The White Comrade, and Other Poems

BY KATHERINE HALE
Author of Grey Knitting
Cover Design by DOROTHY STEVENS
MCCLELLAND, GOODCHILD & STEWART PUBLISHERS : : : : TORONTO
COPYRIGHT CANADA, 1916 MCCLELLAND, GOODCHILD & STEWART, LIMITED TORONTO
PRINTED IN CANADA
Contents
A Canadian soldier, wounded at Ypres, speaks
So this green land is England! Her we saw Radiant and smiling in our early dreams, A land by love dream-haunted. Now we come With stranger vision than our youth could give To the great shelter of her mighty arms. We come from battles bitter and long fought To see the stars shining on village streets And watch a country in midsummer calm— A soft land, lying August-clad but chill, Dull to Canadian eyes that know the sun As it stalks red across an azure sky. And as we limp about and smoke, play cards, And wait impatient to be off again, Sometimes we two, amid the comrades here,— Two only of the three who started out, For, in the wood at Julien, Edward fell— Sometimes we two go silent, then look up To see if we can find in others' eyes A knowledge that has grown with us from out The fields of France, when in those awful nights, Some of us heard a rumor, saw a Form.

Then we look back unto that strange new hour When time was suddenly transformed for us Within a sleepy town near old Quebec. We, sunburned, and already turning home From a long forest tramp of two good weeks, We who were friends together, town and school And lives in common, knitting us akin. We had been tramping through the distant hills Far out of reach of papers and of news And when we stopped for letters, it was there We met the first surprising note of war: A little bill-board like a clarion voice Shouted to us on that midsummer day, Germany says! And on and on and on The fateful message ran. We turned and stared Into each other's eyes in blank amaze. Germany says! In two short weeks of time Hidden by forests as we three had been Could all the world be humbled so that news Of Germany, and what she says or does Or does not say or do, could raise the storm Whose thunders shook us even from afar. Belgium is entered! England is prepared! Canada mobilizing! Oh, ye gods, What things to read upon a little board Tacked up above the place where letters lie!