The prevalence of women and children among the collectors is the most painful feature of the proceedings.”
From “Peace in Austria,” by Sir W. Beveridge.
NOUS n’irons plus au bois: the woods are shut:
Les lauriers sont coupés: the laurels cut.
Thus love, when still his pitiful sweet cry
For youth and spring, his play-boys, sensibly
Touched at the heart. But now he does not care
What woods, what trees are standing anywhere.
For there’s no wood in the world to be found
That does not stab his feet, and the trees wound
His eyes with thorns—the eyes which did not see
In joy, but find their sight in misery.
There is a wood they named the Wienerwald.
There when the spring was new the throstle called
Spring to her ball-room, and the Viennese
Heard her light foot provoking the grave trees,
Half willingly at first, young leaves to stir,
That later passionately danced with her.
And here the cannon-fodder used to feed
The altar-fire of the older need,
And sweeter than the need of death. In spring
The Austrian boys saw love awakening
Here, and as English boys in English wood
Have given all to love, all that they could
These gave—their childhood, dawn’s relentless star
That is put out with kisses. These they gave
And buried childhood lightly in her grave
So that a man might hear her calling yet,
“Primrose farewell, good-morrow violet!”—
Might yet have heard her, but the woods are shut
To those who would return: the laurels cut.
There are many go to-day to Wienerwald,
But love does not go with them. He has failed
In the Great War, who had so little skill
In the Will to Murder, love who was the Will
To live and make live, but the War has shewn
His Will is treachery, and love’s alone
In a great wilderness. For if he cries
Aloud, they mock him in their Paradise—
The Angels of Armageddon. “This is he
Who ruled us, being blind, now let him see”
They say, “a prisoner, what we have done,
The priests of mankind’s last religion.
Let him look deep and celebrate in Hell
How we reverse the Christian miracle,
Stealing their spirits from the sullen swine
And consecrating them as yours and mine,
So that we rush together suddenly
Down a steep place, where by an empty sea
Our worshippers pile on a flaming wharf
The trees that were the woods at Hütteldorf.”
Ares, the god of battles, has prevailed.
At Hütteldorf, deep in the Wienerwald,
They go to the woods for fuel, and one sees
A child that beats upon the laurel trees
With starved small hands that hold an axe, and how
The spring returns to find a hooded crow
Waiting and waiting, as the thrush once waited
For childhood’s end. But this, it seems, was fated
That all should change, save only that these seem
Still unsubstantial as the lover’s dream,
As unsubstantial, but with blossoms set
That have no traffic with the violet
And primrose. Here the purple flowers of Dis
Burn their young foreheads and they fade with this,
Who find a different end and different haven,
Where the hooded crow is waiting with the raven.
In Wienerwald the starving Viennese
Have spoiled the woods and cut the laurel trees,
Nous n’irons plus au bois: oh love, oh love!
Will you not go the more because they prove
So shattered, the poor woods? and will you shut
Your heart, O love, because the trees are cut?
Les lauriers sont coupés, but you can heal
Even the broken laurel, and reveal
Where in the valley of death the children falter
That, though all else doth change, love does not alter,
And, though the woods were dead, there is a tree
You know of, love, planted in Calvary.
Go back to the woods; replant the laurel trees.
Still love than war hath greater victories,
And while the devils beat the warlike drum
Into their kingdom of peace the children come.
HEINE’S LAST SONG.
LIFE’S a blonde of whom I’m tired
(Being fair is just a knack
Women learn to be desired
By a Jew—who answers back).