The Young Guard

it went – in a day.
Deep dread but heightened
your mirth.
Your idols' feet never turned to
clay —
Never lit upon common earth.
Love is the Game but is not the
Goal:
You played it together, body and
soul,
And you had your Candle's
worth.

YES! though the Candle light
a Shrine,
And heart cannot count the
cost,
You are Winners yet in its tender
shine!
Would they choose to have
lived and lost?
There are chills, you see, for the
finest hearts;
But, once it is only old Death
that parts,
There can never come twinge
of frost.

AND this be our comfort for
Every Boy
Cut down in his high heyday,
Or ever the Sweets of the Morn-
ing cloy,
Or the Green Leaf wither
away;
So a sunlit billow curls to a crest,
And shouts as it breaks at its
loveliest,
In a glory of rainbow spray!

BE it also the making of
Ermyntrude,
And many a hundred more —
Compact of foibles and forti-
tude —
Woo'd, won, and widow'd, in
War.
God, keep us gallant and unde-
filed,
Worthy of Husband, Lover, or
– Child…
Sweet as themselves at the
core!

BOND AND FREE

(The Bapaume Road, March 1917)

MISTY and pale the sunlight, brittle and black the
trees;
Roads powdered like sticks of candy for a car to
crunch as they freeze…
Then we overtook a Battalion… and it wasn't
a roadway then,
But cymbals and drums and dulcimers to the
beat of the marching men!
They were laden and groomed for the trenches,
they were shaven and scrubbed and fed;
Like the scales of a single Saurian their helmets
rippled ahead;
Not a sorrowful face beneath them, just the tail
of a scornful eye
For the car full of favoured mufti that went
quacking and quaking by.
You gloat and take note in your motoring coat,
and the sights come fast and thick:
A party of pampered prisoners, toying with shovel
and pick;
A town where some of the houses are so many
heaps of stone,
And some of them steel anatomies picked clean
to the buckled bone.
A road like a pier in a hurricane of mountainous
seas of mud,
Where a few trees, whittled to walking-sticks, rose
out of the frozen flood
Like the masts of the sunken villages that might
have been down below —
Or blown off the festering face of an earth that
God Himself wouldn't know!
Not a yard but was part of a shell-hole – not an
inch, to be more precise —
And most of the holes held water, and all the
water was ice:
They stared at the bleak blue heavens like the
glazed blue eyes of the slain,
Till the snow came, shutting them gently, and
sheeting the slaughtered plain.
Here a pile of derelict rifles, there a couple of
horses lay —