The Silk-Hat Soldier | Page 3

how England loves her Englishmen!
Ah! think you that a single gun
is fired
We do not hear in England. Ah! we hear,
And mothers go
with proud unhappy eyes
That say: It is for England that he dies,

England that does the cruel work of God,
And gives her well beloved
to save the world.
For this is death like to a woman desired,
For this
the wine-press trod.
4
And you in churches, praying this Christmas morn,
Pray as you never
prayed that this may be
The little war that brought the great world
peace;
Undazzled with its glorious infamy,

O pray with all your
hearts that war may cease,
And who knows but that God may hear the

prayer.
So it may come about next Christmas Day
That we shall
hear the happy children play
Gladly aloud, unmindful of the dead,

And watch the lovers go
To the old woods to find the mistletoe.
But
this year, children, if you needs must play,
Play very softly,
underneath your breath;
Be happy softly, lovers, for great Death

Makes England holy with sorrow this Christmas Day;
Yes! in the old
woods leave the mistletoe,
And leave the holly for another year--
Its
berries are too red.
[Christmas, 1899--Written during the Boer War.]
"SOLDIER GOING TO THE WAR"
Soldier going to the war--
Will you take my heart with you,
So that
I may share a little
In the famous things you do?
Soldier going to the war--
If in battle you must fall,
Will you,
among all the faces,
See my face the last of all?
Soldier coming from the war--
Who shall bind your sunburnt brow

With the laurel of the hero,
Soldier, soldier--vow for vow!
Soldier coming from the war--
When the street is one wide sea,

Flags and streaming eyes and glory--
Soldier, will you look for me?
THE RAINBOW
"These things are real," said one, and bade me gaze
On black and
mighty shapes of iron and stone,
On murder, on madness, on lust, on
towns ablaze,
And on a thing made all of rattling bone:
"What,"
said he, "will you bring to match with these?"
"Yea! War is real," I
said, "and real is Death,
A little while--mortal realities;
But Love
and Hope draw an immortal breath."
Think you the storm that wrecks a summer day,
With funeral

blackness and with leaping fire
And boiling roar of rain, more real
than they
That, when the warring heavens begin to tire,
With tender
fingers on the tumult paint;
Spanning the huddled wrack from base to
cope
With soft effulgence, like some haloed saint,--
The rainbow
bridge eternal that is Hope.
Deem her no phantom born of desperate dreams:
Ere man yet was,
'twas hope that wrought him man;
The blind earth, climbing skyward
by her gleams,
Hoped--and the beauty of the world began.

Prophetic of all loveliness to be,
Though God Himself seem from His
station hurled,
Still shall the blackest hell look up and see
Hope's
rainbow on the summits of the world.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Silk-Hat Soldier, by Richard le
Gallienne
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