The poems

DEAD MAN'S DUMP by ISAAC ROSENBERG

The plunging limbers over the shattered track

Racketed with their rusty freight,

Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,

And the rusty stakes like sceptres old

To stay the flood of brutish men

Upon our brothers dear.

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead

But pained them not, though their bones crunched,

Their shut mouths made no moan,

They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,

Man born of man, and born of woman,

And shells go crying over them

From night till night and now.

Earth has waited for them,

All the time of their growth

Fretting for their decay:

Now she has them at last!

In the strength of their strength

Suspended---stopped and held.

What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit

Earth! have they gone into you?

Somewhere they must have gone,

And flung on your hard back

Is their soul's sack,

Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.

Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass,

Or stood aside for the half used life to pass

Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,

When the swift iron burning bee

Drained the wild honey of their youth.

What of us, who flung on the shrieking pyre,

Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,

Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,

Immortal seeming ever?

Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,

A fear may choke in our veins

And the startled blood may stop.

The air is loud with death,

The dark air spurts with fire,

The explosions ceaseless are.

Timelessly now, some minutes past,

These dead strode time with vigorous life,

Till the shrapnel called 'an end!'

But not to all. In bleeding pangs

Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,

Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

A man's brains splattered on

A stretcher-bearer's face;

His shook shoulders slipped their load,

But when they bent to look again

The drowning soul was sunk too deep

For human tenderness.

They left this dead with the older dead,

Stretched at the cross roads.

Burnt black by strange decay

Their sinister faces lie

The lid over each eye,

The grass and coloured clay

More motion have than they,

Joined to the great sunk silences.

Here is one not long dead;

His dark hearing caught our far wheels,

And the choked soul stretched weak hands

To reach the living word the far wheels said,

The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,

Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels

Swift for the end to break,

Or the wheels to break,

Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight.

Will they come? Will they ever come?

Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,

The quivering-bellied mules,

And the rushing wheels all mixed

With his tortured upturned sight,

So we crashed round the bend,

We heard his weak scream,

We heard his very last sound,

And our wheels grazed his dead face.

 TO A SOLDIER IN HOSPITAL by WINIFRED M. LETTS

COURAGE came to you with your boyhood’s grace         

    Of ardent life and limb.            

Each day new dangers steeled you to the test, 

    To ride, to climb, to swim.       

Your hot blood taught you carelessness of death                     

        With every breath. 

               

So when you went to play another game             

    You could not but be brave:   

An Empire’s team, a rougher football field,         

    The end—perhaps your grave.                     

What matter? On the winning of a goal 

        You staked your soul.            

               

Yes, you wore courage as you wore your youth

    With carelessness and joy.     

But in what Spartan school of discipline        

    Did you get patience, boy?     

How did you learn to bear this long-drawn pain

        And not complain? 

               

Restless with throbbing hopes, with thwarted aims,       

    Impulsive as a colt,             

How do you lie here month by weary month     

    Helpless, and not revolt?         

What joy can these monotonous days afford     

        Here in a ward?       

               

Yet you are merry as the birds in spring,                       

    Or feign the gaiety,

Lest those who dress and tend your wound each day    

    Should guess the agony.          

Lest they should suffer—this the only fear         

        You let draw near.          

               

Greybeard philosophy has sought in books         

    And argument this truth,         

That man is greater than his pain, but you           

    Have learnt it in your youth.   

You know the wisdom taught by Calvary                      

        At twenty-three.    

               

Death would have found you brave, but braver still        

    You face each lagging day,      

A merry Stoic, patient, chivalrous,           

    Divinely kind and gay.                        40

You bear your knowledge lightly, graduate         

        Of unkind Fate.        

               

Careless philosopher, the first to laugh,

    The latest to complain,             

Unmindful that you teach, you taught me this           

    In your long fight with pain:    

Since God made man so good—here stands my creed—              

        God’s good indeed.               

THE WIND ON THE DOWNS by MARIAN ALLEN

I like to think of you as brown and tall,
As strong and living as you used to be,
In khaki tunic, Sam Brown belt and all,
And standing there and laughing down at me.
Because they tell me, dear, that you are dead,
Because I can no longer see your face,
You have not died, it is not true, instead,
You seek adventure some other place.
I hear you laughing as you used to,
Yet loving all the things I think of you;
And knowing you are happy, should I grieve?
You follow and are watchful where I go;
How should you leave me, having loved me so?
We walked along the towpath, you and I,
Beside the sluggish-moving, still canal;
It seemed impossible that you should die;
I think of you the same and always shall.
We thought of many things and spoke of few,
And life lay all uncertainly before,
And now I walk alone and think of you,
And wonder what new kingdoms you explore.
Over the railway line, across the grass,
While up above the golden wings are spread,
Flying, ever flying overhead,
Here still I see you khaki figure pass,
And when I leave meadow, almost wait,
That you should open first the wooden gate.

FOR THE FALLEN by LAURENCE BINYON

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

NO MAN’S LAND by JAMES H. KNIGHT-ADKIN

NO Man’s Land is an eerie sight

At early dawn in the pale gray light.        

Never a house and never a hedge          

In No Man’s Land from edge to edge,   

And never a living soul walks there                 

To taste the fresh of the morning air;—

Only some lumps of rotting clay,              

That were friends or foemen yesterday.              

What are the bounds of No Man’s Land?             

You can see them clearly on either hand,                     

A mound of rag-bags gray in the sun,     

Or a furrow of brown where the earthworks run             

From the eastern hills to the western sea,          

Through field or forest o’er river and lea;             

No man may pass them, but aim you well                    

And Death rides across on the bullet or shell.     

But No Man’s Land is a goblin sight         

When patrols crawl over at dead o’ night;            

Boche or British, Belgian or French,         

You dice with death when you cross the trench.                       

When the “rapid,” like fireflies in the dark,          

Flits down the parapet spark by spark,  

And you drop for cover to keep your head          

With your face on the breast of the four months’ dead.               

The man who ranges in No Man’s Land         

Is dogged by the shadows on either hand           

When the star-shell’s flare, as it bursts o’erhead,            

Scares the gray rats that feed on the dead,         

And the bursting bomb or the bayonet-snatch  

May answer the click of your safety-catch,                  

For the lone patrol, with his life in his hand,        

Is hunting for blood in No Man’s Land.