Heard our Lewis guns’ crazed drumming,
Grabbed our rifles, sighted quick,
Fired ... and watched his wounded writhing back from where his dead lay thick.
So we laboured—while we lasted:
Soaked in rain or parched in sun;
Bullet-riddled; fire-blasted;
Poisoned: fodder for the gun:
So we perished, and our bodies rotted in the ground they won.
It heard the song of the First of the Dead, as It couched by the lintel-post;
And the coward-soul would have given Its soul to be back with the Red-Steel host....