* Præpostors.
Ah! but it's not for their looks that you love
them,
Not for the craft of the builder below,
But for the spirit behind and above them—
But for the Spirit of Ages Ago!
Eton may rest on her Field and her River.
Harrow has songs that she knows how to sing.
Winchester slang makes the sensitive shiver.
Rugby had Arnold, but never had Thring!
Repton can put up as good an Eleven.
Marlborough men are the fear of the foe.
All that I wish to remark is—thank Heaven
I was at Uppingham ages ago!
GO LIVE the wide world over—but when you
come to die, .
A quiet English churchyard is the only place to
lie!
I held it half a lifetime, until through war's
mischance
I saw the wooden crosses that fret the fields of
France.
A thrush sings in an oak-tree, and from the old
square tower
A chime as sweet and mellow salutes the idle hour:
Stone crosses take no notice—but the little
wooden ones
Are thrilling every minute to the music of the guns!
Upstanding at attention they face the cannonade,
In apple-pie alinement like Guardsmen on parade:
But Tombstones are Civilians who loll or sprawl
or sway
At every crazy angle and stage of slow decay.
For them the Broken Column—in its plot of
unkempt grass;
The tawdry tinsel garland safeguarded under
glass;
And the Squire's emblazoned virtues, that would
overweight a Saint,
On the vault empaled in iron—scaling red for
want of paint!
The men who die for England don't need it
rubbing in;
An automatic stamper and a narrow strip of tin
Record their date and regiment, their number and
their name—
And the Squire who dies for England is treated
just the same.
So stand the still battalions: alert, austere, serene;
Each with his just allowance of brown earth shot
with green;
None better than his neighbour in pomp or
circumstance—
All beads upon the rosary that turned the fate of
France!
Who says their war is over? While others carry
on,
The little wooden crosses spell but the dead and
gone?
Not while they deck a sky-line, not while they
crown a view,
Or a living soldier sees them and sets his teeth
anew!
The tenants of the churchyard where the singing
thrushes build
Were not, perhaps, all paragons of promise well
fulfilled:
Some failed—through Love, or Liquor—while the
parish looked askance.
But—you cannotdiea Failure if you win a Cross
in France!
The brightest gems of Valour in the Army's
diadem
Are the V.C. and the D.S.O., M.C. and D.C.M.
But those who live to wear them will tell you
they are dross
Beside the Final Honour of a simple Wooden
Cross.