N. G O.
And a bagful of hand-grenades
And the way he rattled and
harried the Hun —
The deeds he did dare, and the
risks he would run —
Were the gossip of the Bri-
gades.

HOW he'd stand stockstill as
the trunk of a tree,
With his face tucked down
out of sight,
When a flare went up and the
other three
Fell prone in the frightening
light.
How the German sandbags, that
made them quake,
Were the only cover he cared to
take,
But he'd eavesdrop there all
night.

MACHINE-GUNS, tapping
a phrase in Morse,
Grew hot on a random quest,
And swarms of bullets buzzed
down the course
Like wasps from a trampled
nest.
Yet, that last night!
They had just set off
When he pitched on his face with
a smothered cough,
And a row 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 Middlesex, under glass:
Only the ribbon that left 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,
Not 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 fear-
less 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 En-
sign 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 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 —
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.