"Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn."
MATTHEW xiii. 30.
HARVEST
"For shoulders curved with the counter stoop will be carried
erect and square;
And faces white from the office light will be bronzed by the
open air;
And we'll walk with the stride of a new-born pride, with a
new-found joy in our eyes;
Scornful men who have diced with death under the naked skies.
"For some of us smirk in a chiffon shop, and some of us teach
in a school;
Some of us help with the seat of our pants to polish an
office stool;
The merits of somebody's soap or jam some of us seek to explain;
But all of us wonder what we'll do when we have to go back
again."—R. W. SERVICE.
What of the harvest? It is coming, perhaps sooner than we expect, perhaps not for many weary months. But the reaper is even now sharpening his sickle in readiness, and—what of the crops?
Into No Man's Land have gone alike, the wheat of honest endeavour and hardship well borne, and the tares of class hatred and selfishness. Had ever reaper nobler task in front of him than the burning of those tares and the gathering of that wheat into the nation's barn? . . .
In the Château at Boesinghe, where the moss is growing round the broken doors and the rank weeds fill the garden, with the stagnant Yser hard by; in Ypres, where the rooks nest in the crumbling Cloth Hall and a man's footsteps ring loud and hollow on the silent square; in Vermelles, where the chalky plains stretch bare towards the east, and the bloody Hohenzollern redoubt, with the great squat slag heap beside it, lies silent and ominous; in Guillemont and Guinchy, where the sunken road was stiff with German dead and no two bricks remain on top of one another; on Vimy Ridge, in Bullecourt and Croisilles, in all these places, in all the hundred others, the seed has been sown. What of the harvest?
If I have made of war a hideous thing—unredeemed, repulsive—the picture is not consciously exaggerated. As far as in me lies I have drawn the thing as I have seen it.
But after the lean years, the fat; after the hideous sowing, the glorious aftermath.