of holes in his chest.
He left a letter. It saved the lives
Of the three who ran from the Gas;
A small enclosure alone survives,
In Battersea, under glass:
Only the ribbon he tore from his breast
On the day he turned and ran with the rest,
And lied with a lip of brass!
But the letters they wrote about the boy,
From the Brigadier to the men!
They would "never forget dear Mr. Joy,"
Nor look on his like again.
Ermyntrude read them with dry, proud eye.
There was only one letter that made her cry.
It was from Sergeant Wren:
"There never was such a fearless man,
Or one so beloved as he.
He was always up to some daring plan,
Or some treat for his men and me.
There wasn't his match when he went away;
But since he got back, there has not been a day
But what he has earned a V.C." . . .
A cynical story? That's not my view.
The years since he fell are twain.
What were his chances of coming through?
Which of his friends remain?
But Ermyntrude's training a splendid boy
Twenty years younger than Ensign Joy.
On balance, a British gain!
And Ermyntrude, did she lose her all,
Or find it, two years ago?
O young girl-wives of the boys who fall,
With your youth and your babes to show!
No heart but bleeds for your widowhood:
Yet Life is with you, and Life is good:
No bone of your bone lies low!
Your blessedness came—as 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 holy 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 Everyboy
Cut down in his high heyday,
Or ever the Sweets of the Morning cloy,
Or the swift foot falter or stray.
So a sunlit billow curls to a crest,
And shouts as it breaks at its loveliest,
In a glory of rainbow spray!
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—
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
