the reader will find that in not a few instances it does so with sensitive sympathy and with living power; some- times, too, with that quietly intimate companionable- ness which we find in Gray's Elegy, and which John Masefield, while lecturing in America in 1916, so often indicated as a prime quality in English poetry. But if this quality appears in Chaucer and the pre-Roman- tics and Wordsworth, it appears also in Longfellow and Lowell, in Emerson and Lanier, and in William Vaughn Moody; for American poetry is, after all, as- English poetry, — "with a difference," — sprung from the same sources, and coursing along similar channels. The new fellowship of the two great Anglo-Saxon nations which a book of this character may, to a de- gree, illustrate, is filled with such high promise for both of them, and for all civilization, that it is perhaps hardly too much to say, with Ambassador Walter H. Page, in his address at the Pilgrims' Dinner in London, April 12, 1917: "We shall get out of this association an indissoluble companionship, and we shall hence- forth have indissoluble mutual duties for mankind. I doubt if there could be another international event comparable in large value and in long consequences to this closer association." Mr. Balfour struck the same note when, during his mission to the United States, he expressed himself in these words: "That this great people should throw themselves whole-heartedly into this mighty struggle, prepared for all efforts and sac-
INTRODUCTION xxix
rifices that may be required to win success for this most righteous cause, is an event at once so happy and so momentous that only the historian of the future will be able, as I believe, to measure its true propor- tions."
The words of these eminent men ratify in the field of international politics the hopeful anticipation which Tennyson expressed in his poem, Hands all Round, as it appeared in the London Examiner, February 7, 1852:—
" Gigantic daughter of the West,
We drink to thee across the flood, We know thee most, we love thee best,
For art thou not of British blood? Should war's mad blast again be blown,
Permit not thou the tyrant powers To fight thy mother here alone,
But let thy broadsides roar with ours. Hands all round!
God the tyrant's cause confound! To our great kinsmen of the West, my friends,
And the great name of England, round and round.
M O rise, our strong Atlantic sons,
WThen war against our freedom springs! O speak to Europe through your guns!
They can be understood by kings. You must not mix our Queen with those
That wish to keep their people fools; Our freedom's foemen are her foes,
She comprehends the race she rules. " Hands all round!
God the tyrant's cause confound! To our dear kinsmen of the West, my friends,
And the great cause of Freedom, round and round."
xxx INTRODUCTION
They ratify also the spirit of those poems in the pres- ent volume which seek to interpret to Britons and Americans their deepening friendship. "Poets," said Shelley, " are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," and he meant by legislation the guidance and determination of the verdicts of the human soul.
G. H. C. August, 1917
.AMERICA
THE CHOICE
The American Spirit speaks i To the Judge of Right and Wrong
With Whom fulfillment lies Our purpose and our power belong,
Our faith and sacrifice.
Let Freedom's land rejoice!
Our ancient bonds are riven; Once more to us the eternal choice
Of good or ill is given.
Not at a little cost,
Hardly by prayer or tears, Shall we recover the road we lost
In the drugged and doubting years.
But after the fires and the wrath,
But after searching and pain, His Mercy opens us a path
To live with ourselves again.
In the Gates of Death rejoice!
We see and hold the good — Bear witness, Earth, we have made our choice
For Freedom's brotherhood.
Then praise the Lord Most High
Whose Strength hath saved us whole,
Who bade us choose that the Flesh should die And not the living Soul !
Rvdyard Kipling
AMERICA
"LIBERTY ENLIGHTENING THE WORLD"
Thou warden of the western gate, above Manhattan
Bay, The fogs of doubt that hid thy face are driven clean
away: Thine eyes at last look far and clear, thou liftest high
thy hand To spread the light of liberty world-wide for every
land.
No more thou dreamest of a peace reserved alone for thee,
While friends are fighting for thy cause beyond the guardian sea:
The battle that they wage is thine; thou fallest if they fall;
The swollen flood of Prussian pride will sweep un- checked o'er all.
O cruel is the conquer-lust in Hohenzollern brains: The paths they plot to gain their goal are dark with
shameful stains: No faith they keep, no law revere, no god but naked
Might; — They are the foemen of mankind. Up, Liberty, and
smite!
Britain, and France, and Italy, and Russia newly born, Have waited for thee in the night. Oh, come as comes
the morn. Serene and strong and full of faith, America, arise, With steady hope and mighty help to join thy brave
Allies.
UNITED STATES
O dearest country of my heart, home of the high de- sire,
Make clean thy soul for sacrifice on Freedom's altar- fire:
For thou must suffer, thou must fight, until the war- lords cease,
And all the peoples lift their heads in liberty and
peace.
Henry van Dyke April 10, 1917
TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Brothers in blood! They who this wrong began To wreck our commonwealth, will rue the day When first they challenged freemen to the fray,
And with the Briton dared the American.
Now are we pledged to win the Rights of man; Labour and Justice now shall have their way, And in a League of Peace — God grant we may —
Transform the earth, not patch up the old plan.
Sure is our hope since he who led your nation
Spake for mankind, and ye arose in awe
Of that high call to work the world's salvation;
Clearing your minds of all estranging blindness
In the vision of Beauty and the Spirit's law,
Freedom and Honour and sweet Lovingkindness.
Robert Bridges April 30, 1917
6 AMERICA
ABRAHAM LINCOLN WALKS AT MIDNIGHT
(IN SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS)
It is portentous, and a thing of state That here at midnight, in our little town, A mourning figure walks, and will not rest, Near the old court-house pacing up and down.
Or by his homestead, or in shadowed yards He lingers where his children used to play; Or through the market, on the well-worn stones He stalks until the dawn-stars burn away.
A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black, A famous high top-hat and plain worn shawl Make him the quaint great figure that men love, The prairie-lawyer, master of us all.
He cannot sleep upon his hillside now. He is among us: — as in times before! And we who toss and lie awake for long Breathe deep, and start, to see him pass the door.
His head is bowed. He thinks on men and kings. Yea, when the sick world cries, how can he sleep? Too many peasants fight, they know not why, Too many homesteads in black terror weep.
The sins of all the war-lords burn his heart. He sees the dreadnaughts scouring every main. He carries on his shawl-wrapped shoulders now The bitterness, the folly, and the pain.
THE WILLIAM P. FRYE
He cannot rest until a spirit-dawn Shall come; — the shining hope of Europe free: The league of sober folk, the Workers' Earth Bringing long peace to Cornland, Alp, and Sea.
It breaks his heart that kings must murder still, That all his hours of travail here for men Seem yet in vain. And who will bring white peace That he may sleep upon his hill again?
Vachel Lindsay
THE "WILLIAM P. FRYE"
I saw her first abreast the Boston Light At anchor; she had just come in, turned head, And sent her hawsers creaking, clattering down. I was so near to where the hawse-pipes fed The cable out from her careening bow, I moved up on the swell, shut steam and lay Hove to in my old launch to look at her. She'd come in light, a-skimming up the Bay Like a white ghost with topsails bellying full; And all her noble lines from bow to stern Made music in the wind; it seemed she rode The morning air like those thin clouds that turn Into tall ships when sunrise lifts the clouds From calm sea-courses.
There, in smoke-smudged coats, Lay funnelled liners, dirty fishing-craft, Blunt cargo-luggers, tugs, and ferry-boats, Oh, it was good in that black-scuttled lot To see the Frye come lording on her way
8 AMERICA
Like some old queen that we had half forgot
Come to her own. A little up the Bay
The Fort lay green, for it was springtime then;
The wind was fresh, rich with the spicy bloom
Of the New England coast that tardily
Escapes, late April, from an icy tomb.
The State-house glittered on old Beacon Hill,
Gold in the sun. . . . 'T was all so fair awhile;
But she was fairest — this great square-rigged ship
That had blown in from some far happy isle
On from the shores of the Hesperides.
They caught her in a South Atlantic road Becalmed, and found her hold brimmed up with
wheat; "Wheat's contrabrand," they said, and blew her hull To pieces, murdered one of our staunch fleet, Fast dwindling, of the big old sailing ships That carry trade for us on the high sea And warped out of each harbor in the States. It was n't law, so it seems strange to me — A big mistake. Her keel's struck bottom now And her four masts sunk fathoms, fathoms deep To Davy Jones. The dank seaweed will root On her oozed decks, and the cross-surges sweep Through the set sails; but never, never more Her crew will stand away to brace and trim, Nor sea-blown petrels meet her thrashing up To windward on the Gulf Stream's stormy rim; Never again she'll head a no'theast gale Or like a spirit loom up, sliding dumb, And ride in safe beyond the Boston Light, To make the harbor glad because she's come.
Jeanne Robert Foster
ENGLAND AND AMERICA
ENGLAND AND AMERICA
Mother and child ! Though the dividing sea Shall roll its tide between us, we are one, Knit by immortal memories, and none
But feels the throb of ancient fealty.
A century has passed since at thy knee
We learnt the speech of freemen, caught the fire That would not brook thy menaces, when sire
And grandsire hurled injustice back to thee.
But the full years have wrought equality: The past outworn, shall not the future bring A deeper union, from whose life shall spring Mankind's best hope? In the dark night of strife Men perished for their dream of Liberty Whose lives were given for this larger life.
Florence T. Holt
TO AMERICA
When the fire sinks in the grate, and night has bent Close wings about the room, and winter stands Hard-eyed before the window, when the hands Have turned the book's last page and friends are
sleeping, Thought, as it were an old stringed instrument Drawn to remembered music, oft does set The lips moving in prayer, for us fresh keeping Knowledge of springtime and the violet.
12 ENGLAND AND AMERICA
And, as the eyes grow dim with many years, The spirit runs more swiftly than the feet, Perceives its comfort, knows that it will meet God at the end of troubles, that the dreary Last reaches of old age lead beyond tears To happy youth unending. There is peace In homeward waters, where at last the weary Shall find rebirth, and their long struggle cease.
So, at this hour, when the Old World lies sick, Beyond the pain, the agony of breath Hard drawn, beyond the menaces of death, O'er graves and years leans out the eager spirit. First must the ancient die; then shall be quick New fires within us. Brother, we shall make Incredible discoveries and inherit The fruits of hope, and love shall be awake.
Charles Langbridge Morgan
A CHANT OF LOVE FOR ENGLAND
A song of hate is a song of Hell; Some there be that sing it well. Let them sing it loud and long, We lift our hearts in a loftier song: We lift our hearts to Heaven above, Singing the glory of her we love, — England !
Glory of thought and glory of deed, Glory of Hampden and Runnymede; Glory of ships that sought far goals, Glory of swords and glory of souls!
CHANT OF LOVE FOR ENGLAND 13
Glory of songs mounting as birds, Glory immortal of magical words; Glory of Milton, glory of Nelson, Tragical glory of Gordon and Scott; Glory of Shelley, glory of Sidney, Glory transcendent that perishes not, — Hers is the story, hers be the glory, England !
Shatter her beauteous breast ye may; The spirit of England none can slay! Dash the bomb on the dome of Paul's — Deem ye the fame of the Admiral falls? Pry the stone from the chancel floor, — Dream ye that Shakespeare shall live no more? Where is the giant shot that kills Wordsworth walking the old green hills? Trample the red rose on the ground, — Keats is Beauty while earth spins round! Bind her, grind her, burn her with fire, Cast her ashes into the sea, — She shall escape, she shall aspire, She shall arise to make men free: She shall arise in a sacred scorn, Lighting the lives that are yet unborn; Spirit supernal, Splendour eternal, ENGLAND!
Helen Gray Cone
14 ENGLAND AND AMERICA
AT ST. PAUL'S April 20, 1917
Not since Wren's Dome has whispered with man's prayer
Have angels leaned to wonder out of Heaven
At such uprush of intercession given, Here where to-day one soul two nations share, And with accord send up thro' trembling air
Their vows to strive as Honour ne'er has striven
Till back to hell the Lords of hell are driven, And Life and Peace again shall flourish fair.
This is the day of conscience high-enthroned, The day when East is West and West is East To strike for human Love and Freedom's word Against foul wrong that cannot be atoned;
To-day is hope of brotherhood's bond increased, And Christ, not Odin, is acclaimed the Lord. Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley
JIMMY DOANE
Often I think of you, Jimmy Doane, — You who, light-heartedly, came to my house Three autumns, to shoot and to eat a grouse!
As I sat apart in this quiet room, My mind was full of the horror of war And not with the hope of a visitor.
I had dined on food that had lost its taste;
My soul was cold and I wished you were here, —
When, all in a moment, I knew you were near.
JIMMY DOANE 15
r-LM — ■ '■ .11 — — ^— ^— ^— ■ I I ^^^MMI II ■■■■■■»
Placing that chair where you used to sit,
I looked at my book : — Three years to-day
Since you laughed in that seat and I heard you say — ■
"My country is with you, whatever befall: America — Britain — these two are akin In courage and honour; they underpin
"The rights of Mankind!" Then you grasped my
hand With a brotherly grip, and you made me feel Something that Time would surely reveal.
You were comely and tall; you had corded arms, And sympathy's grace with your strength was blent; You were generous, clever, and confident.
There was that in your hopes which uncountable
lives Have perished to make; your heart was fulfilled With the breath of God that can never be stilled.
A living symbol of power, you talked Of the work to do in the world to make Life beautiful: yes, and my heartstrings ache
To think how you, at the stroke of War, Chose that your steadfast soul should fly With the eagles of France as their proud ally.
You were America's self, dear lad —
The first swift son of your bright, free land
To heed the call of the Inner Command —
16 ENGLAND AND AMERICA
To image its spirit in such rare deeds
As braced the valour of France, who knows
That the heart of America thrills with her woes.
For a little leaven leavens the whole! Mostly we find, when we trouble to seek The soul of a people, that some unique,
Brave man is its flower and symbol, who Makes bold to utter the words that choke The throats of feebler, timider folk.
You flew for the western eagle — and fell Doing great things for your country's pride: For the beauty and peace of life you died.
Britain and France have shrined in their souls Your memory; yes, and for ever you share Their love with their perished lords of the air.
Invisible now, in that empty seat,
You sit, who came through the clouds to me,
Swift as a message from over the sea.
My house is always open to you :
Dear spirit, come often and you will find
Welcome, where mind can foregather with mind!
And may we sit together one day Quietly here, when a word is said To bring new gladness unto our dead,
Knowing your dream is a dream no more; And seeing on some momentous pact Your vision upbuilt as a deathless fact.
Rowland Tkirlmere
PRINCETON, MAY, 1917 17
PRINCETON, MAY, 1917
Here Freedom stood by slaughtered friend and foe, Ahdf ere the wrath paled or that sunset died,
Looked through the ages; then, with eyes aglow, Laid them to wait that future, side by side.
(Lines for a monument to the American and British soldiers of the Revolutionary War who fell en the Princeton battlefield and were buried in one grave.)
Now lamp-lit gardens in the blue dusk shine
Through dogwood, red and white; And round the gray quadrangles, line by line,
The windows fill with light, Where Princeton calls to Magdalen, tower to tower,
Twin lanthorns of the law; And those cream-white magnolia boughs embower
The halls of "Old Nassau."
The dark bronze tigers crouch on either side
Where redcoats used to pass; And round the bird-loved house where Mercer died.
And violets dusk the grass. By Stony Brook that ran so red of old,
But sings of friendship now, To feed the old enemy's harvest fifty-fold
The green earth takes the plow.
Through this May night, if one great ghost should stray
With deep remembering eyes, Where that old meadow of battle smiles away
Its blood-stained memories,
18 ENGLAND AND AMERICA
If Washington should walk, where friend and foe
Sleep and forget the past, Be sure his unquenched heart would leap to know
Their souls are linked at last.
Be sure he walks, in shadowy buff and blue,
Where those dim lilacs wave. He bends his head to bless, as dreams come true,
The promise of that grave; Then, with a vaster hope than thought can scan,
Touching his ancient sword, Prays for that mightier realm of God in man:
"Hasten thy kingdom, Lord.
"Land of our hope, land of the singing stars,
Type of the world to be, The vision of a world set free from wars
Takes life, takes form from thee; Where all the jarring nations of this earth,
Beneath the all-blessing sun, Bring the new music of mankind to birth,
And make the whole world one."
And those old comrades rise around him there,
Old foemen, side by side, With eyes like stars upon the brave night air,
And young as when they died, To hear your bells, O beautiful Princeton towers,
Ring for the world's release. They see you piercing like gray swords through flowers,
And smile, from souls at peace.
Alfred Noyes
ENGLAND
THE VIGIL
England! where the sacred flame
Burns before the inmost shrine, Where the lips that love thy name
Consecrate their hopes and thine, Where the banners of thy dead Weave their shadows overhead, Watch beside thine arms to-night, Pray that God defend the Right.
Think that when to-morrow comes
War shall claim command of all, Thou must hear the roll of drums,
Thou must hear the trumpet's call. Now, before thy silence ruth, Commune with the voice of truth; England ! on thy knees to-night Pray that God defend the Right.
Single-hearted, unafraid,
Hither all thy heroes came, On this altar's steps were laid
Gordon's life and Outram's fame. England! if thy will be yet By their great example set, Here beside thine arms to-night Pray that God defend the Right.
So shalt thou when morning comes Rise to conquer or to fall,
m ENGLAND
Joyful hear the rolling drums,
Joyful hear the trumpets call, Then let Memory tell thy heart : " England! what thou wert, thou art!" Gird thee with thine ancient might, Forth! and God defend the Right!
Henry Newbolt
a
FOR ALL WE HAVE AND ARE"
For all we have and are, For all our children's fate, Stand up and meet the war. The Hun is at the gate! Our world has passed away In wantonness o'erthrown. There is nothing left to-day But steel and fire and stone.
Though all we knew depart, The old commandments stand: "In courage keep your heart, In strength lift up your hand."
Once more we hear the word That sickened earth of old: "No law except the sword Unsheathed and uncontrolled," Once more it knits mankind, Once more the nations go To meet and break and bind A crazed and driven foe.
ENGLAND TO FREE MEN 23
Comfort, content, delight — The ages' slow-bought gain — They shrivelled in a night, Only ourselves remain To face the naked days In silent fortitude, Through perils and dismays Renewed and re-renewed.
Though all we made depart, The old commandments stand: "In patience keep your heart, In strength lift up your hand."
No easy hopes or lies
Shall bring us to our goal,
But iron sacrifice
Of body, will, and soul
There is but one task for all —
For each one life to give.
Who stands if freedom fall?
Who dies if England live?
Rudyard Kipling
ENGLAND TO FREE MEN
Men of my blood, you English men! From misty hill and misty fen, From cot, and town, and plough, and moor, Come in — before I shut the door! Into my courtyard paved with stones That keep the names, that keep the bones, Of none but English men who came Free of their lives, to guard my fame.
24 ENGLAND
I am your native land who bred
No driven heart, no driven head;
I fly a flag in every sea
Round the old Earth, of Liberty!
I am the Land that boasts a crown;
The sun comes up, the sun goes down —
And never men may say of me,
Mine is a breed that is not free.
I have a wreath! My forehead wears A hundred leaves — a hundred years I never knew the words: "You must!" And shall my wreath return to dust? Freemen! The door is yet ajar; From northern star to southern star, O ye who count and ye who delve, Come in — before my clock strikes twelve!
John Galsworthy
PRO P ATRIA
England, in this great fight to which you go
Because, where Honour calls you, go you must, Be glad, whatever comes, at least to know You have your quarrel just.
Peace was your care; before the nations' bar
Her cause you pleaded and her ends you sought; But not for her sake, being what you are, Could you be bribed and bought.
Others may spurn the pledge of land to land,
May with the brute sword stain a gallant past; But by the seal to which you set your hand, Thank God, you still stand fast!
LINES WRITTEN IN SURREY 25
-
Forth, then, to front that peril of the deep
With smiling lips and in your eyes the light, Steadfast and confident, of those who keep Their storied 'scutcheon bright.
And we, whose burden is to watch and wait, —
High-hearted ever, strong in faith and prayer, — We ask what offering we may consecrate, What humble service share.
To steel our souls against the lust of ease;
To bear in silence though our hearts may bleed; To spend ourselves, and never count the cost, For others' greater need; —
To go our quiet ways, subdued and sane;
To hush all vulgar clamour of the street; With level calm to face alike the strain Of triumph or defeat;
This be our part, for so we serve you best,
So best confirm their prowess and their pride, Your warrior sons, to whom in this high test Our fortunes we confide.
Owen Seaman August 12, 19H
LINES WRITTEN IN SURREY, 1917
A sudden swirl of song in the bright sky — The little lark adoring his lord the sun; Across the corn the lazy ripples run;
Under the eaves, conferring drowsily.
26 ENGLAND
Doves droop or amble; the agile waterfly
Wrinkles the pool; and flowers, gay and dun, Rose, bluebell, rhododendron, one by one,
The buccaneering bees prove busily.
Ah, who may trace this tranquil loveliness In verse felicitous? — no measure tells;
But gazing on her bosom we can guess
Why men strike hard for England in red hells,
Falling on dreams, 'mid Death's extreme caress, Of English daisies dancing in English dells.
George Herbert Clarke
FRANCE
FRANCE
Because for once the sword broke in her hand, The words she spoke seemed perished for a space;
All wrong was brazen, and in every land
The tyrants walked abroad with naked face.
The waters turned to blood, as rose the Star
Of evil Fate denying all release. The rulers smote, the feeble crying "War!"
The usurers robbed, the naked crying "Peace!"
And her own feet were caught in nets of gold, And her own soul profaned by sects that squirm,
And little men climbed her high seats and sold Her honour to the vulture and the worm.
And she seemed broken and they thought her dead, The Overmen, so brave against the weak.
Has your last word of sophistry been said, O cult of slaves? Then it is hers to speak.
Clear the slow mists from her half-darkened eyes, As slow mists parted over Valmy fell,
As once again her hands in high surprise Take hold upon the battlements of Hell.
Cecil Chesterton
30 FRANCE
THE NAME OF FRANCE
Give us a name to fill the mind With the shining thoughts that lead mankind, The glory of learning, the joy of art, — A name that tells of a splendid part In the long, long toil and the strenuous fight Of the human race to win its way From the feudal darkness into the day Of Freedom, Brotherhood, Equal Right, — A name like a star, a name of light- I give you France I
Give us a name to stir the blood With a warmer glow and a swifter flood, — A name like the sound of a trumpet, clear, And silver-sweet, and iron-strong, That calls three million men to their feet, Ready to march, and steady to meet The foes who threaten that name with wrong, — A name that rings like a battle-song. I give you France I
Give us a name to move the heart With the strength that noble griefs impart, A name that speaks of the blood outpoured To save mankind from the sway of the sword, — A name that calls on the world to share In the burden of sacrificial strife Where the cause at stake is the world's free life And the rule of the people everywhere, — A name like a vow, a name like a prayer. I give you France !
Henry van Dyke
VIVE LA FRANCE! 31
VIVE LA FRANCE!
Franceline rose in the dawning gray,
And her heart would dance though she knelt to
pray, For her man Michel had holiday, Fighting for France.
She offered her prayer by the cradle-side, And with baby palms folded in hers she cried : "If I have but one prayer, dear, crucified Christ — save France !
"But if I have two, then, by Mary's grace, Carry me safe to the meeting-place, Let me look once again on my dear love's face, Save him for France!"
She crooned to her boy: "Oh, how glad he'll bea Little three-months old, to set eyes on thee! For, 'Rather than gold, would I give,' wrote he, 'A son to France.'
"Come, now, be good, little stray sauterelle, For we're going by-by to thy papa Michel, But I '11 not say where for fear thou wilt tell, Little pigeon of France!
"Six days' leave and a year between! But what would you have? In six days clean, Heaven was made," said Franceline, "Heaven and France."
32 FRANCE
She came to the town of the nameless name, To the marching troops in the street she came, And she held high her boy like a taper flame Burning for France.
Fresh from the trenches and gray with grime, Silent they march like a pantomime; "But what need of music? My heart beats time — Vive la France!"
His regiment comes. Oh, then where is he? "There is dust in my eyes, for I cannot see, — Is that my Michel to the right of thee, Soldier of France? "
Then out of the ranks a comrade fell, — "Yesterday — 't was a splinter of shell — And he whispered thy name, did thy poor Michel, Dying for France."
The tread of the troops on the pavement throbbed Like a woman's heart of its last joy robbed, As she lifted her boy to the flag, and sobbed : "Vive la France!"
Charlotte Holmes Crawford
THE SOUL OF JEANNE D'ARC
She came not into the Presence as a martyred saint might
come. Crowned, white-robed and adoring, with very reverence
dumb, —
THE SOUL OF JEANNE D'ARC 33
She stood as a straight young soldiery confident, gallant,
strong, Who asks a boon of his captain in the sudden hush of the
drum.
She said: "Now have I stayed too long in this my place of bliss,
With these glad dead that, comforted, forget what sor- row is
Upon that world whose stony stairs they climbed to come to this.
"But lo, a cry hath torn the peace wherein so long I
stayed, Like a trumpet's call at Heaven's wall from a herald
unafraid, — A million voices in one cry, * Where is the Maid, the
Maid?'
"I had forgot from too much joy that olden task of
mine, But I have heard a certain word shatter the chant
divine, Have watched a banner glow and grow before mine
eyes for sign.
"I would return to that my land flung in the teeth of
war, I would cast down my robe and crown that pleasure
me no more, And don the armor that I knew, the valiant sword I
bore.
34 FRANCE
"And angels militant shall fling the gates of Heaven
wide, And souls new-dead whose lives were shed like leaves
on war's red tide Shall cross their swords above our heads and cheer us
as we ride.
"For with me goes that soldier saint, Saint Michael of
the sword, And I shall ride on his right side, a page beside his
lord, And men shall follow like swift blades to reap a sure
reward.
"Grant that I answer this my call, yea, though the
end may be The naked shame, the biting flame, the last, long
agony; I would go singing down that road where fagots wait
for me.
c:Mine be the fire about my feet, the smoke above my
head; So might I glow, a torch to show the path my heroes
tread; My Captain ! Oh, my Captain, let me go back V she
said.
Theodosia Garrison
O GLORIOUS FRANCE 35
O GLORIOUS FRANCE
You have become a forge of snow-white fire, A crucible of molten steel, O France! Your sons are stars who cluster to a dawn And fade in light for you, O glorious France ! They pass through meteor changes with a song Which to all islands and all continents Says life is neither comfort, wealth, nor fame, Nor quiet hearthstones, friendship, wife nor child, Nor love, nor youth's delight, nor manhood's power, Nor many days spent in a chosen work, Nor honored merit, nor the patterned theme Of daily labor, nor the crowns nor wreaths Of seventy years.
These are not all of life, O France, whose sons amid the rolling thunder Of cannon stand in trenches where the dead Clog the ensanguined ice. But life to these Prophetic and enraptured souls is vision, And the keen ecstasy of fated strife, And divination of the loss as gain, And reading mysteries with brightened eyes In fiery shock and dazzling pain before The orient splendour of the face of Death, As a great light beside a shadowy sea; And in a high will's strenuous exercise, Where the warmed spirit finds its fullest strength And is no more afraid, and in the stroke Of azure lightning when the hidden essence And shifting meaning of man's spiritual worth And mystical significance in time
36 FRANCE
Are instantly distilled to one clear drop Which mirrors earth and heaven.
This is life Flaming to heaven in a minute's span When the breath of battle blows the smouldering
spark. And across these seas
We who cry Peace and treasure life and cling To cities, happiness, or daily toil For daily bread, or trail the long routine Of seventy years, taste not the terrible wine Whereof you drink, who drain and toss the cup Empty and ringing by the finished feast; Or have it shaken from your hand by sight Of God against the olive woods.
As Joan of Arc amid the apple trees
With sacred joy first heard the voices, then
Obeying plunged at Orleans in a field
Of spears and lived her dream and died in fire,
Thou, France, hast heard the voices and hast lived
The dream and known the meaning of the dream,
And read its riddle: how the soul of man
May to one greatest purpose make itself
A lens of clearness, how it loves the cup
Of deepest truth, and how its bitterest gall
Turns sweet to soul's surrender.
And you say: Take days for repetition, stretch your hands For mocked renewal of familiar things : The beaten path, the chair beside the window,
TO FRANCE 37
The crowded street, the task, the accustomed sleep,
And waking to the task, or many springs
Of lifted cloud, blue water, flowering fields —
The prison-house grows close no less, the feast
A place of memory sick for senses dulled
Down to the dusty end where pitiful Time
Grown weary cries Enough!
Edgar Lee Masters
TO FRANCE
Those who have stood for thy cause when the dark was around thee,
Those who have pierced through the shadows and shin- ing have found thee,
Those who have held to their faith in thy courage and power,
Thy spirit, thy honor, thy strength for a terrible hour,
Now can rejoice that they see thee in light and in glory,
Facing whatever may come as an end to the story
In calm undespairing, with steady eyes fixed on the morrow —
The morn that is pregnant with blood and with death and with sorrow.
And whether the victory crowns thee, O France the eternal,
Or whether the smoke and the dusk of a nightfall infernal
Gather about thee, and us, and the foe; and all treas- ures
Run with the flooding of war into bottomless meas- ures —
38 FRANCE
Fall what befalls: in this hour all those who are near
thee And all who have loved thee, they rise and salute and
revere thee!
Herbert Jones
PLACE DE LA CONCORDE
August 14, 1914
[Since the bombardment of Strasburg, August 14, 1870, her statue in Paris, representing Alsace, has been draped in mourning by the French people.]
Near where the royal victims fell
In days gone by, caught in the swell
Of a ruthless tide
Of human passion, deep and wide:
There where we two
A Nation's later sorrow knew —
To-day, O friend! I stood
Amid a self-ruled multitude
That by nor sound nor word
Betrayed how mightily its heart was stirred.
A memory Time never could efface —
A memory of Grief —
Like a great Silence brooded o'er the place;
And men breathed hard, as seeking for relief
From an emotion strong
That would not cry, though held in check too long.
One felt that joy drew near — A joy intense that seemed itself to fear — Brightening in eyes that had been dull, As all with feeling gazed
TO FRANCE 39
Upon the Strasburg figure, raised Above us — mourning, beautiful!
Then one stood at the statue's base, and spoke —
Men needed not to ask what word;
Each in his breast the message heard,
Writ for him by Despair,
That evermore in moving phrase
Breathes from the Invalides and Pere Lachaise — ■
Vainly it seemed, alas!
But now, France looking on the image there,
Hope gave her back the lost Alsace.
A deeper hush fell on the crowd :
A sound — the lightest — seemed too loud
(Would, friend, you had been there!)
As to that form the speaker rose,
Took from her, fold on fold,
The mournful crape, gray-worn and old,
Her, proudly, to disclose,
And with the touch of tender care
That fond emotion speaks,
'Mid tears that none could quite command,
Placed the Tricolor in her hand,
And kissed her on both cheeks!
Florence Earle Coates
TO FRANCE
What is the gift we have given thee, Sister?
What is the trust we have laid in thy hand? Hearts of our bravest, our best, and our dearest,
Blood of our blood we have sown in thy land.
40 FRANCE
What for all time will the harvest be, Sister?
What will spring up from the seed that is sown? Freedom and peace and goodwill among Nations,
Love that will bind us with love all our own.
Bright is the path that is opening before us,
Upward and onward it mounts through the night;
Sword shall not sever the bonds that unite us Leading the world to the fullness of light.
Sorrow hath made thee more beautiful, Sister,
Nobler and purer than ever before; We who are chastened by sorrow and anguish
Hail thee as sister and queen evermore.
Frederick George Scott
QUI VIVE?
Qui vive f Who passes by up there? Who moves — what stirs in the startled air? What whispers, thrills, exults up there? Qui vive f
"The Flags of France."
What wind on a windless night is this, That breathes as light as a lover's kiss, That blows through the night with bugle notes, That streams like a pennant from a lance, That rustles, that floats?
"The Flags of France."
What richly moves, what lightly stirs, Like a noble lady in a dance,
QUI VIVE? 41
When all men's eyes are in love with hers And needs must follow?
"The Flags of France."
What calls to the heart — and the heart has heard, Speaks, and the soul has obeyed the word, Summons, and all the years advance, And the world goes forward with France — with
France? Who called?
"The Flags of France."
What flies — a glory, through the night, While the legions stream — a line of light, And men fall to the left and fall to the right, But they fall not?
"The Flags of France."
Qui vive f Who comes? What approaches there? What soundless tumult, what breath in the air Takes the breath in the throat, the blood from the
heart? In a flame of dark, to the unheard beat Of an unseen drum and fleshless feet, Without glint of barrel or bayonets' glance, They approach — they come. Who comes? (Hush!
Hark!) Qui vive f "
"The Flags of France."
a
Uncover the head and kneel — kneel down, A monarch passes, without a crown, Let the proud tears fall but the heart beat high: The Greatest of All is passing by,
42 FRANCE
On its endless march in the endless Plan: "Qui vine f"
"The Spirit of Man."
"O Spirit of Man, pass on! Advance!" And they who lead, who hold the van? Kneel down!
The Flags of France.
Grace Ellery Channing Paris, 1917
BELGIUM
TO THE BELGIANS
O race that Csesar knew, That won stern Roman praise, What land not envies you The laurel of these days?
You built your cities rich Around each towered hall, — Without, the statued niche, Within, the pictured wall.
Your ship-thronged wharves, your marts With gorgeous Venice vied. Peace and her famous arts Were yours : though tide on tide
Of Europe's battle scourged Black field and reddened soil, From blood and smoke emerged Peace and her fruitful toil.
Yet when the challenge rang, "The War-Lord comes; give room!" Fearless to arms you sprang Against the odds of doom.
Like your own Damien Who sought that leper's isle To die a simple man For men with tranquil smile,
46 BELGIUM
So strong in faith you dared
Defy the giant, scorn
Ignobly to be spared,
Though trampled, spoiled, and torn,
And in your faith arose And smote, and smote again, Till those astonished foes Reeled from their mounds of slain,
The faith that the free soul, Untaught by force to quail, Through fire and dirge and dole Prevails and shall prevail.
Still for your frontier stands The host that knew no dread, Your little, stubborn land's Nameless, immortal dead.
Laurence Binyon
BELGIUM
La Belgique ne regrette rien
Not with her ruined silver spires, Not with her cities shamed and rent, Perish the imperishable fires That shape the homestead from the tent.
Wherever men are staunch and free, There shall she keep her fearless state, And homeless, to great nations be The home of all that makes them great.
Edith Wharton
TO BELGIUM IN EXILE 47
TO BELGIUM
Champion of human honour, let us lave
Your feet and bind your wounds on bended knee.
Though coward hands have nailed you to the tree And shed your innocent blood and dug your grave, Rejoice and live! Your oriflamme shall wave — ■
While man has power to perish and be free — •
A golden flame of holiest Liberty, Proud as the dawn and as the sunset brave.
Belgium, where dwelleth reverence for right Enthroned above all ideals; where your fate
And your supernal patience and your might Most sacred grow in human estimate,
You shine a star above this stormy night Little no more, but infinitely great.
Eden Phillpotts
TO BELGIUM IN EXILE
[Lines dedicated to one of her priests, by whose words they were prompted.
Land of the desolate, Mother of tears, Weeping your beauty marred and torn,
Your children tossed upon the spears, Your altars rent, your hearths forlorn,
Where Spring has no renewing spell,
And Love no language save a long Farewell!
Ah, precious tears, and each a pearl, Whose price — for so in God we trust
Who saw them fall in that blind swirl Of ravening flame and reeking dust —
48 BELGIUM
The spoiler with his life shall pay,
When Justice at the last demands her Day.
O tried and proved, whose record stands
Lettered in blood too deep to fade, Take courage! Never in our hands
Shall the avenging sword be stayed Till you are healed of all your pain, And come with Honour to your own again.
Owen Seaman May 19, 1915
THE WIFE OF FLANDERS
Low and brown barns, thatched and repatched and tattered,
Where I had seven sons until to-day, A little hill of hay your spur has scattered. . . .
This is not Paris. You have lost the way.
You, staring at your sword to find it brittle, Surprised at the surprise that was your plan,
Who, shaking and breaking barriers not a little, Find never more the death-door of Sedan —
Must I for more than carnage call you claimant, Paying you a penny for each son you slay?
Man, the whole globe in gold were no repayment For what you have lost. And how shall I repay?
What is the price of that red spark that caught me From a kind farm that never had a name?
What is the price of that dead man they brought me? For other dead men do not look the same.
THE WIFE OF FLANDERS 49
How should I pay for one poor graven steeple
Whereon you shattered what you shall not know?
How should I pay you, miserable people? How should I pay you everything you owe?
Unhappy, can I give you back your honour?
Though I forgave, would any man forget? While all the great green land has trampled on her
The treason and terror of the night we met.
Not any more in vengeance or in pardon An old wife bargains for a bean that's hers.
You have no word to break: no heart to harden. Ride on and prosper. You have lost your spurs.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
RUSSIA AND AMERICA
RUSSIA — AMERICA
A wind in the world! The dark departs;
The chains now rust that crushed men's flesh and
bones, Feet tread no more the mildewed prison stones, And slavery is lifted from your hearts.
A wind in the world! O Company Of darkened Russia, watching long in vain, Now shall you see the cloud of Russia's pain Go shrinking out across a summer sky.
A wind in the world! Our God shall be
In all the future left, no kingly doll
Decked out with dreadful sceptre, steel, and stole,
But walk the earth — a man, in Charity.
A wind in the world! And doubts are blown To dust along, and the old stars come forth — Stars of a creed to Pilgrim Fathers worth A field of broken spears and flowers strown.
A wind in the world! Now truancy From the true self is ended; to her part Steadfast again she moves, and from her heart A great America cries: Death to Tyranny!
A wind in the world! And we have come Together, sea by sea; in all the lands Vision doth move at last, and Freedom stands With brightened wings, and smiles and beckons home!
John Galsworthy
54 RUSSIA AND AMERICA
TO RUSSIA NEW AND FREE
Land of the Martyrs — of the martyred dead And martyred living — now of noble fame! Long wert thou saddest of the nations, wed To Sorrow as the fire to the flame. Not yet relentless History had writ of Teuton shame.
Thou knewest all the gloom of hope deferred.
'Twixt God and Russia wrong had built such bar Each by the other could no more be heard.
Seen through the cloud, the child's familiar star, That once made Heaven near, had made it seem more far.
Land of the Breaking Dawn! No more look back To that long night that nevermore can be :
The sunless dungeon and the exile's track. To the world's dreams of terror let it flee. To gentle April cruel March is now antiquity.
Yet — of the Past one sacred relic save:
That boundary-post 'twixt Russia and Despair, — > Set where the dead might look upon his grave, — Kissed by him with his last-breathed Russian air. Keep it to witness to the world what heroes still may dare.
Land of New Hope, no more the minor key, No more the songs of exile long and lone; Thy tears henceforth be tears of memory.
Sing, with the joy the joyless would have known Who for this visioned happiness so gladly gave their own.
TO RUSSIA NEW AND FREE 55
Land of the warm heart and the friendly hand,
Strike the free chord; no more the muted strings! Forever let the equal record stand —
A thousand winters for this Spring of Springs, That to a warring world, through thee, millennial longing brings.
On thy white tablets, cleansed of royal stain,
What message to the future mayst thou write! — The People's Law, the bulwark of their reign, And vigilant Liberty, of ancient might, And Brotherhood, that can alone lead to the loftiest height.
Take, then, our hearts' rejoicing overflow, Thou new-born daughter of Democracy, Whose coming sets the expectant earth aglow. Soon the glad skies thy proud new flag shall see, And hear thy chanted hymns of hope for Russia new and free.
Robert Underwood Johnson April, 1917
ITALY
ITALY IN ARMS
Of all my dreams by night and day, One dream will evermore return,
The dream of Italy in May;
The sky a brimming azure urn
Where lights of amber brood and burn;
The doves about San Marco's square, The swimming Campanile tower, The giants, hammering out the hour, The palaces, the bright lagoons,
The gondolas gliding here and there
Upon the tide that sways and swoons.
The domes of San Antonio,
Where Padua 'mid her mulberry-trees Reclines; Adige's crescent flow
Beneath Verona's balconies;
Rich Florence of the Medicis; Sienna's starlike streets that climb
From hill to hill; Assisi well
Remembering the holy spell
Of rapt St. Francis; with her crown Of battlements, embossed by time,
Stern old Perugia looking down.
Then, mother of great empires, Rome, City of the majestic past,
That o'er far leagues of alien foam The shadows of her eagles cast, Imperious still; impending, vast,
60 ITALY
The Colosseum's curving line;
Pillar and arch and colonnade; St. Peter's consecrated shade,
And Hadrian's tomb where Tiber strays; The ruins on the Palatine
With all their memories of dead days.
And Naples, with her sapphire arc
Of bay, her perfect sweep of shore;
Above her, like a demon stark,
The dark fire-mountain evermore Looming portentous, as of yore;
Fair Capri with her cliffs and caves; Salerno drowsing 'mid her vines And olives, and the shattered shrines
Of Psestum where the gray ghosts tread,
And where the wilding rose still waves
As when by Greek girls garlanded.
But hark! What sound the ear dismays,
Mine Italy, mine Italy? Thou that wert wrapt in peace, the haze Of loveliness spread over thee! Yet since the grapple needs must be, I who have wandered in the night
With Dante, Petrarch's Laura known, Seen Vallombrosa's groves breeze-blown, Met Angelo and Raffael, Against iconoclastic might
In this grim hour must wish thee well !
Clinton Scollard
ON THE ITALIAN FRONT 61
ON THE ITALIAN FRONT, MCMXVI
"I will die cheering, if I needs must die;
So shall my last breath write upon my lips
Viva Italia ! when my spirit slips Down the great darkness from the mountain sky; And those who shall behold me where I lie
Shall murmur: 'Look, you! how his spirit dips
From glory into glory! the eclipse Of death is vanquished! Lo. his victor-cry!*
" Live, thou, upon my lips, Italia mine,
The sacred death-cry of my frozen clay! Let thy dear light from my dead body shine
And to the passer-by thy message say: Ecco! though heaven has made my skies divine, My sons' love sanctifies my soil for aye!'"
George Edward Woodberry
AUSTRALIA
AUSTRALIA TO ENGLAND
By all the deeds to Thy dear glory done, By all the life blood spilt to serve Thy need, By all the fettered lives Thy touch hath freed,
By all Thy dream in us anew begun;
By all the guerdon English sire to son
Hath given of highest vision, kingliest deed, By all Thine agony, of God decreed
For trial and strength, our fate with Thine is one.
Still dwells Thy spirit in our hearts and lips, Honour and life we hold from none but Thee, And if we live Thy pensioners no more But seek a nation's might of men and ships,
'T is but that when the world is black with war Thy sons may stand beside Thee strong and free.
Archibald T. Strong August, 191k
CANADA
CANADA TO ENGLAND
Great names of thy great captains gone before Beat with our blood, who have that blood of thee: Raleigh and Grenville, Wolfe, and all the free
Fine souls who dared to front a world in war.
Such only may outreach the envious years
Where feebler crowns and fainter stars remove, Nurtured in one remembrance and one love
Too high for passion and too stern for tears.
O little isle our fathers held for home,
Not, not alone thy standards and thy hosts
Lead where thy sons shall follow, Mother Land: Quick as the north wind, ardent as the foam, Behold, behold the invulnerable ghosts Of all past greatnesses about thee stand.
Marjorie L. C. Pickihall
LANGEMARCK AT YPRES
This is the ballad of Langemarck,
A story of glory and might; Of the vast Hun horde, and Canada's part
In the great grim fight.
It was April fair on the Flanders Fields,
But the dreadest April then That ever the years, in their fateful flight,
Had brought to this world of men.
70 CANADA
North and east, a monster wall,
The mighty Hun ranks lay, With fort on fort, and iron-ringed trench,
Menacing, grim and gray.
And south and west, like a serpent of fire,
Serried the British lines, And in between, the dying and dead, And the stench of blood, and the trampled mud,
On the fair, sweet Belgian vines.
And far to the eastward, harnessed and taut,
Like a scimitar, shining and keen, Gleaming out of that ominous gloom,
Old France's hosts were seen.
When out of the grim Hun lines one night,
There rolled a sinister smoke; — A strange, weird cloud, like a pale, green shroud,
And death lurked in its cloak.
On a fiend-like wind it curled along
Over the brave French ranks, Like a monster tree its vapours spread,
In hideous, burning banks Of poisonous fumes that scorched the night
With their sulphurous demon danks.
And men went mad with horror, and fled From that terrible, strangling death,
That seemed to sear both body and soul With its baleful, flaming breath.
LANGEMARCK AT YPRES 71
Till even the little dark men of the south,
Who feared neither God nor man, Those fierce, wild fighters of Afric's steppes,
Broke their battalions and ran : —
Ran as they never had run before,
Gasping, and fainting for breath; For they knew 'twas no human foe that slew;
And that hideous smoke meant death.
Then red in the reek of that evil cloud,
The Hun swept over the plain; And the murderer's dirk did its monster work,
'Mid the scythe-like shrapnel rain;
Till it seemed that at last the brute Hun hordes
Had broken that wall of steel; And that soon, through this breach in the free- man's dyke,
His trampling hosts would wheel; —
And sweep to the south in ravaging might,
And Europe's peoples again Be trodden under the tyrant's heel,
Like herds, in the Prussian pen.
But in that line on the British right,
There massed a corps amain, Of men who hailed from a far west land
Of mountain and forest and plain;
Men new to war and its dreadest deeds,
But noble and staunch and true; Men of the open, East and West,
Brew of old Britain's brew.
72 CANADA
These were the men out there that night,
When Hell loomed close ahead; Who saw that pitiful, hideous rout,
And breathed those gases dread; While some went under and some went mad;
But never a man there fled.
For the word was "Canada," theirs to fight,
And keep on fighting still; — Britain said, fight, and fight they would, Though the Devil himself in sulphurous mood
Came over that hideous hill.
Yea, stubborn, they stood, that hero band,
Where no soul hoped to live; For five, 'gainst eighty thousand men,
Were hopeless odds to give.
Yea, fought they on ! 'T was Friday eve, When that demon gas drove down;
'T was Saturday eve that saw them still Grimly holding their own;
Sunday, Monday, saw them yet,
A steadily lessening band, With "no surrender" in their hearts,
But the dream of a far-off land,
Where mother and sister and love would weep For the hushed heart lying still; —
But never a thought but to do their part, And work the Empire's will.
CANADIANS 73
Ringed round, hemmed in, and back to back, They fought there under the dark,
And won for Empire, God and Right, At grim, red Langemarck.
Wonderful battles have shaken this world,
Since the Dawn-God overthrew Dis; Wonderful struggles of right against wrong, Sung in the rhymes of the world's great song, But never a greater than this.
Bannockburn, Inkerman, Balaclava,
Marathon's godlike stand; But never a more heroic deed, And never a greater warrior breed,
In any war-man's land.
This is the ballad of Langemarck,
A story of glory and might; Of the vast Hun horde, and Canada's part
In the great, grim fight.
Wilfred Campbell
CANADIANS
With arrows on their quarters and with numbers on
their hoofs, With the trampling sound of twenty that re-echoes in
the roofs, Low of crest and dull of coat, wan and wild of eye, Through our English village the Canadians go by.
74 CANADA
Shying at a passing cart, swerving from a car, Tossing up an anxious head to flaunt a snowy star, Racking at a Yankee gait, reaching at the rein, Twenty raw Canadians are tasting life again!
Hollow-necked and hollow-flanked, lean of rib and hip, Strained and sick and weary with the wallow of the
ship, Glad to smell the turf again, hear the robin's call, Tread again the country road they lost at Montreal !
Fate may bring them dule and woe; better steeds than
they Sleep beside the English guns a hundred leagues
away; But till war hath need of them, lightly lie their reins, Softly fall the feet of them along the English lanes.
Will H. Ogilvie
JLLEGIfi
THE KAISER AND BELGIUM
He said: "Thou petty people, let me pass.
What canst thou do but bow to me and kneel? " But sudden a dry land caught fire like grass,
And answer hurtled but from shell and steel.
He looked for silence, but a thunder came
Upon him, from Liege a leaden hail. All Belgium flew up at his throat in flame
Till at her gates amazed his legions quail.
Take heed, for now on haunted ground they tread;
There bowed a mightier war lord to his fall : Fear! lest that very green grass again grow red
With blood of German now as then with Gaul.
If him whom God destroys He maddens first, Then thy destruction slake thy madman's thirst.
Stephen Phillips
THE BATTLE OF LIEGE
Now spake the Emperor to all his shining battle
forces, To the Lancers, and the Rifles, to the Gunners and the
Horses; — And his pride surged up within him as he saw their
banners stream ! — " 'T is a twelve-day march to Paris, by the road our
fathers travelled, And the prize is half an empire when the scarlet road 's
unravelled —
78 LIEGE
Go you now across the border, God's decree and William's order — Climb the frowning Belgian ridges With your naked swords agleam! Seize the City of the Bridges — - Then get on, get on to Paris — To the jewelled streets of Paris — To the lovely woman, Paris, that has driven me to dream!"
A hundred thousand fighting men They climbed the frowning ridges, With their flaming swords drawn free And their pennants at their knee. They went up to their desire, To the City of the Bridges, With their naked brands outdrawn Like the lances of the dawn! In a swelling surf of fire, Crawling higher — higher — higher — Till they crumpled up and died Like a sudden wasted tide,
And the thunder in their faces beat them down and flung them wide!
They had paid a thousand men,
Yet they formed and came again,
For they heard the silver bugles sounding challenge to their pride,
And they rode with swords agleam
For the glory of a dream,
And they stormed up to the cannon's mouth and with- ered there, and died. . . .
THE BATTLE OF LIEGE 79
The daylight lay in ashes On the blackened western hill, And the dead were calm and still; But the Night was torn with gashes — Sudden ragged crimson gashes — And the siege-guns snarled and roared, With their flames thrust like a sword, And the tranquil moon came riding on the heaven's silver ford.
What a fearful world was there,
Tangled in the cold moon's hair!
Man and beast lay hurt and screaming,
(Men must die when Kings are dreaming!) —
While within the harried town
Mothers dragged their children down
As the awful rain came screaming,
For the glory of a Crown!
So the Morning flung her cloak
Through the hanging pall of smoke —
Trimmed with red, it was, and dripping with a deep
and angry stain! And the Day came walking then Through a lane of murdered men, And her light fell down before her like a Cross upon
the plain! But the forts still crowned the height With a bitter iron crown! They had lived to flame and fight, They had lived to keep the Town! And they poured their havoc down All that day . . . and all that night. . . .
80 LIEGE
While four times their number came, Pawns that played a bloody game! — With a silver trumpeting, For the glory of the King,
To the barriers of the thunder and the fury of the flame!
So they stormed the iron Hill,
O'er the sleepers lying still,
And their trumpets sang them forward through the
dull succeeding dawns, But the thunder flung them wide, And they crumpled up and died, — They had waged the war of monarchs — and they died
the death of pawns.
But the forts still stood. . . . Their breath Swept the foeman like a blade, Though ten thousand men were paid To the hungry purse of Death, Though the field was wet with blood, Still the bold defences stood, Stood !
And the King came out with his bodyguard at the
day's departing gleam — And the moon rode up behind the smoke and showed
the King his dream.
Dana Burnet
VERDUN
MEN OF VERDUN
There are five men in the moonlight
That by their shadows stand; Three hobble humped on crutches,
And two lack each a hand.
Frogs somewhere near the roadside
Chorus their chant absorbed : But a hush breathes out of the dream-light
That far in heaven is orbed.
It is gentle as sleep falling
And wide as thought can span,
The ancient peace and wonder That brims the heart of man.
Beyond the hills it shines now
On no peace but the dead, On reek of trenches thunder-shocked, Tense fury of wills in wrestle locked,
A chaos crumbled red !
The five men in the moonlight
Chat, joke, or gaze apart. They talk of days and comrades,
But each one hides his heart.
They wear clean cap and tunic,
As when they went to war; A gleam comes where the medal 's pinned :
But they will fight no more.
84 VERDUN
The shadows, maimed and antic,
Gesture and shape distort, Like mockery of a demon dumb Out of the hell-din whence they come
That dogs them for his sport:
But as if dead men were risen
And stood before me there With a terrible fame about them blown
In beams of spectral air,
I see them, men transfigured
As in a dream, dilate Fabulous with the Titan-throb
Of battling Europe's fate;
For history 's hushed before them, And legend flames afresh, —
Verdun, the name of thunder, Is written on their flesh.
Laurence Binyon
VEEDUN
Three hundred thousand men, but not enough To break this township on a winding stream; More yet must fall, and more, ere the red stuff That built a nation's manhood may redeem The Master's hopes and realize his dream.
They pave the way to Verdun; on their dust The Hohenzollerns mount and, hand in hand, Gaze haggard south; for yet another thrust
GUNS OF VERDUN 85
And higher hills must heap, ere they may stand To feed their eyes upon the promised land.
One barrow, borne of women, lifts them high, Built up of many a thousand human dead. Nursed on their mothers' bosoms, now they lie — A Golgotha, all shattered, torn and sped, A mountain for these royal feet to tread.
A Golgotha, upon whose carrion clay Justice of myriad men still in the womb Shall heave two crosses; crucify and flay Two memories accurs'd; then in the tomb Of world-wide execration give them room.
Verdun ! A clarion thy name shall ring Adown the ages and the Nations see Thy monuments of glory. Now we bring Thank-offering and bend the reverent knee, Thou star upon the crown of Liberty !
Eden Phillpotts
GUNS OF VERDUN
Guns of Verdun point to Metz From the plated parapets; Guns of Metz grin back again O'er the fields of fair Lorraine.
Guns of Metz are long and grey, Growling through a summer day; Guns of Verdun, grey and long, Boom an echo of their song.
86 VERDUN
>»
Guns of Metz to Verdun roar, "Sisters, you shall foot the score; Guns of Verdun say to Metz, "Fear not, for we pay our debts.'
Guns of Metz they grumble, "When?" Guns of Verdun answer then, "Sisters, when to guard Lorraine Gunners lay you East again!"
Patrick R. Chalmers
OXFORD
THE SPIRES OF OXFORD
I saw the spires of Oxford
As I was passing by, The gray spires of Oxford
Against the pearl-gray sky. My heart was with the Oxford men
Who went abroad to die.
The years go fast in Oxford,
The golden years and gay, The hoary Colleges look down
On careless boys at play. But when the bugles sounded war
They put their games away.
They left the peaceful river,
The cricket-field, the quad, The shaven lawns of Oxford,
To seek a bloody sod — They gave their merry youth away
For country and for God.
God rest you, happy gentlemen, Who laid your good lives down,
Who took the khaki and the gun Instead of cap and gown.
God bring you to a fairer place Than even Oxford town.
Winifred M. Letts
90 OXFORD
OXFORD IN WAR-TIME
[The Boat Race will not be held this year (1915). The whole of last year's Oxford Eight and the great majority of the cricket and football teams are serving the King.)
Under the tow-path past the barges Never an eight goes flashing by;
Never a blatant coach on the marge is Urging his crew to do or die;
Never the critic we knew enlarges, Fluent, on How and Why!
Once by the Iffley Road November Welcomed the Football men aglow,
Covered with mud, as you '11 remember, Eager to vanquish Oxford's foe.
Where are the teams of last December? Gone — where they had to go!
Where are her sons who waged at cricket Warfare against the foeman-friend?
Far from the Parks, on a harder wicket, Still they attack and still defend;
Playing a greater game, they'll stick it, Fearless until the end !
Oxford's goodliest children leave her,
Hastily thrusting books aside; Still the hurrying weeks bereave her,
Filling her heart with joy and pride; Only the thought of you can grieve her,
You who have fought and died.
TV. Snov:
OXFORD IN WAR-TIME 91
OXFORD REVISITED IN WAR-TIME
Beneath fair Magdalen's storied towers I wander in a dream, And hear the mellow chimes float out O'er Cherwell's ice-bound stream.
Throstle and blackbird stiff with cold Hop on the frozen grass; Among the aged, upright oaks The dun deer slowly pass.
The chapel organ rolls and swells, And voices still praise God; But ah! the thought of youthful friends Who lie beneath the sod.
Now wounded men with gallant eyes Go hobbling down the street, And nurses from the hospitals Speed by with tireless feet.
The town is full of uniforms, And through the stormy sky, Frightening the rooks from the tallest trees, The aeroplanes roar by.
The older faces still are here, More grave and true and kind, Ennobled by the steadfast toil Of patient heart and mind.
92 OXFORD
And old-time friends are dearer grown To fill a double place: Unshaken faith makes glorious Each forward-looking face.
Old Oxford walls are grey and worn: She knows the truth of tears, But to-day she stands in her ancient pride Crowned with eternal years.
Gone are her sons: yet her heart is glad In the glory of their youth, For she brought them forth to live or die By freedom, justice, truth.
Cold moonlight falls on silent towers; The young ghosts walk with the old; But Oxford dreams of the dawn of May And her heart is free and bold.
Tertius van Dyke
Magdalen College, January, 1917
REFLECTIONS
SONNETS WRITTEN IN THE FALL OF
1914
I
Awake, ye nations, slumbering supine, Who round enring the European fray! Heard ye the trumpet sound? "The Day! the Day!
The last that shall on England's Empire shine!
The Parliament that broke the Right Divine Shall see her realm of reason swept away, And lesser nations shall the sword obey —
The sword o'er all carve the great world's design!1
So on the English Channel boasts the foe On whose imperial brow death's helmet nods.
Look where his hosts o'er bloody Belgium go, And mix a nation's past with blazing sods!
A kingdom's waste! a people's homeless woe! Man's broken Word, and violated gods!
n
Far fall the day when England's realm shall see
The sunset of dominion! Her increase
Abolishes the man-dividing seas, And frames the brotherhood on earth to be! She, in free peoples planting sovereignty,
Orbs half the civil world in British peace;
And though time dispossess her, and she cease, Rome-like she greatens in man's memory.
96 REFLECTIONS
Oh, many a crown shall sink in war's turmoil, And many a new republic light the sky,
Fleets sweep the ocean, nations till the soil, Genius be born and generations die,
Orient and Occident together toil,
Ere such a mighty work man rears on high!
Ill
Hearken, the feet of the Destroyer tread
The wine-press of the nations; fast the blood Pours from the side of Europe; in the flood
On the septentrional watershed
The rivers of fair France are running red! England, the mother-aerie of our brood, That on the summit of dominion stood,
Shakes in the blast: heaven battles overhead!
Lift up thy head, O Rheims, of ages heir
That treasured up in thee their glorious sum;
Upon whose brow, prophetically fair,
Flamed the great morrow of the world to come;
Haunt with thy beauty this volcanic air
Ere yet thou close, O Flower of Christendom!
IV
As when the shadow of the sun's eclipse
Sweeps on the earth, and spreads a spectral air, As if the universe were dying there,
On continent and isle the darkness dips
"Unwonted gloom, and on the Atlantic slips; So in the night the Belgian cities flare Horizon-wide; the wandering people fare
Along the roads, and load the fleeing ships.
SONNETS 97
And westward borne that planetary sweep Darkening o'er England and her times to be,
Already steps upon the ocean-deep!
Watch well, my country, that unearthly sea,
Lest when thou thinkest not, and in thy sleep, Unapt for war, that gloom enshadow thee.
V
I pray for peace; yet peace is but a prayer.
How many wars have been in my brief years!
All races and all faiths, both hemispheres, My eyes have seen embattled everywhere The wide earth through; yet do I not despair
Of peace, that slowly through far ages nears;
Though not to me the golden morn appears. My faith is perfect in time's issue fair.
For man doth build on an eternal scale, And his ideals are framed of hope deferred;
The millennium came not; yet Christ did not fail, Though ever unaccomplished is His word;
Him Prince of Peace, though unenthroned, we hail Supreme when in all bosoms He be heard.
VI
This is my faith, and my mind's heritage, Wherein I toil, though in a lonely place, Who yet world-wide survey the human race
Unequal from wild nature disengage
Body and soul, and life's old strife assuage; Still must abide, till heaven perfect its grace, And love grown wisdom sweeten in man's face,
Alike the Christian and the heathen rage.
98 REFLECTIONS
The tutelary genius of mankind
Ripens by slow degrees the final State,
That in the soul shall its foundations find And only in victorious love grow great;
Patient the heart must be, humble the mind, That doth the greater births of time await!
VII
Whence not unmoved I see the nations form From Dover to the fountains of the Rhine, A hundred leagues, the scarlet battle-line,
And by the Vistula great armies swarm,
A vaster flood; rather my breast grows warm, Seeing all peoples of the earth combine Under one standard, with one countersign,
Grown brothers in the universal storm.
And never through the wide world yet there rang A mightier summons ! O Thou who from the side
Of Athens and the loins of Caesar sprang,
Strike, Europe, with half the coming world allied
For those ideals for which, since Homer sang, The hosts of thirty centuries have died.
George Edward Woodberry
THE WAR FILMS
O living pictures of the dead,
O songs without a sound, O fellowship whose phantom tread
Hallows a phantom ground — How in a gleam have these revealed
The faith we had not found.
THE SEARCHLIGHTS 99
We have sought God in a cloudy Heaven, We have passed by God on earth:
His seven sins and his sorrows seven, His wayworn mood and mirth,
Like a ragged cloak have hid from us The secret of his birth.
Brother of men, when now I see
The lads go forth in line, Thou knowest my heart is hungry in me
As for thy bread and wine; Thou knowest my heart is bowed in me
To take their death for mine.
Henry Newbolt
THE SEARCHLIGHTS
[Political morality differs from individual morality, because there is nc power above the State. — General von Bernhardi.]
Shadow by shadow, stripped for fight, The lean black cruisers search the sea.
Night-long their level shafts of light Revolve, and find no enemy.
Only they know each leaping wave
May hide the lightning, and their grave.
And in the land they guard so well Is there no silent watch to keep?
An age is dying, and the bell
Rings midnight on a vaster deep.
But over all its waves, once more
The searchlights move, from shore to shore.
100 REFLECTIONS
And captains that we thought were dead, And dreamers that we thought were dumb,
And voices that we thought were fled, Arise, and call us, and we come;
And "Search in thine own soul," they cry;
"For there, too, lurks thine enemy."
Search for the foe in thine own soul, The sloth, the intellectual pride;
The trivial jest that veils the goal For which our fathers lived and died;
The lawless dreams, the cynic Art,
That rend thy nobler self apart.
Not far, not far into the night,
These level swords of light can pierce;
Yet for her faith does England fight, Her faith in this our universe,
Believing Truth and Justice draw
From founts of everlasting law;
The law that rules the stars, our stay,
Our compass through the world's wide sea,
The one sure light, the one sure way, The one firm base of Liberty;
The one firm road that men have trod
Through Chaos to the throne of God.
Therefore a Power above the State, The unconquerable Power, returns,
The fire, the fire that made her great Once more upon her altar burns,
Once more, redeemed and healed and whole,
She moves to the Eternal Goal.
Alfred Noyes
MEN WHO MARCH AWAY 101
CHRISTMAS: 1915
Now is the midnight of the nations: dark Even as death, beside her blood-dark seas, Earth, like a mother in birth agonies,
Screams in her travail, and the planets hark
Her million-throated terror. Naked, stark, Her torso writhes enormous, and her knees Shudder against the shadowed Pleiades,
Wrenching the night's imponderable arc.
Christ! What shall be delivered to the morn Out of these pangs, if ever indeed another Morn shall succeed this night, or this vast mother Survive to know the blood-spent offspring, torn From her racked flesh? — What splendour from the smother? What new- wing' d world, or mangled god still- born?
Percy MacKaye
"MEN WHO MARCH AWAY"
(Song of the Soldiers)
What of the faith and fire within us
Men who march away
Ere the barn-cocks say
Night is growing gray, To hazards whence no tears can win us; What of the faith and fire within us
Men who march away!
102 REFLECTIONS
Is it a purblind prank, O think you,
Friend with the musing eye
Who watch us stepping by,
With doubt and dolorous sigh? Can much pondering so hoodwink you ? Is it a purblind prank, O think you,
Friend with the musing eye?
Nay. We see well what we are doing,
Though some may not see —
Dalliers as they be —
England's need are we; Her distress would leave us rueing : Nay. We well see what we are doing,
Though some may not see!
In our heart of hearts believing
Victory crowns the just,
And that braggarts must
Surely bite the dust, Press we to the field ungrieving, In our heart of hearts believing
Victory crowns the just.
Hence the faith and fire within us
Men who march away
Ere the barn-cocks say
Night is growing gray, To hazards whence no tears can win us; Hence the faith and fire within us
Men who march away.
Thomas Hardy
kjpleinbcr 5, 19 >14
WE WILLED IT NOT 103
WE WILLED IT NOT
We willed it not. We have not lived in hate, Loving too well the shires of England thrown From sea to sea to covet your estate, Or wish one flight of fortune from your throne.
We had grown proud because the nations stood Hoping together against the calumny That, tortured of its old barbarian blood, Barbarian still the heart of man should be.
Builders there are who name you overlord, Building with us the citadels of light, Who hold as we this chartered sin abhorredf And cry you risen Caesar of the Night.
Beethoven speaks with Milton on this day, And Shakespeare's word with Goethe's beat* the
sky, In witness of the birthright you betray, In witness of the vision you deny.
We love the hearth, the quiet hills, the song, The friendly gossip come from every land; And very peace were now a nameless wrong — ' You thrust this bitter quarrel to our hand.
For this your pride the tragic armies go, And the grim navies watch along the seas; You trade in death, you mock at life, you throw To God the tumult of your blasphemies.
104 REFLECTIONS
You rob us of our love-right. It is said. In treason to the world you are enthroned. We rise, and, by the yet ungathered dead, Not lightly shall the treason be atoned.
John Drinkwater
THE DEATH OF PEACE Peace
Now slowly sinks the day-long labouring Sun Behind the tranquil trees and old church-tower; And we who watch him know our day is done; For us too comes the evening — and the hour.
The sunbeams slanting through those ancient
trees, The sunlit lichens burning on the byre, The lark descending, and the homing bees, Proclaim the sweet relief all things desire.
Golden the river brims beneath the west,
And holy peace to all the world is given;
The songless stockdove preens her ruddied breast;
The blue smoke windeth like a prayer to heaven.
O old, old England, land of golden peace, Thy fields are spun with gossameres of gold, And golden garners gather thy increase, And plenty crowns thy loveliness untold.
THE DEATH OF PEACE 105
By sunlight or by starlight ever thou Art excellent in beauty manifold; The still star victory ever gems thy brow; Age canot age thee, ages make thee old.
Thy beauty brightens with the evening sun Across the long-lit meads and distant spire: So sleep thou well — like his thy labour done; Rest in thy glory as he rests in fire.
But even in this hour of soft repose A gentle sadness chides us like a friend — The sorrow of the joy that overflows, The burden of the beauty that must end.
And from the fading sunset comes a cry, And in the twilight voices wailing past, Like wild-swans calling, "When we rest we die, And woe to them that linger and are last";
And as the Sun sinks, sudden in heav'n new born There shines an armed Angel like a Star, Who cries above the darkling world in scorn, " God comes to Judgment. Learn ye what ye are.
From fire to umber fades the sunset-gold, From umber into silver and twilight; The infant flowers their orisons have told And turn together folded for, the night;
106 REFLECTIONS
The garden urns are black against the eve; The white moth flitters through the fragrant glooms; How beautiful the heav'ns ! — But yet we grieve And wander restless from the lighted rooms.
For through the world to-night a murmur thrills As at some new-born prodigy of time — Peace dies like twilight bleeding on the hills, And Darkness creeps to hide the hateful crime.
The Death of Peace
Art thou no more, O Maiden Heaven-born, O Peace, bright Angel of the windless morn? Who comest down to bless our furrow'd fields, Or stand like Beauty smiling 'mid the corn:
Mistress of mirth and ease and summer dreams, Who lingerest among the woods and streams To help us heap the harvest 'neath the moon, And homeward laughing lead the lumb'ring teams:
Who teachest to our children thy wise lore; Who keepest full the goodman's golden store; Who crownest Life with plenty, Death with flow'rs; Peace, Queen of Kindness — ■ but of earth, no more.
Not thine but ours the fault, thy care was vain; For this that we have done be ours the pain; Thou gavest much, as He who gave us all, And as we slew Him for it thou art slain.
THE DEATH OF PEACE 10"
Heav'n left to men the moulding of their fate : To live as wolves or pile the pillar'd State — Like boars and bears to grunt and growl in mire, Or dwell aloft, effulgent gods, elate.
Thou lif tedst us : we slew and with thee fell — From golden thrones of wisdom weeping fell. Fate rends the chaplets from our feeble brows; The spires of Heaven fade in fogs of hell.
*
She faints, she falls; her dying eyes are dim; Her fingers play with those bright buds she bore To please us, but that she can bring no more; And dying yet she smiles — as Christ on him Who slew Him slain. Her eyes so beauteous Are lit with tears shed — not for herself but us.
The gentle Beings of the hearth and home;
The lovely Dryads of her aisled woods;
The Angels that do dwell in solitudes
Where she dwelleth; and joyous Spirits that roam
To bless her bleating flocks and fruitful lands;
Are gather'd there to weep, and kiss her dying hands.
"Look, look," they cry, "she is not dead, she breathes! And we have staunched the damned wound and deep, The cavern-carven wound. She doth but sleep And will awake. Bring wine, and new-wound wreaths Wherewith to crown awaking her dear head, And make her Queen again." — But no, for Peace was dead.
108 REFLECTIONS
And then there came black Lords; and Dwarfs
obscene With lavish tongues; and Trolls; and treacherous
Things Like loose-lipp'd Councillors and cruel Kings Who sharpen lies and daggers subterrene: And flashed their evil eyes and weeping cried, "We ruled the world for Peace. By her own hand
she died."
In secret he made sharp the bitter blade, And poison'd it with bane of lies and drew, And stabb'd — O God! the Cruel Cripple slew; And cowards fled or lent him trembling aid. She fell and died — in all the tale of time The direst deed e'er done, the most accursed crime.
Ronald Ross
IN WAR-TIME
{An American Homeward-Bound)
Further and further we leave the scene Of war — and of England's care;
I try to keep my mind serene — But my heart stays there;
For a distant song of pain and wrong My spirit doth deep confuse,
And I sit all day on the deck, and long - And long for news!
THE ANVIL 109
I seem to see them in battle-line —
Heroes with hearts of gold, But of their victory a sign
The Fates withhold;
And the hours too tardy-footed pass, The voiceless hush grows dense
'Mid the imaginings, alas! That feed suspense.
Oh, might I lie on the wind, or fly
In the wilful sea-bird's track, Would I hurry on, with a homesick cry —
Or hasten back?
Florence Earle Coate?
THE ANVIL
Burned from the ore's rejected dross,
The iron whitens in the heat.
With plangent strokes of pain and loss
The hammers on the iron beat.
Searched by the fire, through death and dole
We feel the iron in our soul.
O dreadful Forge ! if torn and bruised The heart, more urgent comes our cry Not to be spared but to be used, Brain, sinew, and spirit, before we die. Beat out the iron, edge it keen, And shape us to the end we mean !
Laurence Binyon
110 REFLECTIONS
THE FOOL RINGS HIS BELLS
Come, Death, I'd have a word with thee;
And thou, poor Innocency;
And Love — a lad with broken wing;
And Pity, too:
The Fool shall sing to you,
As Fools will sing.
Ay, music hath small sense,
And a tune's soon told,
And Earth is old,
And my poor wits are dense;
Yet have I secrets, — dark, my dear,
To breathe you all: Come near.
And lest some hideous listener tells,
I '11 ring my bells.
They 're all at war ! Yes, yes, their bodies go 'Neath burning sun and icy star To chaunted songs of woe, Dragging cold cannon through a mud Of rain and blood; The new moon glinting hard on eyes Wide with insanities!
Hush! ... I use words
I hardly know the meaning of;
And the mute birds
Are glancing at Love!
From out their shade of leaf and flower,
Trembling at treacheries
THE FOOL RINGS HIS BELLS 111
Which even in noonday cower, leed, heed not what I said Of frenzied hosts of men, More fools than I, On envy, hatred fed, Who kill, and die — Spake I not plainly, then? Yet Pity whispered, "Why?"
Thou silly thing, off to thy daisies go. Mine was not news for child to know, And Death — no ears hath. He hath supped
where creep Eyeless worms in hush of sleep; Yet, when he smiles, the hand he draws Athwart his grinning jaws Faintly their thin bones rattle, and . . . There,
there; Hearken how my bells in the air Drive away care! ...
Nay, but a dream I had Of a world all mad. Not a simple happy mad like me, Who am mad like an empty scene Of water and willow tree, Where the wind hath been; But that foul Satan-mad, Who rots in his own head, And counts the dead, Not honest one — and two — But for the ghosts they were9 Brave, faithful, true,
112 REFLECTIONS
When, head in air,
In Earth's clear green and blue
Heaven they did share
With Beauty who bade them there. . . .
There, now ! he goes —
Old Bones; I've wearied him.
Ay, and the light doth dimr
And asleep 's the rose,
And tired Innocence
In dreams is hence. . . •
Come, Love, my lad,
Nodding that drowsy head,
'T is time thy prayers were saidv.
Walter de la Mare
THE ROAD TO DIEPPE
[Concerning the experiences of a journey on foot through the night of August 4, 1914 (the night after the formal declaration of war between England and Germany), from a town near Amiens, in France, to Dieppe, a distance of somewhat more than forty miles.]
Before I knew, the Dawn was on the road, Close at my side, so silently he came Nor gave a sign of salutation, save To touch with light my sleeve and make the way Appear as if a shining countenance Had looked on it. Strange was this radiant Youth, As I, to these fair, fertile parts of France, Where Csesar with his legions once had passed, And where the Kaiser's Uhlans yet would pass Or e'er another moon should cope with clouds For mastery of these same fields. — To-night (And but a month has gone since I walked there)
THE ROAD TO DIEPPE 113
Well might the Kaiser write, as Csesar wrote,
In his new Commentaries on a Gallic war,
" Fortissimi Belgoe." — A moon ago!
Who would have then divined that dead would lie
Like swaths of grain beneath the harvest moon
Upon these lands the ancient Belgae held,
From Normandy beyond renowned Liege! —
But it was out of that dread August night
From which all Europe woke to war, that we,
This beautiful Dawn-Youth, and I, had come,
He from afar. Beyond grim Petrograd
He'd waked the moujik from his peaceful dreams,
Bid the muezzin call to morning prayer
Where minarets rise o'er the Golden Horn,
And driven shadows from the Prussian march
To lie beneath the lindens of the stadt.
Softly he'd stirred the bells to ring at Rheims,
He'd knocked at high Montmartre, hardly asleep.
Heard the sweet carillon of doomed Lou vain,
Boylike, had tarried for a moment's play
Amid the traceries of Amiens,
And then was hast'ning on the road to Dieppe,
When he o'ertook me drowsy from the hours
Through which I'd walked, with no companions else
Than ghostly kilometer posts that stood
As sentinels of space along the way. —
Often, in doubt, I'd paused to question one,
With nervous hands, as they who read Moon-type;
And more than once I 'd caught a moment's sleep
Beside the highway, in the dripping grass,
While one of these white sentinels stood guard,
Knowing me for a friend, who loves the road,
114 REFLECTIONS
And best of all by night, when wheels do sleep And stars alone do walk abroad. — But once Three watchful shadows, deeper than the dark, Laid hands on me and searched me for the marks Of traitor or of spy, only to find Over my heart the badge of loyalty. — With wish for bon voyage they gave me o'er To the white guards who led me on again.
Thus Dawn o'ertook me and with magic speech Made me forget the night as we strode on. Where'er he looked a miracle was wrought: A tree grew from the darkness at a glance; A hut was thatched; a new chateau was reared Of stone, as weathered as the church at Caen; Gray blooms were coloured suddenly in red; A flag was flung across the eastern sky. — Nearer at hand, he made me then aware Of peasant women bending in the fields, Cradling and gleaning by the first scant light, Their sons and husbands somewhere o'er the edge Of these green-golden fields which they had sowed, But will not reap, — out somewhere on the march, God but knows where and if they come again. One fallow field he pointed out to me Where but the day before a peasant ploughed, Dreaming of next year's fruit, and there his plough Stood now mid-field, his horses commandeered, A monstrous sable crow perched on the beam.
Before I knew, the Dawn was on the road, Far from my side, so silently he went, Catching his golden helmet as he ran,
FELLOW TRAVELLERS IN GREECE 115
And hast'ning on along the dun straight way, Where old men's sabots now began to clack And withered women, knitting, led their cows, On, on to call the men of Kitchener Down to their coasts, — I shouting after him : " O Dawn, would you had let the world sleep on Till all its armament were turned to rust, Nor waked it to this day of hideous hate, Of man's red murder and of woman's woe!"
Famished and lame, I came at last to Dieppe, But Dawn had made his way across the sea, And, as I climbed with heavy feet the cliff, Was even then upon the sky-built towers Of that great capital where nations all, Teuton, Italian, Gallic, English, Slav, Forget long hates in one consummate faith.
John Finley
TO FELLOW TRAVELLERS IN GREECE
March-September, 1914
'T was in the piping time of peace We trod the sacred soil of Greece, Nor thought, where the Ilissus runs, Of Teuton craft or Teuton guns;
Nor dreamt that, ere the year was spent, Their iron challenge insolent Would round the world's horizons pour, From Europe to the Australian shore.
116 REFLECTIONS
The tides of war had ebb'd away From Trachis and Thermopylae, Long centuries had come and gone Since that fierce day at Marathon;
Freedom was firmly based, and we Wall'd by our own encircling sea; The ancient passions dead, and men Battl'd with ledger and with pen.
So seem'd it, but to them alone The wisdom of the gods is known; Lest freedom's price decline, from far Zeus hurl'd the thunderbolt of war.
And so once more the Persian steel The armies of the Greeks must feel, And once again a Xerxes know The virtue of a Spartan foe.
Thus may the cloudy fates unroll'd Retrace the starry circles old, And the recurrent heavens decree A Periclean dynasty.
W. Macneile Dixon
«<
WHEN THERE IS PEACE"
<<
When there is Peace our land no more Will be the land we knew of yore." Thus do our facile seers foretell The truth that none can buy or sell And e'en the wisest must ignore.
A PRAYER IN TIME OF WAR 117
♦ ■ *
When we have bled at every pore, Shall we still strive for gear and store? Will it be Heaven? Will it be Hell, When there is Peace?
This let us pray for, this implore:
That all base dreams thrust out at door,
We may in loftier aims excel
And, like men waking from a spell,
Grow stronger, nobler, than before,
When there is Peace.
T . „.„_ Austin Dobson
January 1, 1916
A PRAYER IN TIME OF WAR
I The war will change many things in art and life, and among them, it is to be hoped, many of our own ideas as to what is, and what is not, "intellectual."!
Thou, whose deep ways are in the sea, Whose footsteps are not known,
To-night a world that turned from Thee Is waiting — at Thy Throne.
The towering Babels that we raised
Where scoffing sophists brawl, The little Antichrists we praised —
The night is on them all.
The fool hath said . . . The fool hath said . . , And we, who deemed him wise,
We who believed that Thou wast dead, How should we seek Thine eyes?
118 REFLECTIONS
How should we seek to Thee for power
Who scorned Thee yesterday? How should we kneel, in this dread hour? i Lord, teach us how to pray!
Grant us the single heart, once more,
That mocks no sacred thing, The Sword of Truth our fathers wore
When Thou wast Lord and King.
Let darkness unto darkness tell
Our deep unspoken prayer, For, while our souls in darkness dwell,
We know that Thou art there.
Alfred Noyes
THEN AND NOW
When battles were fought With a chivalrous sense of should and ought,
In spirit men said,
"End we quick or dead,
Honour is some reward! Let us fight fair — for our own best or worst;
So, Gentlemen of the Guard, Fire first !"
In the open they stood, Man to man in his knightlihood :
They would not deign
To profit by a stain
On the honourable rules, Knowing that practise perfidy no man durst
Who in the heroic schools Was nurst.
THE KAISER AND GOD 119
But now, behold, what Is war with those where honour is not! Rama laments Its dead innocents; Herod howls: "Sly slaughter Rules now! Let us, by modes once called accurst, Overhead, under water, Stab first."
Thomas Hardy
THE KAISER AND GOD
1"I rejoice with you in Wilhelm's first victory. How magnificently God supported him!" — Telegram from the Kaiser to the Crown Princess.]
Led by Wilhelm, as you tell, God has done extremely well; You with patronizing nod Show that you approve of God. Kaiser, face a question new — This — does God approve of you?
Broken pledges, treaties torn, Your first page of war adorn; We on fouler things must look Who read further in that book, WThere you did in time of war All that you in peace forswore, Where you, barbarously wise, Bade your soldiers terrorize,
Where you made — the deed was fine — Women screen your firing line. Villages burned down to dust, Torture, murder, bestial lust,
120 REFLECTIONS
Filth too foul for printer's ink,
Crime from which the apes would shrink —
Strange the offerings that you press
On the God of Righteousness!
Kaiser, when you'd decorate Sons or friends who serve your State, Not that Iron Cross bestow, But a cross of wood, and so — So remind the world that you Have made Calvary anew.
Kaiser, when you'd kneel in prayer Look upon your hands, and there Let that deep and awful stain From the blood of children slain Burn your very soul with shame, Till you dare not breathe that Name That now you glibly advertise — God as one of your allies.
Impious braggart, you forget; God is not your conscript yet; You shall learn in dumb amaze That His ways are not your ways, That the mire through which you trod Is not the high white road of God.
To Whom, whichever way the combat rolls, Wey fighting to the end, commend our souls.
Barry Pain
THE SUPERMAN 121
THE SUPERMAN
The horror-haunted Belgian plains riven by shot and
shell Are strewn with her undaunted sons who stayed the
jaws of hell. In every sunny vale of France death is the countersign. The purest blood in Britain's veins is being poured like
wine.
Far, far across the crimsoned map the impassioned
armies sweep. Destruction flashes down the sky and penetrates the
deep. The Dreadnought knows the silent dread, and seas
incarnadine Attest the carnival of strife, the madman's battle scene.
Relentless, savage, hot, and grim the infuriate columns
press Where terror simulates disdain and danger is largess, Where greedy youth claims death for bride and agony
seems bliss. It is the cause, the cause, my soul! which sanctifies all
this.
Ride, Cossacks, ride! Charge, Turcos, charge! The
fateful hour has come. Let all the guns of Britain roar or be" forever dumb. The Superman has burst his bonds. With Kultur-nag
unfurled And prayer on lip he runs amuck, imperilling the
world.
122 REFLECTIONS
The impious creed that might is right in him per- sonified
Bids all creation bend before the insatiate Teuton pride,
Which, nourished on Valhalla dreams of empire unconfined,
Would make the cannon and the sword the despots of mankind.
Efficient, thorough, strong, and brave — his vision is
to kill. Force is the hearthstone of his might, the pole-star of
his will. His forges glow malevolent: their minions never tire To deck the goddess of his lust whose twins are blood
and fire.
O world grown sick with butchery and manifold distress !
O broken Belgium robbed of all save grief and ghast- liness!
Should Prussian power enslave the world and arro- gance prevail,
Let chaos come, let Moloch rule, and Christ give place
to Baal.
Robert Grant
THREE HILLS
There is a hill in England,
Green fields and a school I know,
Where the balls fly fast in summer, And the whispering elm-trees grow,
A little hill, a dear hill, And the playing fields below.
THREE HILLS 123
There is a hill in Flanders, Heaped with a thousand slain,
Where the shells fly night and noontide And the ghosts that died in vain, —
A little hill, a hard hill To the souls that died in pain.
There is a hill in Jewry,
Three crosses pierce the sky,
On the midmost He is dying To save all those who die, —
A little hill, a kind hill To souls in jeopardy.
Everard Owen Harrow, December, 1915
INCIDENTS AND ASPECTS
THE RETURN
I heard the rumbling guns. I saw the smoke, The unintelligible shock of hosts that still,
Far off, unseeing, strove and strove again; And Beauty flying naked down the hill
From morn to eve: and the stern night cried Peace!
And shut the strife in darkness : all was still, Then slowly crept a triumph on the dark —
And I heard Beauty singing up the hill.
John Freeman
THE MOBILIZATION IN BRITTANY
It was silent in the street. I did not know until a woman told me, Sobbing over the muslin she sold me. Then I went out and walked to the square And saw a few dazed people standing there.
And then the drums beat, the drums beat! O then the drums beat! And hurrying, stumbling through the street Came the hurrying stumbling feet.
0 I have heard the drums beat For war!
1 have heard the townsfolk come,
I have heard the roll and thunder of the nearest drum
128 INCIDENTS AND ASPECTS
ks, the drummer stopped and cried, "Hear! Be strong! The summons comes! Prepare!" Closing he prayed us to be cairn . . .
And there was calm in my heart of the desert, of the dead sea, ist plains of the West before the coming storm, And there was calm in their eyes like the last calm that shall be.
And then the drum beat,
The fatal drum beat,
And the drummer marched through the street
And down to another square,
And the drummer above took up the beat
And sent it onward where
Huddled, we stood and heard the drums roll,
And then a bell began to toll.
0 I have heard the thunder of drums Crashing into simple poor homes.
1 have heard the drums roll "Farewell!'* I have heard the tolling cathedral bell. Will it ever peal again?
Shall I ever smile or feel again? What was joy? What was pain?
For I have heard the drums beat,
I have seen the drummer striding from street to street.
Crying, "Be strong! Hear what I must tell!"
While the drums roared and rolled and beat
For war!
MOBILIZATION IN BRITTANY 129
II
Last night the men of this region were leaving. Now
they are far. Rough and strong they are, proud and gay they are. So this is the way of war . . .
The train was full and we all shouted as it pulled away.
Fhey sang an old war -song, they were true to them- selves, they were gay!
We might have thought they were going for a holi- day—
Except for something in the air,
Except for the weeping of the ruddy old women of
Finistere. The younger women do not weep. They dream and
stare.
They seem to be walking in dreams. They seem not to
know It is their homes, their happiness, vanishing so. (Every strong man between twenty and forty must go.)
They sang an old war-song. I have heard it often in
other days, But never before when War was walking the world's
highways. They sang, they shouted, the Marseillaise!
The train went and another has gone, but none, com- ing, has brought word.
Though you may know, you, out in the world, we have not heard,
We are not sure that the great battalions have stirred —
130 INCIDENTS AND ASPECTS
Except for something, something in the air,
Except for the weeping of the wild old women of
Finistere. How long will the others dream and stare?
The train went. The strong men of this region are all
away, afar. Rough and strong they are, proud and gay they are. So this is the way of war . . .
Grace Fallow Norton
THE TOY BAND
(A Song of the Great Retreat)
Dreary lay the long road, dreary lay the town,
Lights out and never a glint o' moon : Weary lay the stragglers, half a thousand down,
Sad sighed the weary big Dragoon. "Oh! if I'd a drum here to make them take the road again,
Oh! if I'd a fife to wheedle, Come, boys, come! You that mean to fight it out, wake and take your load again,
Fall in! Fall in! Follow the fife and drum!
"Hey, but here's a toy shop, here's a drum for me,
Penny whistles too to play the tune! Half a thousand dead men soon shall hear and see
We're a band!" said the weary big Dragoon. "Rubadub! Rubadub! Wake and take the road again,
Wheedle-deedle-deedle-dee, Come, boys, come! You that mean to fight it out, wake and take your load again,
Fall in! Fall in! Follow the fife and drum!"
THOMAS OF THE LIGHT HEART 131
Cheerly goes the dark road, cheerly goes the night,
Cheerly goes the blood to keep the beat: Half a thousand dead men marching on to fight
With a little penny drum to lift their feet. Rubadub! Rubadub! Wake and take the road again,
Wheedle-deedle-deedle-dee, Come, boys, come! You that mean to fight it out, wake and take your load again,
Fall in! Fall in! Follow the fife and drum!
As long as there 's an Englishman to ask a tale of me,
As long as I can tell the tale aright, We'll not forget the penny whistle's wheedle-deedle- dee And the big Dragoon a-beating down the night, Rubadub ! Rubadub ! Wake and take the road again,
Wheedle-deedle-deedle-dee, Come, boys, come! You that mean to fight it out, wake and take your load again, Fall in! Fall in! Follow the fife and drum!
Henry Newbolt
THOMAS OF THE LIGHT HEART
■
Facing the guns, he jokes as well As any Judge upon the Bench;
Between the crash of shell and shell
His laughter rings along the trench;
He seems immensely tickled by a
Projectile which he calls a "Black Maria.'
He whistles down the day-long road, And, when the chilly shadows fall
132 INCIDENTS AND ASPECTS
And heavier hangs the v^eary load,
Is he down-hearted? Not at all. T is then he takes a light and airy View of the tedious route to Tipperary.
His songs are not exactly hymns;
He never learned them in the choir; And yet they brace his dragging limbs
Although they miss the sacred fire; Although his choice and cherished gems Do not include "The Watch upon the Thames."
He takes to fighting as a game;
He does no talking, through his hat, Of holy missions; all the same
He has his faith — be sure of that; He'll not disgrace his sporting breed, Nor play what is n't cricket. There's his creed.
Owen Seaman October, 19U
IN THE TRENCHES
As I lay in the trenches Under the Hunter's Moon, My mind ran to the lenches Cut in a Wiltshire down.
I saw their long black shadows, The beeches in the lane, The gray church in the meadows And my white cottage — plain.
IN THE TRENCHES 133
Thinks I, the down lies dreaming Under that hot moon's eye, Which sees the shells fly screaming And men and horses die.
And what makes she, I wonder, Of the horror and the blood, And what's her luck, to sunder The evil from the good?
'T was more than I could compass, For how was I to think With such infernal rumpus In such a blasted stink?
But here's a thought to tally With t'other. That moon sees A shrouded German valley With woods and ghostly trees.
And maybe there's a river As we have got at home With poplar-trees aquiver And clots of whirling foam.
And over there some fellow, A German and a foe, Whose gills are turning yellow As sure as mine are so,
Watches that riding glory Apparel' d in her gold, And craves to hear the story Her frozen lips enfold.
134 INCIDENTS AND ASPECTS
And if he sees as clearly As I do where her shrine Must fall, he longs as dearly, With heart as full as mine.
Maurice Hewlett
THE GUARDS CAME THROUGH
Men of the Twenty-first
Up by the Chalk Pit Wood, Weak with our wounds and our thirst,
Wanting our sleep and our food, After a day and a night —
God, shall we ever forget! Beaten and broke in the fight,
But sticking it — sticking it yet. Trying to hold the line,
Fainting and spent and done, Always the thud and the whine,
Always the yell of the Hun! Northumberland, Lancaster, York,
Durham and Somerset, Fighting alone, worn to the bone,
But sticking it — sticking it yet.
Never a message of hope!
Never a word of cheer! Fronting Hill 70's shell-swept slope,
With the dull dead plain in our rear. Always the whine of the shell,
Always the roar of its burst, Always the tortures of hell,
As waiting and wincing we cursed
THE GUARDS CAME THROUGH 135
Our luck and the guns and the Bocke,
When our Corporal shouted, "Stand to!"
And I heard some one cry, "Clear the front for the Guards!" And the Guards came through.
Our throats they were parched and hot,
But Lord, if you'd heard the cheers! Irish and Welsh and Scot,
Coldstream and Grenadiers. Two brigades, if you please,
Dressing as straight as a hem, We — we were down on our knees,
Praying for us and for them! Lord, I could speak for a week,
But how could you understand! How should your cheeks be wet,
Such feelin's don't come to you. But when can me or my mates forget,
When the Guards came through?
"Five yards left extend!"
It passed from rank to rank. Line after line with never a bend,
And a touch of the London swank. A trifle of swank and dash,
Cool as a home parade, Twinkle and glitter and flash,
Flinching never a shade, With the shrapnel right in their face
Doing their Hyde Park stunt, Keeping their swing at an easy pace,
Arms at the trail, eyes front!
136 INCIDENTS AND ASPECTS
Man, it was great to see!
Man, it was fine to do! It's a cot and a hospital ward for me, But I '11 tell 'em in Blighty, wherever I be,
How the Guards came through.
Arthur Conan Doyle
THE PASSENGERS OF A RETARDED SUBMERSIBLE November, 1916
The American People:
What was it kept you so long, brave German sub- mersible?
We have been very anxious lest matters had not gone well
With you and the precious cargo of your country's drugs and dyes.
But here you are at last, and the sight is good for our eyes,
Glad to welcome you up and out of the caves of the sea,
And ready for sale or barter, whatever your will may be.
The Captain of the Submersible: Oh, do not be impatient, good friends of this neutral
land, That we have been so tardy in reaching your eager
strand. We were stopped by a curious chance just off the
Irish coast,
PASSENGERS OF A SUBMERSIBLE 137
Where the mightiest wreck ever was lay crowded with
a host Of the dead that went down with her; and some prayed
us to bring them here That they might be at home with their brothers and
sisters dear. We Germans have tender hearts, and it grieved us sore
to say We were not a passenger ship, and to most we must
answer nay, But if from among their hundreds they could somehow
a half-score choose We thought we could manage to bring them, and we
would not refuse. They chose, and the women and children that are
greeting you here are those Ghosts of the women and children that the rest of the
hundred chose.
The American People: What guff are you giving us, Captain? We are able
to tell, we hope, A dozen ghosts, when we see them, apart from a
periscope. Come, come, get down to business! For time is money,
you know, And you must make up in both to us for having been
so slow. Better tell this story of yours to the submarines, for
we Know there was no such wreck, and none of your
spookery.
138 INCIDENTS AND ASPECTS
The Ghosts of the Lusitania Women and
Children:
Oh, kind kin of our murderers, take us back when you
sail away; Our own kin have forgotten us. 0 Captain, do not
stay! But hasten, Captain, hasten: The wreck that lies
under the sea Shall be ever the home for us this land can never be.
William Dean Howells
EDITH CAVELL
She was binding the wounds of her enemies when they came — The lint in her hand unrolled. They battered the door with their rifle-butts, crashed it in: She faced them gentle and bold.
They haled her before the judges where they sat
In their places, helmet on head. With question and menace the judges assailed her, "Yes,
I have broken your law," she said.
"I have tended the hurt and hidden the hunted, have done As a sister does to a brother, Because of a law that is greater than that you have made, Because I could do none other.
EDITH CAVELL 139
"Deal as you will with me. This is my choice to the end, To live in the life I vowed." "She is self-confessed," they cried; "she is self -con- demned. She shall die, that the rest may be cowed."
In the terrible hour of the dawn, when the veins are cold, They led her forth to the wall. I have loved my land," she said, "but it is not
enough : Love requires of me all.
a
>»
"I will empty my heart of the bitterness, hating none.
And sweetness filled her brave With a vision of understanding beyond the hour
That knelled to the waiting grave.
They bound her eyes, but she stood as if she shone.
The rifles it was that shook When the hoarse command rang out. They could not endure
That last, that defenceless look.
And the officer strode and pistolled her surely, ashamed
That men, seasoned in blood, Should quail at a woman, only a woman, —
As a flower stamped in the mud.
And now that the deed was securely done, in the night When none had known her fate,
140 INCIDENTS AND ASPECTS
They answered those that had striven for her, day by day: "It is over, you come too late."
And with many words and sorrowful-phrased excuse
Argued their German right To kill, most legally; hard though the duty be,
The law must assert its might.
Only a woman! yet she had pity on them,
The victim offered slain To the gods of fear that they worship. Leave them there,
Red hands, to clutch their gain!
She bewailed not herself, and we will bewail her not,
But with tears of pride rejoice That an English soul was found so crystal-clear
To be triumphant voice
Of the human heart that dares adventure all
But live to itself untrue, And beyond all laws sees love as the light in the night;
As the star it must answer to.
The hurts she healed, the thousa nds comforted — these Make a fragrance of her fame. "But because she stept to her star right on through death It is Victory speaks her name.
Laurence Binyon
THE HELL-GATE OF SOISSONS 141
THE HELL-GATE OF SOISSONS
My name is Darino, the poet. You have heard? Oui,
Comedie Frangaise. Perchance it has happened, mon ami, you know of my
unworthy lays. Ah, then you must guess how my fingers are itching to
talk to a pen; For I was at Soissons, and saw it, the death of the
twelve Englishmen.
My leg, malkeureusement, I left it behind on the banks
of the Aisne. Regret? I would pay with the other to witness their
valor again. A trifle, indeed, I assure you, to give for the honor to
tell How that handful of British, undaunted, went into
the Gateway of Hell.
Let me draw you a plan of the battle. Here we French and your Engineers stood;
Over there a detachment of German sharpshooters lay hid in a wood.
A mitrailleuse battery planted on top of this well- chosen ridge
Held the road for the Prussians and covered the direct approach to the bridge.
It was madness to dare the dense murder that spewed
from those ghastly machines. (Only those who have danced to its music can knor/ what the mitrailleuse means.)
142 INCIDENTS AND ASPECTS
But the bridge on the Aisne was a menace; our safety
demanded its fall: "Engineers, — volunteers!" In a body, the Royals
stood out at the call.
Death at best was the fate of that mission — to their
glory not one was dismayed. A party was chosen — and seven survived till the
powder was laid. And they died with their fuses unlighted. Another
detachment! Again A sortie is made — all too vainly. The bridge still
commanded the Aisne.
We were fighting two foes — Time and Prussia — the moments were worth more than troops.
We must blow up the bridge. A lone soldier darts out from the Royals and swoops
For the fuse! Fate seems with us. We cheer him; he answers — our hopes are reborn!
A ball rips his visor — his khaki shows red where an- other has torn.
Will he live — will he last — will he make it? Helas!
And so near to the goal! A second, he dies! then a third one! A fourth! Still
the Germans take toll! A fifth, magnifique ! It is magic ! How does he escape
them? He may . . . Yes, he does ! See, the match flares ! A rifle rings out
from the wood and says "Nay!"
THE HELL-GATE OF SOISSONS 143
Six, seven, eight, nine take their places, six, seven,
eight, nine brave their hail; Six, seven, eight, nine — how we count them! But
the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth fail! A tenth! Sacre nom ! But these English are soldiers —
they know how to try; (He fumbles the place where his jaw was) — they
show, too, how heroes can die.
Ten we count — ten who ventured unquailing — ten
there were — and ten are no more ! Yet another salutes and superbly essays where the ten
failed before. God of Battles, look down and protect him! Lord, his
heart is as Thine — let him live ! But the mitrailleuse splutters and stutters, and riddles
him into a sieve.
Then I thought of my sins, and sat waiting the charge
that we could not withstand. And I thought of my beautiful Paris, and gave a last
look at the land, At France, my belle France, in her glory of blue sky
and green field and wood. Death with honor, but never surrender. And to die
with such men — it was good.
They are forming — the bugles are blaring — they will cross in a moment and then . . .
When out of the line of the Royals (your island, mon ami, breeds men)
144 INCIDENTS AND ASPECTS
Burst a private, a tawny -haired giant — it was hope- less, but, del I how he ran!
Bon Dieu please remember the pattern, and mak( many more on his plan!
No cheers from our ranks, and the Germans, they halted in wonderment too;
See, he reaches the bridge; ah! he lights it! I am dream- ing, it cannot be true.
Screams of rage ! Fusillade ! They have killed him ! Too late though, the good work is done.
By the valor of twelve English martyrs, the Hell- Gate of Soissons is won!
Herbert Kaufman
THE VIRGIN OF ALBERT
(Notre Dame de Brebieres)
Shyly expectant, gazing up at Her,
They linger, Gaul and Briton, side by side: Death they know well, for daily have they died,
Spending their boyhood ever bravelier;
They wait: here is no priest or chorister, Birds skirt the stricken tower, terrified; Desolate, empty, is the Eastertide,
Yet still they wait, watching the Babe and Her.
Broken, the Mother stoops: the brutish foe
Hurled with dull hate his bolts, and down She swayed,
Down, till She saw the toiling swarms below, — Platoons, guns, transports, endlessly arrayed:
"Women are woe for them! let Me be theirs,
And comfort them, and hearken all their prayers!"
George Herbert Clarke
A LETTER FROM THE FRONT 115
RETREAT
Broken, bewildered by the long retreat
Across the stifling leagues of southern plain, Across the scorching leagues of trampled grain,
Half-stunned, half -blinded, by the trudge of feet
And dusty smother of the August heat, He dreamt of flowers in an English lane, Of hedgerow flowers glistening after rain —
All-heal and willow-herb and meadow-sweet.
All-heal and willow-herb and meadow-sweet — The innocent names kept up a cool refrain —
All-heal and willow-herb and meadow-sweet, Chiming and tinkling in his aching brain, Until he babbled like a child again —
"All-heal and willow-herb and meadow-sweet."
Wilfrid V/ilson Gibson
A LETTER FROM THE FRONT
I was out early to-day, spying about
From the top of a haystack — such a lovely morning —
And when I mounted again to canter back
1 saw across a field in the broad sunlight
A young Gunner Subaltern, stalking along
With a rook-rifle held at the ready, and — would you
believe it? — A domestic cat, soberly marching besfde him.
So I laughed, and felt quite well disposed to the
youngster, And shouted out "the top of the morning" to him,
146 INCIDENTS AND ASPECTS
And wished him "Good sport!" — and then I re- membered My rank, and his, and what I ought to be doing: And I rode nearer, and added, "I can only suppose You have not seen the Commander-in-Chief's order Forbidding English officers to annoy their Allies By hunting and shooting."
But he stood and saluted And said earnestly, "I beg your pardon, Sir, I was only going out to shoot a sparrow To feed my cat with."
So there was the whole picture, The lovely early morning, the occasional shell Screeching and scattering past us, the empty land- scape, — Empty, except for the young Gunner saluting, And the cat, anxiously watching his every movement.
I may be wrong, and I may have told it badly, But it struck me as being extremely ludicrous.
Henry Newbolt
RHEIMS CATHEDRAL — 1914
A winged death has smitten dumb thy bells,
And poured them molten from thy tragic towers : Now are the windows dust that were thy flower?
Patterned like frost, petalled like asphodels.
Gone are the angels and the archangels,
The saints, the little lamb above thy door, The shepherd Christ! They are not, any more,
Save in the soul where exiled beauty dwells.
RHEIMS CATHEDRAL— 1914 147
But who has heard within thy vaulted gloom That old divine insistence of the sea,
When music flows along the sculptured stone In tides of prayer, for him thy windows bloom Like faithful sunset, warm immortally!
Thy bells live on, and Heaven is in their tone!
Grace Hazard Conkling
POETS MILITANT
(The authors of the poems included in this section are or were on active service.)
I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH
I have a rendezvous with Death At some disputed barricade, When Spring comes back with rustling shade And apple-blossoms fill the air — I have a rendezvous with Death When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand And lead me into his dark land And close my eyes and quench my breath — It may be I shall pass him still. I have a rendezvous with Death On some scarred slope of battered hill, When Spring comes round again this year And the first meadow-flowers appear.
God knows 't were better to be deep Pillowed in silk and scented down, Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath, Where hushed awakenings are dear . . . But I've a rendezvous with Death At midnight in some flaming town, When Spring trips north again this year, And I to my pledged word am true, I shall not fail that rendezvous.
Alan Seeger
152 POETS MILITANT
THE SOLDIER
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there 's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave once her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Rupert Brooke
EX PEC TANS EXPECT AVI
From morn to midnight, all day through, I laugh and play as others do, I sin and chatter, just the same As others with a different name.
And all year long upon the stage, I dance and tumble and do rage So vehemently, I scarcely see The inner and eternal me.
I have a temple I do not Visit, a heart I have forgot,
THE VOLUNTEER 153
A self that I have never met,
A secret shrine — and yet, and yet
This sanctuary of my soul Unwitting I keep white and whole, Unlatched and lit, if Thou should'st care To enter or to tarry there.
With parted lips and outstretched hands And listening ears Thy servant stands, Call Thou early, call Thou late, To Thy great service dedicate.
Charles Hamilton Sorley May, 1915
THE VOLUNTEER
Here lies a clerk who half his life had spent Toiling at ledgers in a city grey, Thinking that so his days would drift away With no lance broken in life's tournament: Yet ever 'twixt the books and his bright eyes The gleaming eagles of the legions came, And horsemen, charging under phantom skies, Went thundering past beneath the oriflamme.
And now those waiting dreams are satisfied; From twilight to the halls of dawn he went; His lance is broken; but he lies content With that high hour, in which he lived and died. And falling thus he wants no recompense, Who found his battle in the last resort; Nor needs he any hearse to bear him hence, Who goes to join the men of Agineourt.
Herbert Asquith
154, POETS MILITANT
INTO BATTLE
The naked earth is warm with Spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees Leans to the sun's gaze glorying,
And quivers in the sunny breeze; And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light,
And a striving evermore for these; And he is dead who will not fight;
And who dies fighting has increase.
The fighting man shall from the sun
Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth; Speed with the light-foot winds to run,
And with the trees to newer birth; And find, when fighting shall be done,
Great rest, and fullness after dearth.
All the bright company of Heaven Hold him in their high comradeship,
The Dog-Star, and the Sisters Seven, Orion's Belt and sworded hip.
The woodland trees that stand together, They stand to him each one a friend;
They gently speak in the windy weather; They guide to valley and ridges' end.
The kestrel hovering by day,
And the little owls that call by night,
Bid him be swift and keen as they, As keen of ear, as swift of sight.
THE CRICKETERS OF FLANDERS 155
The blackbird sings to him, "Brother, brother, If this be the last song you shall sing,
Sing well, for you may not sing another; Brother, sing."
In dreary, doubtful, waiting hours,
Before the brazen frenzy starts, The horses show him nobler powers;
O patient eyes, courageous hearts!
And when the burning moment breaks, And all things else are out of mind,
And only Joy-of -Battle takes
Him by the throat, and makes him blind,
Through joy and blindness he shall know, Not caring much to know, that still
Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so That it be not the Destined Will.
The thundering line of battle stands, And in the air Death moans and sings;
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
And Night shall fold him in soft wings.
Julian Grenfell Flanders, April, 1915
THE CRICKETERS OF FLANDERS
The first to climb the parapet With "cricket balls" in either hand; The first to vanish in the smoke Of God-forsaken No Man's Land;
156 POETS MILITANT
First at the wire and soonest through. First at those red-mouthed hounds of hell, The Maxims, and the first to fall, — They do their bit and do it well.
Full sixty yards I've seen them throw With all that nicety of aim They learned on British cricket-fields. Ah, bombing is a Briton's game! Shell-hole to shell-hole, trench to trench, "Lobbing them over" with an eye As true as though it were a game And friends were having tea close by.
Pull down some art-offending thing Of carven stone, and in its stead Let splendid bronze commemorate These men, the living and the dead. No figure of heroic size, Towering skyward like a god; But just a lad who might have stepped From any British bombing squad.
His shrapnel helmet set atilt,
His bombing waistcoat sagging low,
His rifle slung across his back:
Poised in the very act to throw.
And let some graven legend tell
Of those weird battles in the West
Wherein he put old skill to use,
And played old games with sterner zest.
Thus should he stand, reminding those In less-believing days, perchance,
ALL THE HILLS AND VALES 157
How Britain's fighting cricketers Helped bomb the Germans out of France. And other eyes than ours would see; And other hearts than ours would thrill; And others say, as we have said: "A sportsman and a soldier still!"
James Norman Hall
"ALL THE HILLS AND VALES ALONG"
All the hills and vales along Earth is bursting into song, And the singers are the chaps Who are going to die perhaps.
O sing, marching men,
Till the valleys ring again.
Give your gladness to earth's keeping,
So be glad, when you are sleeping.
Cast away regret and rue, Think what you are marching to. Little live, great pass. Jesus Christ and Barabbas Were found the same day. This died, that went his way.
So sing with joyful breath.
For why, you are going to death.
Teeming earth will surely store
All the gladness that you pour.
Earth that never doubts nor fears, Earth that knows of death, not tears,
158 POETS MILITANT
Earth that bore with joyful ease Hemlock for Socrates, Earth that blossomed and was glad 'Neath the cross that Christ had, Shall rejoice and blossom too When the bullet reaches you.
Wherefore, men marching
On the road to death, sing!
Pour your gladness on earth's head,
So be merry, so be dead.
From the hills and valleys earth
Shouts back the sound of mirth,
Tramp of feet and lilt of song
Ringing all the road along.
All the music of their going,
Ringing, swinging, glad song-throwing,
Earth will echo still, when foot
Lies numb and voice mute. On, marching men, on To the gates of death with song. Sow your gladness for earth's reaping, So you may be glad, though sleeping. Strew your gladness on earth's bed, So be merry, so be dead.
Charles Hamilton Sorley
NO MAN'S LAND
No Man's Land is an eerie sight At early dawn in the pale gray light. Never a house and never a hedge In No Man's Land from edge to edge,
NO MAN'S LAND 159
And never a living soul walks there To taste the fresh of the morning air; — Only some lumps of rotting clay, That were friends or foemen yesterday.
What are the bounds of No Man's Land? You can see them clearly on either hand, A mound of rag-bags gray in the sun, Or a furrow of brown where the earthworks run From the eastern hills to the western sea, Through field or forest o'er river and lea; No man may pass them, but aim you well And Death rides across on the bullet or shell.
But No Man's Land is a goblin sight When patrols crawl over at dead o' night; Boche or British, Belgian or French, You dice with death when you cross the trench. When the "rapid," like fireflies in the dark, Flits down the parapet spark by spark, And you drop for cover to keep your head With your face on the breast of the four months' dead.
The man who ranges in No Man's Land Is dogged by the shadows on either hand When the star-shell's flare, as it bursts o'erhead, Scares the gray rats that feed on the dead, And the bursting bomb or the bayonet-snatch May answer the click of your safety-catch, For the lone patrol, with his life in his hand, Is hunting for blood in No Man's Land.
James H. Knight- Adlcin
160 POETS MILITANT
CHAMPAGNE, 1914-15
In the glad revels, in the happy fetes,
When cheeks are flushed, and glasses gilt and pearled With the sweet wine of France that concentrates
The sunshine and the beauty of the world,
Drink sometimes, you whose footsteps yet may tread The undisturbed, delightful paths of Earth,
To those whose blood, in pious duty shed,
Hallows the soil where that same wine had birth.
Here, by devoted comrades laid away,
Along our lines they slumber where they fell,
Beside the crater at the Ferme d 'Alger And up the bloody slopes of La Pompelle,
And rounds the city whose cathedral towers The enemies of Beauty dared profane,
And in the mat of multicolored flowers
That clothe the sunny chalk-fields of Champagne.
Under the little crosses where they rise
The soldier rests. Now round him undismayed
The cannon thunders, and at night he lies At peace beneath the eternal fusillade . . .
That other generations might possess —
From shame and menace free in years to come —
A richer heritage of happiness,
He marched to that heroic martyrdom.
Esteeming less the forfeit that he paid
Than undishonored that his flag might float
CHAMPAGNE, 1814-15 161
Over the towers of liberty, he made
His breast the bulwark and his blood the moat.
Obscurely sacrificed, his nameless tomb, Bare of the sculptor's art, the poet's lines,
Summer shall flush with poppy-fields in bloom, And Autumn yellow with maturing vines.
There the grape-pickers at their harvesting Shall lightly tread and load their wicker trays,
Blessing his memory as they toil and sing In the slant sunshine of October days . . .
I love to think that if my blood should be So privileged to sink where his has sunk,
I shall not pass from Earth entirely,
But when the banquet rings, when healths are drunk.
And faces that the joys of living fill
Glow radiant with laughter and good cheer,
In beaming cups some spark of me shall still Brim toward the lips that once I held so dear.
So shall one coveting no higher plane
Than nature clothes in color and flesh and tone, Even from the grave put upward to attain
The dreams youth cherished and missed and might have known;
And that strong need that strove unsatisfied Toward earthly beauty in all forms it wore,
Not death itself shall utterly divide
From the beloved shapes it thirsted for.
162 POETS MILITANT
Alas, how many an adept for whose arms Life held delicious offerings perished here,
How many in the prime of all that charms,
Crowned with all gifts that conquer and endear !
Honor them not so much with tears and flowers, But you with whom the sweet fulfilment lies,
Where in the anguish of atrocious hours
Turned their last thoughts and closed their dying eyes,
Rather when music on bright gatherings lays Its tender spell, and joy is uppermost,
Be mindful of the men they were, and raise Your glasses to them in one silent toast.
■ Drink to them — amorous of dear Earth as well,
They asked no tribute lovelier than this —
And in the wine that ripened where they fell,
Oh, frame your lips as though it were a kiss.
Alan Seeger Champagne, France, July, 1915
HEADQUARTERS
A league and a league from the trenches — from the
traversed maze of the lines, Where daylong the sniper watches and daylong the
bullet whines, And the cratered earth is in travail with mines ano
with countermines —
HEADQUARTERS 163
Here, where haply some woman dreamed, (are those
her roses that bloom In the garden beyond the windows of my littered
working-room ?) We have decked the map for our masters as a bride is
decked for the groom.
Fair, on each lettered numbered square- — crossroad
and mound and wire, Loophole, redoubt, and emplacement — lie the targets
their mouths desire; Gay with purples and browns and blues, have we
traced them their arcs of fire.
And ever the type-keys chatter; and ever our keen
wires bring Word from the watchers a-crouch below, word from
the watchers a-wing: And ever we hear the distant growl of our hid guns
thundering.
Hear it hardly, and turn again to our maps, where the
trench lines crawl, Red on the gray and each with a sign for the ranging
shrapnel's fall — Snakes that our masters shall scotch at dawn, as is
written here on the wall.
For the weeks of our waiting draw to a close. . . .
There is scarcely a leaf astir In the garden beyond my windows, where the twilight
shadows blur The blaze of some woman's roses. . . .
" Bombardment orders, sir." Gilbert FranJcau
164 POETS MILITANT
HOME THOUGHTS FROM LAVENTIE
Geeen gardens in Laventie!
Soldiers only know the street
Where the mud is churned and splashed about
By battle-wending feet; And yet beside one stricken house there is a glimpse of grass —
Look for it when you pass.
Beyond the church whose pitted spire
Seems balanced on a strand
Of swaying stone and tottering brick,
Two roofless ruins stand; And here, among the wreckage, where the back-wall should have been,
We found a garden green.
The grass was never trodden on,
The little path of gravel
Was overgrown with celandine;
No other folk did travel Along its weedy surface but the nimble-footed mouse.
Running from house to house.
So all along the tender blades
Of soft and vivid grass
We lay, nor heard the limber wheels
That pass and ever pass In noisy continuity until their stony rattle
Seems in itself a battle.
THOUGHTS FROM LAVENTIE 165
At length we rose up from this ease
Of tranquil happy mind,
And searched the garden's little length
Some new pleasaunce to find; And there some yellow daffodils, and jasmine hanging high,
Did rest the tired eye.
The fairest and most fragrant Of the many sweets we found Was a little bush of Daphne flower
Upon a mossy mound, And so thick were the blossoms set and so divine the scent,
That we were well content.
Hungry for Spring I bent my head, The perfume fanned my face, And all my soul was dancing
In that lovely little place, Dancing with a measured step from wrecked and shattered towns
Away . . . upon the Downs.
I saw green banks of daffodil,
Slim poplars in the breeze,
Great tan-brown hares in gusty March
A-courting on the leas. &nd meadows, with their glittering streams — and silver-scurrying dace — Home, what a perfect place!
E. Wyndham Tennant
166 POETS MILITANT
A PETITION
All that a man might ask thou hast given me, England,
Birthright and happy childhood's long heart's-ease, And love whose range is deep beyond all sounding
And wider than all seas: A heart to front the world and find God in it,
Eyes blind enow but not too blind to see The lovely things behind the dross and darkness,
And lovelier things to be; And friends whose loyalty time nor death shall weaken
And quenchless hope and laughter's golden store — All that a man might ask thou hast given me, England,
Yet grant thou one thing more : That now when envious foes would spoil thy splendour,
Unversed in arms, a dreamer such as I, May in thy ranks be deemed not all unworthy,
England, for thee to die.
Robert Ernest Vernede
FULFILMENT
Was there love once? I have forgotten her. Was there grief once? Grief yet is mine. Other loves I have, men rough, but men who stir More grief, more joy, than love of thee and thiner
Faces cheerful, full of whimsical mirth, Lined by the wind, burned by the sun; Bodies enraptured by the abounding earth, As whose children we are brethren: one.
THE DAY'S MARCH 167
And any moment may descend hot death To shatter limbs! Pulp, tear, blast Beloved soldiers who love rough life and breath Not less for dying faithful to the last.
O the fading eyes, the grimed face turned bony,
Oped mouth gushing, fallen head,
Lessening pressure of a hand, shrunk, clammed and
stony ! O sudden spasm, release of the dead!
Was there love once? I have forgotten her. Was there grief once? Grief yet is mine. O loved, living, dying, heroic soldier, All, all my joy, my grief, my love, are thine.
Robert Nichols
THE DAY'S MARCH
The battery grides and jingles, Mile succeeds to mile; Shaking the noonday sunshine The guns lunge out awhile, And then are still awhile.
We amble along the highway; The reeking, powdery dust Ascends and cakes our faces With a striped, sweaty crust.
Under the still sky's violet The heat throbs on the air . . . The white road's dusty radiance Assumes a dark glare.
168 POETS MILITANT
With a head hot and heavy, And eyes that cannot rest, And a black heart burning In a stifled breast,
I sit in the saddle,
I feel the road unroll,
And keep my senses straightened
Toward to-morrow's goal.
There, over unknown meadows Which we must reach at last, Day and night thunders A black and chilly blast.
Heads forget heaviness, Hearts forget spleen, For by that mighty winnowing Being is blown clean.
Light in the eyes again, Strength in the hand, A spirit dares, dies, forgives, And can understand!
And, best! Love comes back again After grief and shame, And along the wind of death Throws a clean flame.
The battery grides and jingles, Mile succeeds to mile;
THE SIGN 169
Suddenly battering the silence The guns burst out awhile . . .
I lift my head and smile.
Robert Nichols
THE SIGN
We are here in a wood of little beeches: And the leaves are like black lace Against a sky of nacre.
One bough of clear promise Across the moon.
It is in this wise that God speaketh unto me. He layeth hands of healing upon my flesh, Stilling it in an eternal peace, Until my soul reaches out myriad and infinite
hands Toward him, And is eased of its hunger.
And I know that this passes :
This implacable fury and torment of men,
As a thing insensate and vain:
And the stillness hath said unto me,
Over the tumult of sounds and shaken flame,
Out of the terrible beauty of wrath,
/ alone am eternal.
One bough of clear promise Across the moon.
Frederic Manning
170 POETS MILITANT
THE TRENCHES
Endless lanes sunken in the clay,
Bays, and traverses, fringed with wasted herbage,
Seed-pods of blue scabious, and some lingering blooms;
And the sky, seen as from a well,
Brilliant with frosty stars.
We stumble, cursing, on the slippery duck-boards.
Goaded like the damned by some invisible wrath,
A will stronger than weariness, stronger than animal
fear, Implacable and monotonous.
Here a shaft, slanting, and below
A dusty and nickering light from one feeble candle
And prone figures sleeping uneasily,
Murmuring,
And men who cannot sleep,
With faces impassive as masks,
Bright, feverish eyes, and drawn lips,
Sad, pitiless, terrible faces,
Each an incarnate curse.
Here in a bay, a helmeted sentry
Silent and motionless, watching while two sleep,
And he sees before him
With indifferent eyes the blasted and torn land
Peopled with stiff prone forms, stupidly rigid,
As tho' they had not been men.
Dead are the lips where love laughed or sang, The hands of youth eager to lay hold of life, Eyes that have laughed to eyes,
SONNETS 171
And these were begotten,
O Love, and lived lightly, and burnt
With the lust of a man's first strength: ere they were
rent, Almost at unawares, savagely; and strewn In bloody fragments, to be the carrion Of rats and crows.
And the sentry moves not, searching Night for menace with weary eyes.
Frederic Manning
SONNETS
I
I see across the chasm of flying years The pyre of Dido on the vacant shore; I see Medea's fury and hear the roar
Of rushing flames, the new bride's burning tears;
And ever as still another vision peers
Thro' memory's mist to stir me more and more, I say that surely I have lived before
And known this joy and trembled with these fears.
The passion that they show me burns so high;
Their love, in me who have not looked on love, So fiercely flames; so wildly comes the cry
Of stricken women the warrior's call above, That I would gladly lay me down and die
To wake again where Helen and Hector move.
172 POETS MILITANT
II
The falling rain is music overhead,
The dark night, lit by no intruding star,
Fit covering yields to thoughts that roam afar
And turn again familiar paths to tread,
Where many a laden hour too quickly sped In happier times, before the dawn of war, Before the spoiler had whet his sword to mar
The faithful living and the mighty dead.
It is not that my soul is weighed with woe, But rather wonder, seeing they do but sleep. As birds that in the sinking summer sweep
Across the heaven to happier climes to go,
So they are gone; and sometimes we must weep,
And sometimes, smiling, murmur, "Be it so!"
Henry William Hutchinson
THE MESSINES ROAD
I
The road that runs up to Messines
Is double-locked with gates of fire,
Barred with high ramparts, and between The unbridged river, and the wire.
None ever goes up to Messines,
For Death lurks all about the town,
Death holds the vale as his demesne,
And only Death moves up and down.
THE MESSINES ROAD 173
II
Choked with wild weeds, and overgrown With rank grass, all torn and rent
By war's opposing engines, strewn
With debris from each day's event!
And in the dark the broken trees,
Whose arching boughs were once its shade, Grim &ad distorted, ghostly ease
In groans their souls vexed and afraid.
Yet here the farmer drove his cart,
Here friendly folk would meet and pass,
Here bore the good wife eggs to mart
And oU and young walked up to Mass.
Here schoolboys lingered in the way,
Here the bent packman laboured by,
And lovers at the end o' the day
Whispered their secret blushingly.
A goodly road for simple needs,
An avenue to praise and paint, Kept by fair us* from wreck and weeds,
Blessed by the shrine of its own saint.
HI
The road that snns up to Messines f
Ah, how we guard it day and night!
And how they guard it, who o'erween A stricken people, with their might!
174 POETS MILITANT
But we shall go up to Messines
Even thro' that fire-defended gate.
Over and thro' all else between
And give the highway back its state.
J. E. Stewart
THE CHALLENGE OF THE GUNS
By day, by night, along the lines their dull boom rings, And that reverberating roar its challenge flings. Not only unto thee across the narrow sea, But from the loneliest vale in the last land's heart The sad-eyed watching mother sees her sons depart.
And freighted full the tumbling waters of ocean are With aid for England from England's sons afar. The glass is dim; we see not wisely, far, nor well, But bred of English bone, and reared on Freedom's
wine, All that we have and are we lay on England's shrine.
A. N. Field
THE BEACH ROAD BY THE WOOD
I know a beach road,
A road where I would go,
It runs up northward
From Cooden Bay to Hoe;
And there, in the High Woods, Daffodils grow.
And whoever walks along there Stops short and sees,
BEACH ROAD BY THE WOOD 175
By the moist tree-roots
In a clearing of the trees, Yellow great battalions of them,
Blowing in the breeze.
While the spring sun brightens,
And the dull sky clears, They blow their golden trumpets,
Those golden trumpeteers! They blow their golden trumpets
And they shake their glancing spears.
And all the rocking beech-trees Are bright with buds again,
And the green and open spaces Are greener after rain,
And far to southward one can hear The sullen, moaning rain.
Once before I die
I will leave the town behind, The loud town, the dark town
That cramps and chills the mind, And I'll stand again bareheaded there
In the sunlight and the wind.
Yes, I shall stand
Where as a boy I stood Above the dykes and levels
In the beach road by the wood, And I'll smell again the sea breeze,
Salt and harsh and good.
176 POETS MILITANT
And there shall rise to me
From that consecrated ground The old dreams, the lost dreams
That years and cares have drowned: Welling up within me
And above me and around The song that I could never sing
And the face I never found.
Geoffrey Howard
GERMAN PRISONERS
When first I saw you in the curious street
Like some platoon of soldier ghosts in grey,
My mad impulse was all to smite and slay,
To spit upon you — tread you 'neath my feet.
But when I saw how each sad soul did greet
My gaze with no sign of defiant frown,
How from tired eyes looked spirits broken down,
How each face showed the pale flag of defeat,
And doubt, despair, and disillusionment,
And how were grievous wounds on many a head,
And on your garb red-faced was other red;
And how you stooped as men whose strength was spent,
I knew that we had suffered each as other,
And could have grasped your hand and cried, "My
brother!" T , T
Joseph Lee
"—BUT A SHORT TIME TO LIVE"
Oue little hour, — how swift it flies When poppies flare and lilies smile;
How soon the fleeting minute dies, Leaving us but a little while
BUT A SHORT TIME TO LIVE 177
To dream our dream, to sing our song, To pick the fruit, to pluck the flower,
The Gods — They do not give us long, — One little hour.
Our little hour, — how short it is
When Love with dew-eyed loveliness Raises her lips for ours to kiss
And dies within our first caress. Youth flickers out like wind-blown flame,
Sweets of to-day to-morrow sour, For Time and Death, relentless, claim
Our little hour.
Our little hour, — how short a time
To wage our wars, to fan our hates, To take our fill of armoured crime,
To troop our banners, storm the gates. Blood on the sword, our eyes blood-red,
Blind in our puny reign of power, Do we forget how soon is sped
Our little hour?
Our little hour, — how soon it dies :
How short a time to tell our beads, To chant our feeble Litanies,
To think sweet thoughts, to do good deeds. The altar lights grow pale and dim,
The bells hang silent in the tower — So passes with the dying hymn
Our little hour.
Leslie Coulson
H8 POETS MILITANT
BEFORE ACTION
By all the glories of the day, And the cool evening's benison: By the last sunset touch that lay Upon the hills when day was done t By beauty lavishly outpoured, And blessings carelessly received, By all the days that I have lived, Make me a soldier, Lord.
By all of all men's hopes and fears, And all the wonders poets sing, The laughter of unclouded years, And every sad and lovely thing: By the romantic ages stored With high endeavour that was his, By all his mad catastrophes, Make me a man, O Lord.
I, that on my familiar hill Saw with uncomprehending eyes A hundred of Thy sunsets spill Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice, Ere the sun swings his noonday sword Must say good-bye to all of this: — By all delights that I shall miss, Help me to die, O Lord.
William Noel Hodgson (" Edward Melbourne ")
OPTIMISM 179
COURAGE
Alone amid the battle-din untouched
Stands out one figure beautiful, serene; No grime of smoke nor reeking blood hath smutched
The virgin brow of this unconquered queen. She is the Joy of Courage vanquishing
The unstilled tremors of the fearful heart; And it is she that bids the poet sing,
And gives to each the strength to bear his part.
Her eye shall not be dimmed, but as a flame Shall light the distant ages with its fire,
That men may know the glory of her name, That purified our souls of fear's desire.
And she doth calm our sorrow, soothe our pain,
And she shall lead us back to peace again.
Dyneley Hussey
OPTIMISM
At last there '11 dawn the last of the long year, Of the long year that seemed to dream no end, Whose every dawn but turned the world more drear, And slew some hope, or led away some friend. Or be you dark, or buffeting, or blind, We care not, day, but leave not death behind.
The hours that feed on war go heavy-hearted, Death is no fare wherewith to make hearts fain. Oh, we are sick to find that they who started With glamour in their eyes came not again.
180 POETS MILITANT
O day, be long and heavy if you will, But on our hopes set not a bitter heel.
For tiny hopes like tiny flowers of Spring
Will come, though death and ruin hold the land,
Though storms may roar they may not break the wing
Of the earthed lark whose song is ever bland.
Fell year unpitiful, slow days of scorn,
Your kind shall die, and sweeter days be born.
A. Victor Ratclijfe
THE BATTLEFIELD
Around no fire the soldiers sleep to-night, But lie a-wearied on the ice-bound field, With cloaks wrapt round their sleeping forms, to shield
Them from the northern winds. Ere comes the light
Of morn brave men must arm, stern foes to fight. The sentry stands, his limbs with cold congealed; His head a-nod with sleep; he cannot yield,
Though sleep and snow in deadly force unite.
Amongst the sleepers lies the Boy awake.
And wide-eyed plans brave glories that transcend
The deeds of heroes dead; then dreams o'ertake His tired-out brain, and lofty fancies blend
To one grand theme, and through all barriers break To guard from hurt his faithful sleeping friend.
Sydney Oswald
ON LES AURA! 181
"ON LES AURA!"
Soldat Jacques Bonhomme loquitur: See you that stretch of shell-torn mud spotted with
pools of mire, Crossed by a burst abandoned trench and tortured
strands of wire, Where splintered pickets reel and sag and leprous
trench-rats play, That scour the Devil's hunting-ground to seek their
carrion prey? That is the field my father loved, the field that once
was mine, The land I nursed for my child's child as my fathers
did long syne.
See there a mound of powdered stones, all flattened,
smashed, and torn, Gone black with damp and green with slime? — Ere
you and I were born My father's father built a house, a little house and
bare, And there I brought my woman home — that heap of
rubble there! The soil of France! Fat fields and green that bred my
blood and bone! Each wound that scars my bosom's pride burns deeper
than my own.
But yet there is one thing to say — one thing thr^t
pays for all, Whatever lot our bodies know, whatever fate befall,
182 POETS MILITANT
We hold the line! We hold it still! My fields are No
Man's Land, But the good God is debonair and holds us by the
hand. "On les aura /" See there! and there! soaked heaps
of huddled grey! My fields shall laugh — enriched by those who sought
them for a prey.
James H. Knight-Adkin
TO AN OLD LADY SEEN AT A GUEST- HOUSE FOR SOLDIERS
Quiet thou didst stand at thine appointed place, There was no press to purchase — younger grace Attracts the youth of valour. Thou didst not know, Like the old, kindly Martha, to and fro To haste. Yet one could say, "In thine I prize The strength of calm that held in Mary's eyes." And when they came, thy gracious smile so wrought They knew that they were given, not that they bought. Thou didst not tempt to vauntings, and pretence Was dumb before thy perfect woman's sense. Blest who have seen, for they shall ever see The radiance of thy benignity.
Alexander Robertson
THE CASUALTY CLEARING STATION
A bowl of daffodils,
A crimson-quilted bed,
Sheets and pillows white as snow —
White and gold and red —
HILLS OF HOME 183
And sisters moving to and fro, With soft and silent tread.
So all my spirit fills
With pleasure infinite,
And all the feathered wings of rest
Seem flocking from the radiant West
To bear me thro' the night.
See, how they close me in. They, and the sisters' arms. One eye is closed, the other lid Is watching how my spirit slid Toward some red-roofed farms, And having crept beneath them slept Secure from war's alarms.
Gilbert Waterhouse
HILLS OF HOME
Oh! yon hills are filled with sunlight, and the green
leaves paled to gold, And the smoking mists of Autumn hanging faintly
o'er the wold; I dream of hills of other days whose sides I loved to
roam When Spring was dancing through the lanes of those
distant hills of home.
The winds of heaven gathered there as pure and cold
as dew; Wood-sorrel and wild violets along the hedgerows
grew,
184 POETS MILITANT
The blossom on the pear-trees was as white as flakes
of foam In the orchard 'neath the shadow of those distant
hills of home.
The first white frost in the meadow will be shining
there to-day And the furrowed upland glinting warm beside the
woodland way; There, a bright face and a clear hearth will be waiting
when I come, And my heart is throbbing wildly for those distant
hills of home.
Malcolm Hemphrey
AUXILIARIES
THE RED CROSS SPIRIT SPEAKS
Wherever war, with its red woes, Or flood, or fire, or famine goes,
There, too, go I; If earth in any quarter quakes Or pestilence its ravage makes,
Thither I fly.
I kneel behind the soldier's trench,
I walk 'mid shambles' smear and stench,
The dead I mourn; I bear the stretcher and I bend O'er Fritz and Pierre and Jack to mend
What shells have torn.
I go wherever men may dare, I go wherever woman's care
And love can live, Wherever strength and skill can bring Surcease to human suffering,
Or solace give.
I helped upon Haldora's shore; With Hospitaller Knights I bore
The first red cross; I was the Lady of the Lamp; I saw in Solferino's camp
The crimson loss.
188 AUXILIARIES
I am your pennies and your pounds; I am your bodies on their rounds
Of pain afar; I am you, doing what you would If you were only where you could — ■
Your avatar.
The cross which on my arm I wear, The flag which o'er my breast I bear,
Is but the sign Of what you 'd sacrifice for him Who suffers on the hellish rim
Of war's red line.
John Fin ley
CHAPLAIN TO THE FORCES
["I have once more to remark upon the devotion to duty, courage, and contempt of danger which has characterized the work of the Chaplains of the Army throughout this campaign." — Sir John French, in the Neuvs Chapelle dispatch.]
Ambassador of Christ you go Up to the very gates of Hell, Through fog of powder, storm of shell, To speak your Master's message: "Lo, The Prince of Peace is with you still, His peace be with you, His good-will."
It is not small, your priesthood's price,
To be a man and yet stand by,
To hold your life while others die,
To bless, not share the sacrifice,
To watch the strife and take no part —
You with the fire at your heart.
SONG OF THE RED CROSS 189
But yours, for our great Captain Christ,
To know the sweat of agony,
The darkness of Gethsemane,
In anguish for these souls unpriced.
Vicegerent of God's pity you,
A sword must pierce your own soul through.
In the pale gleam of new-born day. Apart in some tree-shadowed place, Your altar but a packing-case, Rude as the shed where Mary lay, Your sanctuary the rain-drenched sod, You bring the kneeling soldier God.
As sentinel you guard the gate
'Twixt life and death, and unto death
Speed the brave soul whose failing breath
Shudders not at the grip of Fate,
But answers, gallant to the end,
" Christ is the Word — and I his friend."
Then God go with you, priest of God,
For all is well and shall be well.
What though you tread the roads of Hell,
Your Captain these same ways has trod.
Above the anguish and the loss
Still floats the ensign of His Cross.
Winifred M. Letts
SONG OF THE RED CROSS
O gracious ones, we bless your name
Upon our bended knee; The voice of love with tongue of flame
Records your charity.
190 AUXILIARIES
Your hearts, your lives right willingly ye gave,
That sacred ruth might shine; Ye fell, bright spirits, brave amongst the brave,
Compassionate, divine.
Example from your lustrous deeds
The conqueror shall take, Sowing sublime and fruitful seeds
Of aidos in this ache. And when our griefs have passed on gloomy wing,
When friend and foe are sped, Sons of a morning to be born shall sing
The radiant Cross of Red; Sons of a morning to be born shall sing
The radiant Cross of Red.
Eden Phillpotts
THE HEALERS
In a vision of the night I saw them,
In the battles of the night. 'Mid the roar and the reeling shadows of blood
They were moving like light,
Light of the reason, guarded
Tense within the will, As a lantern under a tossing of boughs
Burns steady and still.
With scrutiny calm, and with fingers
Patient as swift They bind up the hurts and the pain-writhen
Bodies uplift,
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Un tired and defenceless; around them
With shrieks in its breath' Bursts stark from the terrible horizon
Impersonal death;
But they take not their courage from anger
That blinds the hot being; They take not their pity from weakness;
Tender, yet seeing;
Feeling, yet nerved to the uttermost;
Keen, like steel; Yet the wounds of the mind they are stricken with,
Who shall heal?
They endure to have eyes of the watcher
In hell, and not swerve For an hour from the faith that they follow,
The light that they serve.
Man true to man, to his kindness
That overflows all, To his spirit erect in the thunder
When all his forts fall, —
This light, in the tiger-mad welter,"
They serve and they save. What song shall be worthy to sing of them —
Braver than the brave?
Laurence Binyon
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THE RED CROSS NURSES
Out where the line of battle cleaves The horizon of woe
And sightless warriors clutch the leaves The Red Cross nurses go. In where the cots of agony Mark death's unmeasured tide — Bear up the battle's harvestry — The Red Cross nurses slide.
Look! Where the hell of steel has torn Its way through slumbering earth The orphaned urchins kneel forlorn And wonder at their birth. Until, above them, calm and wise With smile and guiding hand, God looking through their gentle eyes, "The Red Cross nurses stand.
Thomas L. Masson
KEEPING THE SEAS
KILMENY
(A Song of the Trawlers)
Dark, dark lay the drifters, against the red west,
As they shot their long meshes of steel overside; And the oily green waters were rocking to rest
When Kilmeny went out, at the turn of the tide. And nobody knew where that lassie would roam,
For the magic that called her was tapping unseen, It was well nigh a week ere Kilmeny came home,
And nobody knew where Kilmeny had been.
She'd a gun at her bow that was Newcastle's best,
And a gun at her stern that was fresh from the Clyde, And a secret her skipper had never confessed,
Not even at dawn, to his newly wed bride; And a wireless that whispered above like a gnome,
The laughter of London, the boasts of Berlin. O, it may have been mermaids that lured her from home,
But nobody knew where Kilmeny had been.
It was dark when Kilmeny came home from her quest, With her bridge dabbled red where her skipper had died; But she moved like a bride with a rose at her breast; And "Well done, Kilmeny!" the admiral cried.
196 KEEPING THE SEAS
Now at sixty-four fathom a conger may come, And nose at the bones of a drowned submarine;
But late in the evening Kilmeny came home, And nobody knew where Kilmeny had been.
There's a wandering shadow that stares at the foam, Though they sing all the night to old England, their queen, Late, late in the evening Kilmeny came home, And nobody knew where Kilmeny had been.
Alfred Noyes
THE MINE-SWEEPERS
Dawn off the Foreland — the young flood making
Jumbled and short and steep — Black in the hollows and bright where it 's breaking —
Awkward water to sweep.
" Mines reported in the fairway,
Warn all traffic and detain. Sent up Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, Stormcock, and Golden Gain."
Noon off the Foreland — the first ebb making
Lumpy and strong in the bight. Boom after boom, and the golf-hut shaking
And the jackdaws wild with fright.
"Mines located in the fairway,
Boats now working up the chain, Sweepers — Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, Stormcock, and Golden Gain."
Dusk off the Foreland — the last light going And the traffic crowding through,
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And five damned trawlers with their syreens blowing Heading the whole review! "Sweep completed in the fairway. No more mines remain. Sent back Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, Stormcock, and Golden Gain."
Rudyard Kipling
MARE LIBERUM
You dare to say with perjured lips,
"We fight to make the ocean free"?
You, whose black trail of butchered ships Bestrews the bed of every sea Where German submarines have wrought Their horrors ! Have you never thought, — ■
What you call freedom, men call piracy!
Unnumbered ghosts that haunt the wave
Where you have murdered, cry you down; And seamen whom you would not save,
Weave now in weed-grown depths a crowtf Of shame for your imperious head, — A dark memorial of the dead, — Women and children whom you left to drown- Nay, not till thieves are set to guard
The gold, and corsairs called to keep O'er peaceful commerce watch and ward, And wolves to herd the helpless sheep, Shall men and women look to thee — Thou ruthless Old Man of the Sea — To safeguard law and freedom on the deep!
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In nobler breeds we put our trust:
The nations in whose sacred lore The "Ought" stands out above the "Must," And Honor rules in peace and war. With these we hold in soul and heart, With these we choose our lot and part, Till Liberty is safe on sea and shore.
Henry van Dyke February 11, 1917
THE DAWN PATROL
Sometimes I fly at dawn