Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/166

 166

Or e'er another moon should cope with clouds

For mastery of these same fields.—To-night

(And but a month has gone since I walked there)

Well might the Kaiser write, as Cæsar wrote,

In his new Commentaries on a Gallic war,

"Fortissimi Belgæ." A moon ago!

Who would have then divined that dead would lie

Like swaths of grain beneath the harvest moon

Upon these lands the ancient Belgæ held,

From Normandy beyond renowned Liège!

But it was out of that dread August night

From which all Europe woke to war, that we,

This beautiful Dawn-Youth, and I, had come,

He from afar. Beyond grim Petrograd

He'd waked the moujik from his peaceful dreams,

Bid the muezzin call to morning prayer

Where minarets rise o'er the Golden Horn,

And driven shadows from the Prussian march

To lie beneath the lindens of the stadt.

Softly he'd stirred the bells to ring at Rheims,

He'd knocked at high Montmartre, hardly asleep,

Heard the sweet carillon of doomed Louvain,

Boylike, had tarried for a moment's play

Amid the traceries of Amiens,

And then was hast'ning on the road to Dieppe,

When he o'ertook me drowsy from the hours

Through which I'd walked, with no companions else

Than ghostly kilometre posts that stood

As sentinels of space along the way.—

Often, in doubt, I'd paused to question one,

With nervous hands, as they who read Moon-type;

And more than once I'd caught a moment's sleep

Beside the highway, in the dripping grass,

While one of these white sentinels stood guard,

Knowing me for a friend, who loves the road,

And best of all by night, when wheels do sleep,

And stars alone do walk abroad.—But once

Three watchful shadows, deeper than the dark,