CHANT OF THE NURSES
A Modern Greek Folk-Song
Translated from the French Version of Antonin Proust
By Eunice Tietjens
Sleep, my child! For if you sleep you shall have three cities, three villages and three monasteries. In the cities you shall command, in the villages you shall walk at leisure, in the monasteries you shall pray.
Sleep, my child! For if you do not wish to command, nor to walk at leisure, nor to pray, sleep shall carry you away to the vineyards of the Sultan. The Sultan shall give you grapes, the Moons of the Harem shall give you roses and the odalisques shall make you cakes of sesame.
Sleep, my child, sleep!
A MEMORY OF YPRES[[3]]
By H. M. Tomlinson
As for the city itself you probably know all about it, and wish you had never heard of it. As for me I had been in it so often that my mouth didn’t get so dry on wet days, when walking up that Sinister Street from Suicide Corner to what was once the Cloth Hall. There I was, one summer day, in a silence like deafness, amid ruins which might have been in Central Asia, and I, the last man on earth, contemplating them. There was something bumping somewhere, but it wasn’t in Ypres, and no notice is ever taken in Flanders of what doesn’t bump near you. So I sat on the disrupted pedestal of a forgotten building and smoked, and wondered why I was in the city of Ypres, and why there was a war, and why I was a fool.