THE SPIRIT OF WAR
Ho! ho! I come in fury as the storm
And seek earth’s nations east and west.
I breathe the breath of fire within them all,
And lure to arms the proud’st and best.
I swoop down on their gilded palaces,
And shake the monarchs of the world;
I rouse them from their cots of peace and ease
And set their boasting flags unfurled.
Upon the doors of happy homes I knock,
And men of valor do I call
To take the stand against their fellowmen,
To spill their blood and spill it all.
I wend my flight to peaceful, quiet fields
Where tillers ever tireless toil;
I bid them leave their plows and homes behind,
And steel themselves with arms of spoil.
Then nursing babes at mothers’ breasts I touch,
For loud their fathers do I call;
I reck not of their mothers’ tear-stained eyes
When those do in the battle fall.
I sweep o’er peaceful cities great and strong,
Whose towers outtop the blue-ribbed sky;
I give the word to grind out shot and shell
Until they lowly, humble lie.
The mighty nations to my wings I call,—
A hundred million men of war
To struggle helpless ’gainst the sword of death,—
Beneath my spell they fallen are.
O’er Asia’s strand I spread mine eaglet wings,
O’er Austria, England, France and Spain;
Then do I touch Japan and Mexico,
Then back to Europe’s soil again.
My maw is ever empty for their blood,
“On! on!” I cry for newer prey;
My master Mars doth urge me take the field
Myself to slaughter and to slay.
Away with peace and arbitration’s hand,
’Neath whose pale spell I envious quake:
They only dare to cross my boist’rous path;
Them can I never bend nor break.
But on I go, and when my wreak is o’er
And Mars requites me for my pain,
To war’s dead corps and sepulchres I cry:
“Great God, what fools have mortals been!”