THE CRIMSON YEAR
CHRISTMAS, 1916
From Riga southward to the Horn, fierce beats the iron hail,
Beneath the Pole Star and the Cross, war's Vampire rides the gale.
Across earth's shaken palisades, the red sirocco blows
From sand of Suez in the south to Yukon's northern snows.
And who are these who sally forth—these million doomed to die,
Where scarred between embattled hordes, the scalped hills bloody lie,
Sons of the mothers of the world, each sworn to overwhelm
Legions of men of many climes, from city, farm, and realm.
Sons of the mothers of the Earth, who out of love were born,
Go forth in majesty of health and come back maimed and torn.
Caught in the whirlpool of the war, all raging, battle-swirled,
Boiling and reeling, bloody-foamed, labours the frenzied world.
Who dare cry peace where all is strife; Who bid the conflict cease?
Who dares to kneel beside the crib which thrones the Prince of Peace?
Behold! it is the Christmas time, the feast of Him divine;
How shall we stand with stained hands, and worship at His shrine?
From Verdun's hero-hallowed heights to Belgium's sea-swept dunes,
The land with shell-ripped bosom lifts His temples, heaped in ruins.
What gory harvests here are reaped, of human flesh and bone,
Christ, in thy Christmas time, forgive! Who shall for these atone?
The Serbian hills lie bleak and bare, their people fled or slain;
And through the Iron Gate the storm sweeps the Wallachian plain;
And twice ten thousand thundering guns hurl forth
their screaming shells,
Till Europe seems a place accurst with all its flaming hells.
There is no respite on the land—no safety on the deep,
Where like a school of famished sharks the gaunt subs vigil keep;
While overhead, like vultures huge, the pinioned airships fly,
Wheeling their courses, seeking prey across the glowering sky.
The sky where once His herald glowed, that ushered in His reign,
The earth which hushed to hear of Peace in sweet, seraphic strain,
The water which in olden days, storm-tossed, obeyed His will,
The earth, the waters, and the sky—His—now men mould to kill.
Like human gophers burrowing, whole armies sap and mine,
And foul beneath the winds of God, proud humans rot as swine,
And crimson with the blood of men the streams their courses run:—
God in this Christmas hour forgive! How shall we greet Thy Son?
The rocket's glare shall greet His eyes, the tumult breaks His rest,
And He, the King, shall sorrowed cling unto His mother's breast;
The battle's smoke His star shall dim, the song the angels sing
Shall pass unheard; thus men at war shall greet their Lord and King.
What of the future and mankind while Christian, Christian slays?
How shall we dream of better things amid these saddened days?
There sounds, derisive, from the East, the laughing Pagan lands,
"Go back, false prophets of the Christ, with blood upon your hands."
Behind their Eastern barriers as tigers wait their prey,
The little bead-eyed yellow men sit dreaming of their Day,
When crippled Europe, on a crutch, shall cringe before their power,
And, chained with broken sword, renounce two thousand years of dower.