Counter-Attack and Other Poems | Page 7

my eyes your face shows pain;?I hear you make some cheery old remark--?I can rebuild you in my brain,?Though you've gone out patrolling in the dark.
You hated tours of trenches; you were proud?Of nothing more than having good years to spend;?Longed to get home and join the careless crowd?Of chaps who work in peace with Time for friend.?That's all washed out now. You're beyond the wire:?No earthly chance can send you crawling back;?You've finished with machine-gun fire--?Knocked over in a hopeless dud-attack.
Somehow I always thought you'd get done in,?Because you were so desperate keen to live:?You were all out to try and save your skin,?Well knowing how much the world had got to give.?You joked at shells and talked the usual "shop,"?Stuck to your dirty job and did it fine:?With "Jesus Christ! when will it stop??Three years... It's hell unless we break their line."
So when they told me you'd been left for dead?I wouldn't believe them, feeling it must be true.?Next week the bloody Roll of Honour said?"Wounded and missing"--(That's the thing to do?When lads are left in shell-holes dying slow,?With nothing but blank sky and wounds that ache,?Moaning for water till they know?It's night, and then it's not worth while to wake!)

Good-bye, old lad! Remember me to God,?And tell Him that our Politicians swear?They won't give in till Prussian Rule's been trod?Under the Heel of England... Are you there? ...?Yes ... and the War won't end for at least two years;?But we've got stacks of men... I'm blind with tears,?Staring into the dark. Cheero!?I wish they'd killed you in a decent show.
SICK LEAVE
When I'm asleep, dreaming and lulled and warm,--?They come, the homeless ones, the noiseless dead.?While the dim charging breakers of the storm?Bellow and drone and rumble overhead,?Out of the gloom they gather about my bed.?They whisper to my heart; their thoughts are mine.?"Why are you here with all your watches ended??From Ypres to Frise we sought you in the Line."?In bitter safety I awake, unfriended;?And while the dawn begins with slashing rain?I think of the Battalion in the mud.?"When are you going out to them again??Are they not still your brothers through our blood?"
BANISHMENT
I am banished from the patient men who fight.?They smote my heart to pity, built my pride.?Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side,?They trudged away from life's broad wealds of light.?Their wrongs were mine; and ever in my sight?They went arrayed in honour. But they died,--?Not one by one: and mutinous I cried?To those who sent them out into the night.
The darkness tells how vainly I have striven?To free them from the pit where they must dwell?In outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and riven?By grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel.?Love drives me back to grope with them through hell;?And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.
SONG-BOOKS OF THE WAR
In fifty years, when peace outshines?Remembrance of the battle lines,?Adventurous lads will sigh and cast?Proud looks upon the plundered past.?On summer morn or winter's night,?Their hearts will kindle for the fight,?Reading a snatch of soldier-song,?Savage and jaunty, fierce and strong;?And through the angry marching rhymes?Of blind regret and haggard mirth,?They'll envy us the dazzling times?When sacrifice absolved our earth.
Some ancient man with silver locks?Will lift his weary face to say:?"War was a fiend who stopped our clocks?Although we met him grim and gay."?And then he'll speak of Haig's last drive,?Marvelling that any came alive?Out of the shambles that men built?And smashed, to cleanse the world of guilt.?But the boys, with grin and sidelong glance,?Will think, "Poor grandad's day is done."?And dream of those who fought in France?And lived in time to share the fun.
THRUSHES
Tossed on the glittering air they soar and skim,?Whose voices make the emptiness of light?A windy palace. Quavering from the brim?Of dawn, and bold with song at edge of night,?They clutch their leafy pinnacles and sing?Scornful of man, and from his toils aloof?Whose heart's a haunted woodland whispering;?Whose thoughts return on tempest-baffled wing;?Who hears the cry of God in everything,?And storms the gate of nothingness for proof.
AUTUMN
October's bellowing anger breaks and cleaves?The bronzed battalions of the stricken wood?In whose lament I hear a voice that grieves?For battle's fruitless harvest, and the feud?Of outraged men. Their lives are like the leaves?Scattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blown?Along the westering furnace flaring red.?O martyred youth and manhood overthrown,?The burden of your wrongs is on my head.
INVOCATION
Come down from heaven to meet me when my breath?Chokes, and through drumming shafts of stifling death?I stumble toward escape, to find the door?Opening on morn where I may breathe once more?Clear cock-crow airs across some valley dim?With whispering trees. While dawn along the rim?Of night's horizon flows in lakes of fire,?Come down from heaven's bright hill, my song's desire.
Belov'd and faithful, teach my soul to wake?In glades deep-ranked with flowers that gleam and shake?And flock your paths