Chapter IV

The troubled day sped on in weariness
Till Night drugged Carnage in a drunken swoon.
Jet-black, with spangling stars athwart her dress
And pale in the shafted amber of the moon,
She moved triumphant as a young-eyed queen
In silent dignity: her shadowed face
Scarce veiled by gossamer clouds, that scurrying ran
Breathless in speed the high star-lanes between.
She passed unheeding ’neath the dome of space,
And scorned the petty tragedy of Man.

And one looked upward, and in wonder saw
The vast star-soldiered army of the sky.
Unheard, the needless blasphemy of War
Shrank at that primal splendour sweeping by.
The moon’s gold-shadowed craters bathed the ground--
(Pale queen, she hunted in her pathless rise
Lithe blackened raiders that bomb-laden creep)
But now the earth-walled comfort wrapped him round,
And soon in lulled forgetfulness he lies
Where soldiers clasping arms like children sleep.

Sleep held him as a mother holds her child:
Sleep the soft calm that levels hopes and fears,
Now stilled his brain and scarfed his eyelids wild,
And sped the transient misery of tears,
Until the dawn’s sure prophets cleft the night
With opal shafts, and streamers tinged with flame,
Swift merging riot of the turbaned East.
Through rustling gesture loomed the advancing light;
Through fitful eddying winds, grey vanguards came
Rising in billowy mountains silver-fleeced.

And with the dawn came action, and again
The spiteful interplay of static war:
Dogged, with grim persistence Blood and Pain
Rose venomous to greet the Morning Star.
But others watched that lonely sentinel
Chase fleeting fellow-stars before the day;
Fresh men heard tides of thunder ebb and flow.
--Stumbling in sleep, scarce heeding shot or shell,
The men who fought at Gommecourt filed away:
The poppies nodded as they passed below.

They left the barren wilderness behind,
And Gommecourt gnarled and dauntless, till they came
To fields where trees unshattered took the wind,
Which tossed the crimson poppy heads to flame.
But one stood musing at a waking thought
That spurred his blood and dimmed his searching eyes--
The primal thought that stirs the seed to birth.
Here where the battling nations clashed and fought
The common grass still breathed of Paradise
And Love with silent lips was Lord of Earth.

B. E. F. 1916.

A VISION

Before the dawn wind swept the troubled sky
And stirred the stricken trenches far and wide,
I saw the Lord of Holiness pass by,
With Mary at His side.

With Mary Michael passed, for I could hear
His clashing arms, and see his spangled sword.
Loudly I cried out, “Mother!” then in fear,
“O Mother of our Lord.”

For in her eyes all human sorrow burned,
All tenderness lay naked when she smiled;
And once she stooped to kiss, and once she turned
And shuddered like a child.

He moved through all the surge and clash of war,
The King of Kings since Brotherhood began;
But in His still and shadowed face I saw
The agony of Man.

And as I gazed, the ruined fields of France
Loomed to the dawn in shades of shifting grey;
Dumbly I stood to arms, as in a trance
I watched the climbing day.

Was this a dream? Yet Mary saw the sky,
Lit by a vision from the darkness hurled;
A little dream which made a baby cry--
A dream which saved the world.

REVELATION

Can death give you such dignity, and pride
So beautiful it puts our grief to shame?
For now we stumble as we speak your name,
Yet you were just a boy before you died.
We question blankly, pondering heavy-eyed,
Can this be he we used to praise or blame
In careless moments, ere the trial came
When all the bravest hearts in anguish cried?
Then, humbled, we beheld our poor disguise,
False moods and manners clothed in empty speech
Which drowned the silence--till there came a day
That smote our vision to awakened eyes:
For God bent down to bring you to our reach,
But ere we touched you, you had gone away.

TELL ME, STRANGER

Tell me, Stranger, is it true
There is magic happening,
Are _all_ the dappled fields of Kew
Bowing to their Lord the Spring?

Are the bluebells chaste and mute
Dancing in each dale and hollow
Dew-sprinkled, with a glad salute
To omnipotent Apollo?

Tell me, do the feathered creatures
Flutter as in days of yore,
What are the “distinctive features”
Of the Swallow’s Flying Corps?

Here there is no magic, Stranger.
Save within our merry souls--
For some wanton god in anger
Punches earth with gaping holes.

Yet the stifled land is showing
Here and there a touch of grace,
And the marshalled clouds are blowing
Through the aerodromes of space.

Hate is strong, but Love is stronger,
And the world shall wake to birth
When the touch of man no longer
Stays the touch of God from Earth.

Tell me, Stranger, is it true
There is magic happening,
Are _all_ the dappled fields of Kew
Bowing to their Lord the Spring?

B. E. F., _April, 1917_.

SPRING IN THE TRENCHES

The racing clouds have borne her message down
And blown a thrilling rumour, from the far
Heart-centres of each crowded port and town,
And up the flowing arteries of War.
Life, life, green tales of corn in sprouting blades,
Of swallows crowding with sea-sprinkled wings
And ash-buds amber-gummed round close-furled green.
High blossom mantling murmurous orchard glades
In air a-tingle April-sweet and keen--
Ah, we have heard of wondrous happenings.

For now the magic carnivals begin
The lilac broods in honeyed secrecy,
And dappled lawns are changed: a Harlequin
Has brushed the tangled carpet silently.
We know how white narcissus fills the lake
With dancing shadows; how in open blue
A chestnut builds her clustered pyramids,
And down below anemones awake;
Long-hushed the violets open wide their lids
And all the dreamed-of fantasy comes true.

Glad tidings thrill the re-awakened earth
By daffodils and blue-bells heralded;
Spring with her van imperial comes forth
To herald Summer proudly canopied
Beneath the bowing leaves. Persistent Spring
Bestirs the seed enshrined in Winter’s store;
And even round the parapet a breath
Of far-flung prophecy is clamouring:
“Behold new life within the tomb of death
“Importunate and vivid as before.”

ON THE ROAD

We halted, with the urgent Spring behind
Our straining teams, where all the land was black,
And huddled woods lay beaten, starkly blind:
Their mangled branches loomed athwart the track
Grotesque and terrible. Yet near the way,
A river, scatheless as the open sea,
Flowed like a breathing hope that cannot die
In desolation. Now, at setting day,
Moored water lilies, pale as argent sky,
Cling to the twilight fading silently.

Such is the tale of memory, ere night
Had deepened, and our weary convoy slept
Beside the way. Slow-rising points of light
Twinkled amid the spangled netting swept
Across the ebon desert; and a gleam
Pierced the cloud-woven pillows of the moon.
Now slumber freed me from the iron cage
That bound the snarling war; and, in a dream,
The panorama of a dawning age
Unrolled, a world slow-waking from a swoon.

Before my gaze a teeming city loomed
Gay with the bustling clamour of the street--
The very town an easy word had doomed
And cast in ashes at the trampling feet
Of mortal gods. Street, corner, square and place,
Seemed woken from a long and squalid trance--
I saw a nation growing like a flower;
A nation true and loyal to a race
That forged an army of clean-soldiered power
Wrought by the common chivalry of France.

Here was no arrogance of martial pride,
The fireside boast that sows the fatal seed,
For happiness had come from those who died
Stark of delusion and the deadly creed
Of false romance. I saw a world reborn--
The very battlefield was robed again
In lines of chequered land, and bordered round
With stretching roads and rills. The poppied corn
Held rubies set in gold, and far beyond
Lay a surf-ravelled sea and swarded plain.

I marvelled, till oblivion shadowed all,
Blurred in the dawning light of every day.
It was so true, I scarcely heard the call
To feed and water and to move away.
We stretched our limbs, and packed each heavy load;
Moved on, and left the weary night behind,
Through torn and withered trees that stared aghast;
Yet, through the veil that shrouded all the road
I saw new radiance in the land we passed,
And heard a sudden murmur in the wind.

B. E. F., 1917.

KEATS, BEFORE ACTION

A little moment more--O, let me hear
(The thunder rolls above, and star-shells fall)
Those melodies unheard re-echo clear
Before the shuddering moment closes all.
They come--they come--they answer to my call,
That Grecian throng of graven ecstasies,
Hyperion aglow in blazing skies,
And Cortez with the wonder in his eyes.
In battle-wreaths of smoke they rise, and fall
Beyond--beyond recall.

Now all is silent, still, and magic-keen
(Yet thunder rolls above and star-shells fall)
And slowly pacing, rides a faery queen
Wild eyed and singing to a knight in thrall.
Enough--enough--let lightning whip me bare
And leave me naked in the howling air
My body broken here, and here, and here.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty--that is all,
The very all in all.

THE SOMME

_From Amiens to Abbeville_
_My swollen waters race,_
_And silver-veined by many a rill_
_Green hamlets thrive apace._
_From Amiens to Abbeville_
_I labour at the listless mill,_
_And tempt the nodding daffodil_
_To blur my open face._
_But south of Amiens I flow_
_Past dumb Peronne and Brie,_
_The peopled land I used to know_
_Now all belongs to me._
_Yet phantom armies come and go,_
_And shadows hurry to and fro;_
_Again my seething battles grow_
_In murdered Picardy._

Behold the mother of a soil forlorn;
I suckled towns, and fed the forest land,
Behold my shattered villages and mourn
How should I understand?

Why are those huts o’erpatched like dappled kine,
What are those weary men in blue and brown,
And humming craft that search my sinuous line;
Why should my name re-echo with renown
Past every phantom town?
But still my lily-breasted waters shine,
And still I chant my shadowy ripples down.

From peace through war my waters flow,
To peace again at sea,
The peopled land I used to know
Now all belongs to me.
Though battling armies come and go,
I toil and spin, I reap and sow,
And poppy-mantled meadows blow
In murdered Picardy.

My eddies bear the clinging scent of lime
To sweeten clouds of plume-tossed meadowsweet;
My meadow grasses nestle with the thyme
And flowering rushes tower in the heat.
Low-brushing swifts and swallows splashed with white
O’er flash my laden mirrors slow and deep
That bear swift-merging canopies of sleep.
Until the growing light
Has chased marauding owls, and butterflies,
Born of blue-woven skies,
Flutter away like hare-bells spurred to flight.
But who are these? The powdered butterfly
Outshines that air leviathan that swings
In rigid curves adown the barren sky,
With cloudy satellites about her wings.
And I have seen
Dark horsemen ride with spears of tapered steel;
And bellowing guns beneath the far balloons.
And once a ponderous slug bedecked in green
Crept, in the waning moon’s
Still-darkening gloom, and at her giant heel
White-gleaming, ran a train of hooded cars....

I triumph, triumph, search my sinuous line
Amid the snarling impotence of wars.
Turn where you will. Look, there a signboard shows
The lair of guns; already round the sign
White trumpeting convolvuli entwine
Their clinging arms, across the placard blows
A quiet-breathing rose.
And still my lily-breasted waters shine
And loud my chanting grows:

From peace through war my waters flow
To peace again at sea,
The peopled land I used to know
Now all belongs to me.
Though battling armies come and go
I toil and spin, I reap and sow,
And poppy-mantled meadows blow
In murdered Picardy.

SOMME FLOWER TALK

Said the Cornflower to the Pimpernel,
“O sudden scarlet eyes,
You never bloomed till ploughing shell
Laid bare earth’s sanctities!”

Then upward cried the Pimpernel:
“Blue head in deeper blue,
’Tis strange this former waste of Hell
Is Paradise anew.

“But who is Lord of Paradise
And Commandant; and who
Commands sky-faring butterflies
All camouflaged in blue?

“Are dandelion parachutes
His messages, and do
Those armoured beetles clamber roots
With news from Army Q?

“Above each water-lily ship
The feathered red caps pipe.
Because the pear has earned a pip,
The tiger-moth a stripe.

“The gorse artillery has eyes
We never knew before.
And lady bees can organise
The Honey Service Corps.

“Field-marshals rule the war behind
The guns, but Summer shields
Here in the clash of human kind
Her marshal of the fields.”

TO THE UTTERMOST FARTHING.

“He too! He too!” The veteran paused, the sound
Of a light paper fluttering to the ground
Rustled the twilight peace. “He--too--is--dead--”
His wife, scarce faltering from the words she read,
Stared at the glowing sun, the while her eyes
Shone mistily in nameless agonies.
Five sons, and four were dead!
The clock ticked desolation to their ears
And silence gripped the moments as they passed
Too terrible, too passionless for tears.
At last,
Stronger than he, she curbed herself and smiled
And held him weeping like a weary child
Before the first immensity of pain.
Yet once again
She conjured scenes beyond the darkened cloud
That blurred the soul’s horizon, as aloud
She spoke his name, and whispered little things
More pregnant than the utterance of kings.

That night she moved,
Spurred by devotion for the man she loved,
Without a pause for sorrow, or a breath
To murmur at the closing walls of death;
Love-steeled and queenly every step she trod;
She climbed unfaltering, serenely browed,
Until she touched the very feet of God
Undaunted and unbowed.
And there in mystic awe
Slow-turning wheels of evolution spun
The poised and pulsing universe. She saw
All life and death synonymous, and birth
The dawn of human wonderment begun
(Birth of all birth) in other realms afar.
Below, ice pivoted revolved the earth,
A traveller’s joy it seemed, a mile-stone star,
Half-glowing, bathed in sun....

At dawn they met and found each other’s eyes,
Asked the same questions, sought the same replies:
Their last and youngest fought where harsh commands
Still goaded forward lashed and driven bands,
Where Vaux and Thiaumont twin sentinels
Loomed stalwartly. And still a howl of shells
Shattered the Verdun battlements in vain;
Still domineered that keen death-tutored brain
Behind an army deaf to angry scorn,
The boast forgotten and the mask outworn.
At length she spoke: “Go quickly now,” she said,
“Quick, the next hurrying hour may see him dead.
Find the Great Overlord and tell him all
Quick, for our boy may pass beyond recall
Meanwhile. He shall know happiness to come,
He, the last scion of our stricken home,
Shall blossom like a flower in early Spring
I say it, I who bore him. Time shall bring
The old primeval happiness to birth
If there be any justice upon earth.”
She ceased; it seemed her voice re-echoed still
As strung with hope he hurried on until
He reached the palace and besought for grace
To see his royal master face to face.

That night in sudden joy he urged away
Across Lorraine, for in his wallet lay
An order blazoned with the royal seals.
Hour after hour the car’s revolving wheels
Rushed dizzily towards the high command
That held his son in fee. Around, the land
Awoke in changeless Spring. Four steady hours
They travelled, till the bloom of passing flowers
Brought tidings of the dawn. Then to his ears
Rumbled a distant thunder, sudden fears
Urged onward faster. Now the country showed
First signs of war-flung tentacles, the road
Lay pitted here and there, a wounded tree
No longer framed its lordly symmetry.
And soon the land whereon all life was stilled
Became as Man had willed.
At last his journey ended. Long delayed
He sought his goal, now pressing on, now stayed,
Until outside the place of high command
The royal warrant burning in his hand
He knocked--was bidden enter--tense and mute
He faced the marshal with a grave salute
And showed the royal word.
The crowded room was silent, no man stirred--
A pause as long as death, then, dragged and slow,
A voice--“Your son was killed an hour ago.”
A clock importunately unconcerned
Repeated tick--tick--tick. His eyes discerned
A pen vague-sprawling, madly spiderwise.
Not a man glanced--Yet all the room had eyes:
Not a man spoke--Yet clamorous voices cried:
Stumbling, he walked outside.

IN THE MESS

I sat alone although the mess
Was full, when--quick as tears
A song of naked happiness
Came singing in my ears.

I summoned strength to kill a cry
And mad desire to weep;
Then, glancing round me guiltily,
Found everyone asleep!

A TRENCH INCIDENT

We waited, as the thundering curtain swept
Our sector, and torn shards of iron fell;
Dust from the parapet in showers leapt
Swirled up by bursting shell.

We waited, like a storm-bespattered ship
That flutters sail to free her grounded keel;
The tingling moments tightened every grip
On rifles lanced with steel.

We knew the man who led us. All could hear
His ringing voice re-echo loud and strong,
Born of that higher bravery when fear.
Is battled into song.

Then sudden fury lulled and far behind
Like angered beasts our batteries replied--
And suddenly he stumbled, dazed and blind.
He lay, but ere he died

He struggled for a while, then dimly smiled,
Wrapped in the comradeship of happy things,
Before he entered like a wondering child
The heritage of kings.

REALITY

Below my room the noise and measured beat
Of marching men re-echoed loud and clear;
Now bobbing cavalry swung down the street;
Now mules and rumbling batteries drew near.
But all is dim--The rolling wagon-stream
To Amiens between the aspen trees,
The stables, billets, men and horses, seem
Dead mummers of forgotten fantasies.

Only my dreams are still aglow, a throng
Of scenes that crowded through a waiting mind
A myriad scenes: For I have swept along
To foam ashriek with gulls, and rowed behind
Brown oarsmen swinging to an ocean song
Where stately galleons bowed before the wind.

“WE POETS OF THE PROUD OLD LINEAGE”

Apart we labour, and alone we climb
The barren heights; for we the singing throng
Whose lives were hallowed by impassioned song
Must die or prove unworthy of our rhyme.
Man after man--we know the price of wars
Who watched the mask of Night whilst others slept,
And spread our laughter far and wide, but kept
Our tears and terror privy to the stars.

0 magic gift omnipotent, to sing
And conjure Heaven from surrounding Hell.
Our lips and eyes are touched (for we have seen
Celestial weavers at the loom of Spring).
But O the iron bitterness and keen
Of voices ever clamouring farewell!