Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/210

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They left him lean,

Those strenuous days, but oh! they left him clean

And tingling with the glow of primal joys:

Rough jests of boys,

The taste of bread, the shelter of the tent,

The marching song, the couch beneath the stars,

The laugh triumphant over shocks and jars.

Rent after rent

Gaped in the cloak of shibboleths effete,

Blasts of strong passion through the tatters beat,

Till the last remnant to the wind was borne,

And one grey morn

He rose in fibred panoply. At noon

They numbered off the men of his platoon;

And when they rose to drink to him that night,

The toast "The fight!"

He drained his glass, then lifted it on high:

"England or die!"

Oh! see them now as they swing billetwards,

Out of the dusk into the growing light,

At the grey end of a long Flanders night;

Each face accords

In colour with the dawn, but the tired eyes

Are eyes of veterans; rhythmic beat

Braces the loins, lightens the weary feet;

Song-snatches rise

And fall down the loose files; one lifts his head

To meet the morn but communes with the dead—

His comrade dead, filling a shallow grave

Beneath the nave

Of low grey skies—curses the shrapnel death,

Catches the chorus with his shuddering breath,

Swings to the march again. There in the rear,

Last to appear

The leader comes, a stripling at his side;

The alchemy of night has decked his age

With a strange garb of youth; but to assuage

Time's hungry tide

The stripling's face carries the mask of years;