Excerpt
Foreword I've tinkered at my bits of rhymesIn weary, woeful, waiting times;In doleful hours of battle-din,Ere yet they brought the wounded in;Through vigils of the fateful night,In lousy barns by candle-light;In dug-outs, sagging and aflood,On stretchers stiff and bleared with blood;By ragged grove, by ruined road,By hearths accurst where Love abode;By broken altars, blackened shrinesI've tinkered at my bits of rhymes.I've solaced me with scraps of songThe desolated ways along:Through sickly fields all shrapnel-sown,And meadows reaped by death alone;By blazing cross and splintered spire,By headless Virgin in the mire;By gardens gashed amid their bloom,By gutted grave, by shattered tomb;Beside the dying and the dead,Where rocket green and rocket red,In trembling pools of poising light,With flowers of flame festoon the night.Ah me! by what dark ways of wrongI've cheered my heart with scraps of song.So here's my sheaf of war-won verse,And some is bad, and some is worse.And if at times I curse a bit,You needn't read that part of it;For through it all like horror runsThe red resentment of the guns.And you yourself would mutter whenYou took the things that once were men,And sped them through that zone of hateTo where the dripping surgeons wait;And wonder too if in God's sightWar ever, ever can be right.Yet may it not be, crime and warBut effort misdirected are?And if there's good in war and crime,There may be in my bits of rhyme,My songs from out the slaughter mill:So take or leave them as you will. The Call(France, August first, 1914) Far and near, high and clear,Hark to the call of War!Over the gorse and the golden dells,Ringing and swinging of clamorous bells,Praying and saying of wild farewells:War! War! War!High and low, all must go:Hark to the shout of War!Leave to the women the harvest yield;Gird ye, men, for the sinister field;A sabre instead of a scythe to wield:War! Red War!Rich and poor, lord and boor,Hark to the blast of War!Tinker and tailor and millionaire,Actor in triumph and priest in prayer,Comrades now in the hell out there,Sweep to the fire of War!Prince and page, sot and sage,Hark to the roar of War!Poet, professor and circus clown,Chimney-sweeper and fop o' the town,Into the pot and be melted down:Into the pot of War!Women all, hear the call,The pitiless call of War!Look your last on your dearest ones,Brothers and husbands, fathers, sons:Swift they go to the ravenous guns,The gluttonous guns of War.Everywhere thrill the airThe maniac bells of War.There will be little of sleeping to-night;There will be wailing and weeping to-night;Death's red sickle is reaping to-night:War! War! War! The Fool "But it isn't playing the game," he said,And he slammed his books away;"The Latin and Greek I've got in my headWill do for a duller day.""Rubbish!" I cried; "The bugle's callIsn't for lads from school."D'ye think he'd listen? Oh, not at all:So I called him a fool, a fool....