Oh nothing, oh no nothing
May your resolution shake,
When you’re a First-class Private,
And you know you’re Sitting Jake.
BIRDS OF BATTLE.
Keats sings in peerless stanzas
To the lovely Nightingale—
And Shelley tells of the Skylark
Above the summer gale—
But I to the Birds of Battle
Needs lift my numbers frail.
For far by the out-flung wires,
Where the shell-torn tree stumps stand,
And over the barren, hole-strewn tracks
Of the wastes of No Man’s Land,
In the morning light and the black of night,
The Birds of Battle stand.
No shrieking shots may quell them—
Nor gloom nor storm nor rain,
As out of the crash or stillness
A wondrous, shrill refrain
Cuts clear and glad and lithesome
Above the death-strewn plain.
The weary heavens welcome,
And echo back the song,
And weary soldiers linger,
And pause to listen long
To the one glad cry in a war-torn sky,
That holds so much of wrong.
ONLY FOR YOU.
The torturous hike up the hill road,
Plowing through snow and mud;
The poor weary arches breaking—
The socks that are wet with our blood:
The terrible, binding, burning strap
That’s cutting our shoulder through—
And our parched lips stammer, “My Country,
For you and only for you.”
The slight and the slur and the nagging
We must take from a rowdy or cad;
And we simply salute and say “Yes sir,”
And pretend that we never feel mad:
Though our heart is a forest of hatred—
And justice seems hidden from view—
And we mutter, “For you, oh my Country—
For you, yea, and only for you.”
When all evening long the guns’ reddened glares
Turn night into hellish day,
Till in Berserker rage their silver bursts cut
The drab of the dawn’s growing gray:
When over the top we are starting again—
Full knowing the thing that we do—
We murmur, “For you, oh my Country—
For you, aye and only for you.”