The Young Guard

Like rockerless rocking-horses, as wooden of leg
as they,
And not much redder of nostril – not anything
like so grim
As the slinking ghoul of a lean live cat creeping
over the crater's rim!
And behind and beyond and about us were the
long black Dogs of War,
With pigmies pulling their tails for them, and
making the monsters roar
As they slithered back on their haunches, as they
put out their flaming tongues,
And spat a murderous message long leagues from
their iron lungs!
They were kennelled in every corner, and some
were in gay disguise,
But all kept twitching their muzzles and baying
the silvery skies!
A howitzer like a hyena guffawed point-blank at
the car —
But only the sixty – pounder leaves an absolute
aural scar!
(Could a giant but crack a cable as a stockman
cracks his whip,
Or tear up a mile of calico with one unthinkable
r-r-r-r-rip!
Could he only squeak a slate-pencil about the
size of this gun,
You might get some faint idea of its sound, which
is those three sounds in one.)
But certain noises were absent, we looked for
some sights in vain,
And I cannot tell you if shrapnel does really
descend like rain —
Or Big Stuff burst like a bonfire, or bullets
whistle or moan;
But the other figures I'll swear to – if some of
'em are my own!
Livid and moist the twilight, heavy with snow
the trees,
And a road as of pleated velvet the colour of new
cream-cheese…
Then we overtook a Battalion… and I'm
hunting still for the word
For that gaunt, undaunted, haunted, whitening,
frightening herd!
They had done their tour of the trenches, they
were coated and caked with mud,
And some of them wore a bandage, and some of
them wore their blood!
The gaps in their ranks were many, and none of
them looked at me…
And I thought of no more vain phrases for the
things I was there to see,
But I felt like a man in a prison van where the
rest of the world goes Free.

SHELL-SHOCK IN ARRAS

ALL night they crooned high overhead
As the skies are over men:
I lay and smiled in my cellar bed,
And went to sleep again.
All day they whistled like a lash
That cracked in the trembling town:
I stood and listened for the crash
Of houses thundering down.
In, in they came, three nights and days,
All night and all day long;
It made us learned in their ways
And experts on their song.
Like a noisy clock, or a steamer's screw,
Their beat debauched the ear,
And left it dead to a deafening few
That burst who cared how near?
We only laughed when the flimsy floor
Heaved on the shuddering sod:
But when some idiot slammed a door —
My God!

THE BIG THING

(1918)

IT WAS a British Linesman. His face was like a
fist,
His sleeve all stripes and chevrons from the
elbow to the wrist.
Said he to an American (with other words of his):
"It's a big thing you are doing – do you know
how big it is?"
"I guess, Sir," that American inevitably drawled,
"Big Bill's our proposition an' we're goin' for him
bald.
You guys may have him rattled, but I figure it's
for us
To slaughter, quarter, grill or bile, an' masticate
the cuss."
"I hope your teeth," the Linesman said, "are
equal to your tongue —