II
RESURRECTION
Five million men are dead. How can the worth
Of all the world redeem such waste as this?
And yet the spring is clamorous of birth,
And whispering in winter’s chrysalis
Glad tidings to each clod, each particle of earth.
So the year’s Easter triumphs. Shall we then
Mourn for the dead unduly, and forget
The resurrection in the hearts of men?
Even the poppy on the parapet
Shall blossom as before when Summer blows again.
GOMMECOURT
I
The wind, which heralded the blackening night,
Swirled in grey mists the sulphur-laden smoke.
From sleep, in sparkling instancy of light,
Crouched batteries like grumbling tigers woke
And stretched their iron symmetry; they hurled
Skyward with roar and boom each pregnant shell
Rumbling on tracks unseen. Such tyrants reign
The sullen masters of a mangled world,
Grim-mothered in a womb of furnaced hell,
Wrought, forged, and hammered for the work of pain.
For six long days the common slayers played,
Till, fitfully, there boomed a heavier king,
Who, couched in leaves and branches deftly laid,
And hid in dappled colour of the spring,
Vaunted tornadoes. Far from that covered lair,
Like hidden snares the sinuous trenches lay
Mid fields where nodding poppies show their pride.
The tall star-pointed streamers leap and flare,
And turn the night’s immensity to day;
Or rockets whistle in their upward ride.
II
The moment comes when thrice-embittered fire
Proclaims the prelude to the great attack.
In ruined heaps, torn saps and tangled wire
And battered parapets loom gaunt and black:
The flashes fade, the steady rattle dies,
A breathless hush brings forth a troubled day,
And men of sinew, knit to charge and stand,
Rise up. But he of words and blinded eyes
Applauds the puppets of his ghastly play,
With easy rhetoric and ready hand.
Unlike those men who waited for the word,
Clean soldiers from a country of the sea;
These were no thong-lashed band or goaded herd
Tricked by the easy speech of tyranny.
All the long week they fought encircling Fate,
While chaos clutched the throat and shuddered past
As phantoms haunt a child, and softly creep
Round cots, so Death stood sentry at the Gate
And beckoned waiting terror, till at last
He vanished at the hurrying touch of sleep.