Classic Poem

I

What troglodytes are these, — these men like moles,
Who tunnel in the soil their saps and mines,
Or burrow holes
Into the rocks under the roots of pines;
Who make their homes
In catacombs,
Or crouch on rotten planks and muddy logs
In desolate obscene Serbonian bogs;
Who in the craters of the riven land
Contrive their hornet-nests with bags of sand,
And mud, and slime, —
Are these weird creatures all alive with lice,
And black with grime,
Our sons, our fathers, and our husbands? Yea,
This is the altar of their sacrifice,
This is the price
That for your sakes they pay.

II

Hour follows barren hour, till heart and brain
Grow stagnant as the water in the trench,
Penned in a ditch upon a muddy plain,
Poisoned and palsied by the sickly stench —
The festering corruption of the slain,
Body and soul seem impotent and vain.
There in a bloody pool
A carrion crow pecks at a bloated horse.
And some poor fool,
Sniped like a frightened rabbit in the gorse,
Has left on No-man's-Land his huddled corse;
And there some forty — fifty yards away,
Lusting to slay,
The foe makes caves,
And pits, and graves,
In the same mud and clay,
Yet none have hate
Save against Fate
That turns poor simple men into wild beasts of prey.

III

Can this foul charnel damp,
This spiritual cramp,
This lewd stagnation of the soul, be war?
Where are the battle-cries,
The flashing eyes,
The flying banners and the spears of Thor?
Here there are only mud, and filth, and flies,
And foul obscenities men's hearts abhor.
Where are the flaming hope, the fiery cross
That called us to the rampart and the fosse?
Alas, alas, faint, far away they seem,
Like a dim memory of a holy dream.

IV

Now Moloch goes to reap,
Across the sky his searchlights wheel and flash,
His vivid lightnings leap,
His thunders crash.
The gobbling howitzers and whinneying guns
Sound like the howling billows of the deep,
Hurled on a rocky steep
By a tornado's ire.
The tumult stupefies and stuns
Spirit and sense, as, like a devil's choir,
Ten thousand mouths of steel give tongue and spit,
In stuttering staccato, lead and fire.
The bullets of the shrapnel hiss and thud,
The star-shells burst in bud,
Orange, and green, and red;
The rockets rise and spread
Their blossoms overhead;
And every trench and every crater-pit
Is blotched with blood
And dappled with the dead.

V

The belching mortars with war-drunken breath
Hiccup forth shells, whose entrails — flame and death —
Make every mound and parapet a pyre,
And bloody shards that turn the spirit sick
Lie mangled in the mire,
Or on the barbed wire
Where the infernal flammenwerfer lick,
Shrivel, and blacken. E'en the gracious air
That has been wont to tremble into prayer,
To throb and thrill
And vibrate into music at our will,
Is turned to steel and stone, and strikes to kill;
While poisonous and thick,
Out of strange Stygian glooms,
Wreath after yellow wreath,
Rise acrid fumes
That grip and tear the throat like fiery teeth
Of some grim dragon snorting flames of hell,
Yea, grip with grip accurst,
Till the blue veins upon the forehead swell
And the blear eyeballs burst.

VI

Above the vapour loom the monstrous wings
Of fierce, uncanny, harpy things —
White hawks and kites of hate that whir and fly,
Dropping down death from the unheeding sky.
Across the plain with mighty mottled flanks
Waddle reptilian tanks —
Iguanodons and Juggernauts of steel.
These nose their way
Through mud and clay,
And crush and mutilate with cloven heel
The fallen and the dying, till the mud
Is like a winepress, purpurate with blood
Of mangled mortals. On the sea afloat
Great Boats of Battle cleave the waves asunder,
Keel after keel,
And stertorously, through the strident throat
Of giant guns, join in the battle thunder.
While deep thereunder
In the blue water's mirk
There slink and lurk
Black submarines, like devils with a dirk.

VII

Now through the forests drive the shrapnel hail;
Great jagged flying hatchets hew and hack,
And whirling, blazing flambeaux flash and flare,
Flaying the beeches bare,
Burning the birches black.
The woods are threshed as by a flaming flail,
The mighty branches splinter, split, and crack,
The growth of twenty centuries, alack,
The patient carpentry of sun and rain,
The moonbeams' and the sunbeams' bivouac,
Becomes a piteous wrack —
A black and bloody shambles of the slain,
A Golgotha of skulls, a hideous house of Pain.

VIII

O friendly trees,
O brave brown branches swaying in the breeze
Full of young hopes, full of old memories,
O cool green leaves that whispered to the moon,
Or threw the tune
Of singing thrushes to the evening air,
Or scattered dew upon the thirsty sod,
How ye are hacked and hewn!
Nought now but shrivelled, blackened stumps are there,
As tho' a leprous, blasphemous Despair
Uplifted handless arms to heartless God!

IX

The craterous soil bludgeoned, and scalped, and tossed,
Is like a stormy sea congealed by frost,
And every hummocky wave
Of mud and clay
Is like a mighty barrow grave, —
An ossuary of the brave,
Frozen, and still, and grey.
Ah, bitter, barren sea, thy tide devours —
Thy surf and spume
Engulf, entomb
Hamlets, and thorps, and cottages, and towers,
Castles and palaces, and barns and bields,
Orchards and gardens, white and red with flowers,
Arcades of roses, honeysuckle-bowers,
Vineyards, and olive-groves, and harvest-fields!

X

Ah, bitter, barren sea!
The quiet home where children used to play
Or kneel and pray
Beside a mother's knee
Huddles a heap of rubble in the mire,
Or, burnt by fire,
Stands like a dead man's dream
Nor light, nor love, nor joyance may redeem —
Stands with black rafters where the blind bats sway
Like little corses on a gibbet beam —
Where the rats climb and scamper night and day,
And carrion-crows
In greedy rows
Wrangle and scream
Above their prey.

XI

All that Love's labour through long years of toil
Had sorely wrested from the stubborn soil —
The white-washed cottage with the thatched eaves
And portico entwined with ivy leaves,
The rugged poplars of the avenue,
The hedges glistening with morning dew
Strung like round pearls upon a gossamer thread, —
All these are gone — all these are gone and dead.
The olive-groves, the vines, the wheat, the maize,
The meadows where the kine were wont to graze,
The cosy arbour in the orchard nook,
The rustic bridge across the gurgling brook
To the old mossy, drowsy, droning mill, —
All these the tides of fire and death erase,
And rend, and burn, and blacken.

XII

Yea, and still
The howling havoc sweeps across the land.
Valley, and moor, and hill
Are scourged and devastated. Bomb and brand,
Murder and maim,
Ravage and rape,
Cathedrals topple, cities fall in flame,
And churchyards yawn and gape.
There in His shrine Christ is re-crucified;
The bullets on the nails like hammers beat;
The bayonets are in His wounded side;
The daggers have transfixed His patient feet.

XIII

Behold the tabid tundra-land of Sin
Where like a yellow mist from brackish streams
Drift melancholy ghost of Hopes and Dreams!
Behold the dreary deadland where the thin
Fingers of Famine rake the garbage heap
Seeking a crust therein, —
Where Pestilence and Plague with jaundiced skin
Shamble and creep —
Where ghastly bundles in the petrol steep,
And flames incredible begin to leap,
Robbing the rats and maggots of their prey —
Round, pitiful thing in bloody brown and grey,
Where buried in some dug-out like a tomb
Men in the gloom
Despairing lie,
And call in vain to Death and cannot die!

XIV

Here huddle all the scarred,
The halt, the lame,
Those blinded, broken, marred
By steel and flame.
Here the mad walk apart
With tears in their heart, —
Tears that will not flow,
That will not gently rise
To cool their aching eyes,
Scalded with tearless woe.
They cannot weep, but sometimes laughter vain
Shrieks on their lips,
Where still there drips
The dregs of some red cup of poisoned pain
Whose draught has slain the soul and seared the brain.
Behold the land where men their victories win!
Behold the dreary tundra-land of Sin!

XV

Still, camouflaged in Tartaraean glooms,
In muddy pits like fetid tombs,
The thunder-fiends of battle stoke
The lightning fires of tragic dooms,
And woolly wisps of yellow smoke,
And green, and red, and purple fumes,
Like feathery funereal plumes,
Flutter, or on the wind upborne.
Billow and fly
Upon the sky
Like splendid banners slashed and torn.

XVI

The planet is all tumult and turmoil,
And madly on the pocked and pitted soil
Drums Death's insane hysterical tattoo —
The carmagnole of guns, la folie des obus .
The whole air cleft asunder
Reverberates in thunder,
Whines, whimpers, whinneys, shudders, shrieks, and screams
As though the stars were on the mountains hurled
By demons in demoniac nightmare dreams,
As though the Earth's foundation-stones were riven,
As though by plectron of a bomb, or shell,
Or twitching finger-tips of fire, or levin,
Death plucked the nerves and sinews of the world,
Strung on a harp whose pedestal was set
'Mong the unshriven,
Upon the flaming floor of hell,
And yet
Whose pillars reached the very roof of heaven.

XVII

The thunder pauses. With a shriek and roar
" Over the top " surges a line of steel.
Behind cascades of fire that foam before,
The hounds of war go baying at Death's heel, —
Go baying on a trail of human gore.
Out of the broken trenches blink and peer
The beady eyes of muddy human moles,
That glitter with alternate hate and fear
Like wind-swept incalescent brazier coals.
Death is upon them, the bright steel grows red,
And greedy Hate is glutted with the dead.

XVIII

The " Push " is over, and ten thousand things
That once were Nature's lords and Nature's kings,
That once were men, lie writhing in the clay,
Lie with pink bubbles frothing on their lips,
With gaping wounds from which their life-blood drips,
With filmy eyes o'ershadowed by eclipse,
With arms and legs and faces shot away.
O fair white bodies lying in the mud
So stiff and grey,
Once in your hearts there leapt the living blood,
Once your cold lips could love, and sing, and pray,
Once women at your coming knew the kiss
Of husband, father, brother, lover, son.
Alas, alas, how have ye come to this?
What have ye done?

XIX

Has Fate no wisdom, and has Hate no ruth?
Did God the Maker blunder,
Making your bodies wonder,
Filling your hearts with love, your minds with truth?
Did God the Father blunder,
Making your bodies wonder,
Filling your limbs with force, your souls with fire,
With all the dreams and all the hopes of youth,
To leave you bloody carrion in the mire?

XX

Nay, who can tell what such a death may mean?
To be o'ertaken
By lightning and by thunder:
To feel the keen
Sharp blade divide asunder
Body and soul, the unseen and the seen!
To be reborn
Through the sky rent and torn,
And on a sudden waken
Into a peace serene,
Into the radiance of eternal morn?
Who, who can guess, what such a birth may mean
To him who goes with body young and clean,
To him who goes with spirit pure and fresh,
Unknowing blemish and unwotting blame,
In hot pursuit of some immortal aim
Out of the flesh?

XXI

A warrior, a lover!
What hopes and dreams will hover
Around his head,
What beauty will his spirit
Develop and discover,
What glory-land of merit
Inhabit and inherit,
There in the starry kingdom of the immortal dead?
Surely he will come forth exultant, whole,
Happy, victorious, and unafraid,
A shining, joyous, liberated soul
Knighted by Death's immortal accolade!