Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/277

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And stiff in khaki the boys were laid

To the sniper's toll at the barricade,

But the quick went clattering through the town,

Shot at the sniper and brought him down,

As we entered Loos in the morning.

The dead men lay on the cellar stair,

Toll of the bomb that found them there,

In the street men fell as a bullock drops,

Sniped from the fringe of Hulluch copse.

And the choking fumes of the deadly shell

Curtained the place where our comrades fell,—

This we saw when the charge was done,

And the East blushed red to the rising sun

In the town of Loos in the morning. Patrick MacGill

REEN gardens in Laventie!

Soldiers only know the street

Where the mud is churned and splashed about

By battle-wending feet;

And yet beside one stricken house there is a glimpse of grass—

Look for it when you pass.

Beyond the church whose pitted spire

Seems balanced on a strand

Of swaying stone and tottering brick,

Two roofless ruins stand;

And here, among the wreckage, where the back-wall should have been,

We found a garden green.

The grass was never trodden on,

The little path of gravel

Was overgrown with celandine;

No other folk did travel

Along its weedy surface but the nimble-footed mouse,

Running from house to house.