THE BOMBER GIPSY.
Thank you, dear William, I am fairly well.
The climate suits me and the simple life—
Come, let me tell the oft-told tale again
Of that strange Tyneside grenadier we had,
Whom none could quell or decently constrain,
For he was turbulent and sometimes bad,
Yet, stout of heart, he dearly loved to fight,
And spoke his fellows on a gusty night
In some high barn, where, huddled in the straw,
They watched the cheap wicks gutter on the shelf,
How he was irked with discipline and law,
And would fare forth to battle by himself.
This said, he left them and returned no more;
But whispers passed from Vimy to Verdun,
Where'er the fields ran thickliest with gore,
Of some stray bomber that belonged to none,
But none more fierce or flung a fairer bomb,
Who ran unscathed the gamut of the Somme
And followed Freyberg up the Beaucourt mile
With uncouth cries and streaming muddy hair;
But after, when they sought his name and style
And would have honoured him—he was not there.
But most he loved to lie upon Lorette
And, couched on cornflowers, gaze across the lines
At Vimy's heights—we had not Vimy yet—
Pale Souchez's bones and Lens among the mines,
The tall pit-towers and dusky heaps of slag,
Until, like eagles on the mountain-crag
By strangers stirred, with hoarse indignant shrieks
Gunners emerged from some deep-delvéd lair
To chase the intruder from their sacred peaks
And cast him down to Ablain St. Nazaire.
And rumour said he roamed the rearward ways
In quiet seasons when no battle brewed;
The transport, homing through the evening haze,
Had seen and carried him, and given him food;
And he would leave them at Bethune canteen
Or some hot drinking-house at Noeux-les-Mines,
Where he would sit with wine and eggs and bread
Till the swart minions of the A.P.M.
Stole in and called for him, but found him fled
Out at the back. He was too much for them.
Too much. And surely thou shalt e'er be so;
No hungry discipline shall starve thy soul;
Shalt freely foot it where the poppies blow,
Shalt fight unfettered when the cannon roll,
And haply, Wanderer, when the hosts go home,
Thou only still in Aveluy shalt roam,
Haunting the crumbled windmill at Gavrelle
And fling thy bombs across the silent lea,
Drink with shy peasants at St. Catherine's Well
And in the dusk go home with them to tea.
A. P. H.
