Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/290

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"Ready?" He nodded. I turned my head

And nearly collapsed with fright.

Four of them were standing at my shoulder,

The others to the left and right.

Then, "Fire!" I shouted, and the gun leaped up

With a roar and a spurt of flame.

The sergeant gripped the handles while the belt ran through,

Never stopping to correct his aim.

Fearfully I turned, then jumped to my feet,

Forgetting all about the feed.

They were running like the wind up a long, steep hill,

With the thumb-and-finger man in the lead!

And high above the rattle and roar of the gun

I heard a despairing yell,

As Englishmen, Dutchmen, pikemen, bowmen,

Vanished in the night, pell-mell.

The men who were sleeping in the moonlit trench

Sat up and rubbed their eyes;

And one of them muttered in a drowsy voice:

"Wot to blazes is the row, you guys?"

The sergeant said: "That'll do! That'll do!"

But he whispered to me: "Keep mum!"

They wouldn't have believed that the row was all about

A finger and a huge, thick thumb. James Norman Hall

SEE across the chasm of flying years

The pyre of Dido on the vacant shore;

I see Medea's fury and hear the roar

Of rushing flames, the new bride's burning tears;

And ever as still another vision peers

Thro' memory's mist to stir me more and more,

I say that surely I have lived before

And known this joy and trembled with these fears.