"My Sergeant's plan, Sir"—
"And that's not bad—
But you've lost that ribbon
you wear?"
"It—must have been eaten away
by the Gas!"
"Well—ribbons are ribbons—
but don't be an ass!
It's better to do than dare."
DARE! He has dared to de-
sert his post—
But he daren't acknowledge
his sin!
He has dared to face Wren with
a lying boast—
But Wren is not taken in.
None sings his praises so long
and loud—
With look so loving and loyal
and proud!
But the boy sees under his
skin.
DAILY and gaily he wrote to
his wife,
Who had dropped the beati-
fied droll
And was writing to him on the
Meaning of Life
And the Bonds between Body
and Soul.
Her courage was high—though
she mentioned its height;
She was putting upon her the
Armour of Light—
Including her aureole!
BUT never a helm had the lad
we know,
As he went on his nightly raids
With a brace of his Blighters, an
N. G O.
And a bagful of hand-grenades
And the way he rattled and
harried the Hun—
The deeds he did dare, and the
risks he would run—
Were the gossip of the Bri-
gades.
HOW he'd stand stockstill as
the trunk of a tree,
With his face tucked down
out of sight,
When a flare went up and the
other three
Fell prone in the frightening
light.
How the German sandbags, that
made them quake,
Were the only cover he cared to
take,
But he'd eavesdrop there all
night.
MACHINE-GUNS, tapping
a phrase in Morse,
Grew hot on a random quest,
And swarms of bullets buzzed
down the course
Like wasps from a trampled
nest.
Yet, that last night!
They had just set off
When he pitched on his face with
a smothered cough,
And a row of holes in his chest.
HE left a letter. It saved
the lives
Of the three who ran from the
Gas;
A small enclosure alone survives,
In Middlesex, under glass:
Only the ribbon that left his
breast
On the day he turned and ran
with the rest,
And lied with a lip of brass!
BUT the letters they wrote
about the boy,
From the Brigadier to the
men!
They would never forget dear
Mr. Joy,
Not look on his like again.
Ermyntrude read them with dry,
proud eye.
There was only one letter that
made her cry.
It was from Sergeant Wren:
THERE never was such a fear-
less man,
Or one so beloved as he.
He was always up to some daring
plan,
Or some treat for his men and
me.
There wasn't his match when he
went away;
But since he got back, there has
not been a day
But what he has earned a
V. C
ACYNICAL story? That's
not my view.
The years since he fell are
twain.
What were his chances of coming
through?
Which of his friends remain?
But Ermyntrude's training a
splendid boy
Twenty years younger than En-
sign Joy.
On balance, a British gain!
AND Ermyntrude, did she
lose her all
Or find it, two years ago?
O young girl-wives of the boys
who fall,
With your youth and your
babes to show!
No heart but bleeds for your
widowhood.
Yet Life is with you, and Life is
good.
No bone ofyourbone lies low!
YOUR blessedness came—as
it went—in a day.
Deep dread but heightened
your mirth.
Your idols' feet never turned to
clay—
Never lit upon common earth.
Love is the Game but isnotthe
Goal:
You played it together, body and
soul,
And you had your Candle's
worth.
YES! though the Candle light
a Shrine,
And heart cannot count the
cost,
You are Winners yet in its tender
shine!
Wouldtheychoose to have
lived and lost?
There are chills, you see, for the
finest hearts;
But, once it is only old Death
that parts,
There can never come twinge
of frost.
AND this be our comfort for
Every Boy
Cut down in his high heyday,
Or ever the Sweets of the Morn-
ing cloy,
Or the Green Leaf wither
away;
So a sunlit billow curls to a crest,
And shouts as it breaks at its
loveliest,
In a glory of rainbow spray!
BE it also the making of
Ermyntrude,
And many a hundred more—
Compact of foibles and forti-
tude—
Woo'd, won, and widow'd, in
War.
God, keep us gallant and unde-
filed,
Worthy of Husband, Lover, or
—Child...
Sweet as themselves at the
core!
MISTY and pale the sunlight, brittle and black the
trees;
Roads powdered like sticks of candy for a car to
crunch as they freeze...
Then we overtook a Battalion... and it wasn't
a roadway then,
But cymbals and drums and dulcimers to the
beat of the marching men!
They were laden and groomed for the trenches,
they were shaven and scrubbed and fed;
Like the scales of a single Saurian their helmets
rippled ahead;
Not a sorrowful face beneath them, just the tail
of a scornful eye
For the car full of favoured mufti that went
quacking and quaking by.
You gloat and take note in your motoring coat,
and the sights come fast and thick:
A party of pampered prisoners, toying with shovel
and pick;
A town where some of the houses are so many
heaps of stone,
And some of them steel anatomies picked clean
to the buckled bone.
A road like a pier in a hurricane of mountainous
seas of mud,
Where a few trees, whittled to walking-sticks, rose
out of the frozen flood
Like the masts of the sunken villages that might
have been down below—
Or blown off the festering face of an earth that
God Himself wouldn't know!
Not a yard but was part of a shell-hole—not an
inch, to be more precise—
And most of the holes held water, and all the
water was ice:
They stared at the bleak blue heavens like the
glazed blue eyes of the slain,
Till the snow came, shutting them gently, and
sheeting the slaughtered plain.
Here a pile of derelict rifles, there a couple of
horses lay—
Like rockerless rocking-horses, as wooden of leg
as they,
And not much redder of nostril—not anything
like so grim
As the slinking ghoul of a lean live cat creeping
over the crater's rim!
And behind and beyond and about us were the
long black Dogs of War,
With pigmies pulling their tails for them, and
making the monsters roar
As they slithered back on their haunches, as they
put out their flaming tongues,
And spat a murderous message long leagues from
their iron lungs!
They were kennelled in every corner, and some
were in gay disguise,
But all kept twitching their muzzles and baying
the silvery skies!
A howitzer like a hyena guffawed point-blank at
the car—
But only the sixty - pounder leaves an absolute
aural scar!
(Could a giant but crack a cable as a stockman
cracks his whip,
Or tear up a mile of calico with one unthinkable
r-r-r-r-rip!
Could he only squeak a slate-pencil about the
size of this gun,
You might get some faint idea of its sound, which
is those three sounds in one.)
But certain noises were absent, we looked for
some sights in vain,
And I cannot tell you if shrapnel does really
descend like rain—
Or Big Stuff burst like a bonfire, or bullets
whistle or moan;
But the other figures I'll swear to—if some of
'emaremy own!
Livid and moist the twilight, heavy with snow
the trees,
And a road as of pleated velvet the colour of new
cream-cheese...
Then we overtook a Battalion... and I'm
hunting still for the word
For that gaunt, undaunted, haunted, whitening,
frightening herd!
They had done their tour of the trenches, they
were coated and caked with mud,
And some of them wore a bandage, and some of
them wore their blood!
The gaps in their ranks were many, and none of
them looked at me...
And I thought of no more vain phrases for the
things I was there to see,
But I felt like a man in a prison van where the
rest of the world goes Free.
ALL night they crooned high overhead
As the skies are over men:
I lay and smiled in my cellar bed,
And went to sleep again.
All day they whistled like a lash
That cracked in the trembling town:
I stood and listened for the crash
Of houses thundering down.
In, in they came, three nights and days,
All night and all day long;
It made us learned in their ways
And experts on their song.
Like a noisy clock, or a steamer's screw,
Their beat debauched the ear,
And left it dead to a deafening few
That burst who cared how near?
We only laughed when the flimsy floor
Heaved on the shuddering sod:
But when some idiot slammed a door—
My God!
IT WAS a British Linesman. His face was like a
fist,
His sleeve all stripes and chevrons from the
elbow to the wrist.
Said he to an American (with other words of his):
"It's a big thing you are doing—do you know
how big it is?"
"I guess, Sir," that American inevitably drawled,
"Big Bill's our proposition an' we're goin' for him
bald.
You guys may have him rattled, but I figure it's
for us
To slaughter, quarter, grill or bile, an' masticate
the cuss."
"I hope your teeth," the Linesman said, "are
equal to your tongue—
But that's the sort of carrion that's better when
it's hung.
Yet—the big thing you're doing I should like to
make you see!"
"Our stunt," said that young Yankee, "is to set
the whole world free!"
The Linesman used a venial verb (and other parts
of speech):
"That's just the way the papers talk and
politicians preach!
But apart from gastronomical designs upon the
Hun—
And the rather taller order—there's a big thing
that you'vedone."
"Why, say! The biggest thing on earth, to any
cute onlooker,
Is Old Man Bull and Uncle Sam aboard the
same blamed hooker!
One crew, one port, one speed ahead, steel-true
twin-hearts within her:
One ding-dong English-singin' race—a race
without a winner!"
The boy's a boyish mixture—half high-brow and
half droll:
So brave and naïve and cock-a-hoop—so sure
yet pure of soul!
Behold him bright and beaming as the bride-
groom after church—
The Linesman looking wistful as a rival in the
lurch!
"I'd love to be as young as you—" he doesn't
even swear—
"Love to be joining up anew and spoiling for my
share!
But when your blood runs cold and old, and brain
and bowels squirm,
The only thing to ease you is some fresh blood in
the firm.
"When the war was young, andwewere young,
we felt the same as you:
A few short months of glory—and we didn't care
how few!
French, British and Dominions, it took us all the
same—
Who knows but what the Hun himself enjoyed
his dirty game!
"We tumbled out of tradesmen's carts, we fell off
office stools;
Fathers forsook their families, boys ran away from
schools;
Mothers untied their apron-strings, lovers un-
loosed their arms—
All Europe was a wedding and the bells were
war's alarms!
"The chime had changed—You took a pull—the
old wild peal rings on
With the clamour and the glamour of a Genera-
tion gone.
Their fun—their fire—their hearts' desire—are
born again in You!"
"Thatthe big thing we're doin'?"
"It's as big as Man can do!"
WHEN I lie dying in my bed,
A grief to wife, and child, and friend,—
How I shall grudge you gallant dead
Your sudden, swift, heroic end!
Dear hands will minister to me,
Dear eyes deplore each shallower breath:
You had your battle-cries, you three,
To cheer and charm you to your death.
You did not wane from worse to worst,
Under coarse drug or futile knife,
But in one grand mad moment burst
From glorious life to glorious Life....
These twenty years ago and more,
'Mid purple heather and brown crag,
Our whole school numbered scarce a score,
And three have fallen for the Flag.
* H. P. P.—F. M. J. W. A. C. St. Ninian's, Moffat, 1879-1880; South Africa, 1899-1900.
You two have finished on one side,
You who were friend and foe at play;
Together you have done and died;
But that was where you learnt the way.
And the third face! I see it now,
So delicate and pale and brave.
The clear grey eye, the unruffled brow,
Were ripening for a soldier's grave.
Ah! gallant three, too young to die!
The pity of it all endures.
Yet, in my own poor passing, I
Shall lie and long for such as yours.
AGES ago (as to-day they are reckoned)
I was a lone little, blown little fag:
Panting to heel when Authority beckoned,
Spoiling to write for theUppingham Mag.!
Thirty years on seemed a terrible time then—
Thirty years back seems a twelvemonth or so.
Little I saw myself spinning this rhyme then—
Less do I feel that it's ages ago!
Ages ago that was Somebody's study;
Somebody Else had the study next door.
O their long walks in the fields dry or muddy!
O their long talks in the evenings of yore!
Still, when they meet, the old evergreen fellows
Jaw in the jolly old jargon as though
Both were as slender and sound in the bellows
As they were ages and ages ago!
O but the ghosts at each turn I could show
you!—
Ghosts in low collars and little cloth caps—
Each of 'em now quite an elderly O.U.—
Wiser, no doubt, and as pleasant—perhaps!
That's where poor Jack lit the slide up with
tollies,
Once when the quad was a foot deep in snow—
When a live Bishop was one of the Pollies * —
Ages and ages and ages ago!
Things that were Decent and things that were
Rotten,
How I remember them year after year!
Some—it may be—that were better forgotten:
Some that—it may be—should still draw a
tear...
More, many more, that are good to remember:
Yarns that grow richer, the older they grow:
Deeds that would make a man's ultimate ember
Glow with the fervour of ages ago!
Did we play footer in funny long flannels?
Had we no Corps to give zest to our drill?
Never a Gym lined throughout with pine panels?
Half of your best buildings were quarry-stone
still?