it wasn't for him that she languished and sighed,But for all of our dear doomed youth;
And it wasn't for her, but her sex, that he cried,
If he could but have probed the truth.
Did she? She would none of his hot young heart;
As khaki escort he's tall and smart,
As lover a shade uncouth.
He went with his draft. She returned to her craft.
He wrote in his merry vein;
She read him aloud, and the Studio laughed!
(Ermyntrude bore the strain.)
He was full of gay bloodshed and Old Man Fritz
His flippancy sent her friends into fits.
(Ermyntrude frowned with pain.)
His tales of the Sergeant who swore so hard
Left Ermyntrude cold and prim;
The tactless truth of the picture jarred,
And some of his jokes were grim.
Yet, let him but skate upon tender ice,
And he had to write to her twice or thrice
Before she would answer him.
(Yet once she sent him a fairy's box,
And her pocket felt the brunt
Of tinned contraptions and books and socks—
Which he hailed as " a sporting stunt!"
She slaved at his muffler none the less,
And still took pleasure in murmuring, " Yes—
For a friend of mine at the Front")
One fine morning his name appears—
Looking so pretty in print!
"Wounded!" she warbles in tragedy tears—
And pictures the reddening lint,
The drawn damp face and the draggled hair . . .
But she found him blooming in Belgrave Square,
With a punctured shin in a splint.
It wasn't a haunt of Ermyntrude's,
That grandiose urban pile;
Like starlight in arctic altitudes
Was the stately Sister's smile.
Tropical sunshine was Ensign Joy—
In his golden greeting no least alloy—
In his beaming eyes no guile.
He showed her the bullet that did the trick—
He showed her the trick, X-ray'd;
He showed her a table timed to a tick,
And a map that an airman made.
He spoke of a shell that caused grievous loss—
But he never mentioned a certain Cross
For his part in the camisade.
She saw it herself in a list next day,
And it brought her back to his bed
With a number of beautiful things to say,
Which were mostly over his head.
Turned pink as his own pyjamas' stripe,
To her mind he ceased to embody a type—
Sank into her heart instead.
"I wonder that all of you didn't retire!"
"My blighters were not that kind."
"But it says you —' advanced under murderous fire,
Machine-gun and shell combined '—"
"Oh, that's the regular War Office wheeze! "
"'Advanced '—with that leg!—' on his hands and knees'!"
"I couldn't leave it behind."
He was soon trick-driving an invalid chair,
And dancing about on a crutch.
The haute noblesse still in Belgrave Square Were moved to oblige as such. They sent him for many a motor-whirl— With the wistful, willowy, wisp of a girl Who never again lost touch.
Their people were most of them dead and gone,
'They had only themselves to please.
His pay was enough to marry upon,
As every Ensign sees.
They would muddle along as others did,
On vast supplies of the tertium quid One brackets with bread and cheese.
They gave him some leave after Belgrave Square—
And bang went a month on banns;
For Ermyntrude had a natural flair For the least unusual plans. Her heaviest uncle came down well, And entertained, at a fair hotel, The dregs of the coupled clans.
A certain number of cheques accrued
To keep the wolf from the door:
The economical Ermyntrude
Had charge of the dwindling store,
When a Board reported her bridegroom fit
As—some expression she didn't permit . . .
And he left for the Front once more.
His crowd had been climbing the jaws of hell:
He found them in death's dog-teeth,
With little to show but a deal to tell
In their fissure of smoking heath.
There were changes—of course—but the change in him
Was the ribbon that showed on his tunic trim
And the tumult hidden beneath!
For all he had suffered and seen before
Seemed nought to a husband's
