Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/355

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Greybeard philosophy has sought in books

And argument this truth,

That man is greater than his pain, but you

Have learnt it in your youth.

You know the wisdom taught by Calvary

At twenty-three.

Death would have found you brave, but braver still

You face each lagging day,

A merry Stoic, patient, chivalrous,

Divinely kind and gay.

You bear your knowledge lightly, graduate

Of unkind Fate.

Careless philosopher, the first to laugh,

The latest to complain,

Unmindful that you teach, you taught me this

In your long fight with pain:

Since God made man so good—here stands my creed—

God's good indeed. Winifred M. Letts

HEN consciousness came back, he found he lay

Between the opposing fires, but could not tell

On which hand were his friends; and either way

For him to turn was chancy—bullet and shell

Whistling and shrieking over him, as the glare

Of searchlights scoured the darkness to blind day.

He scrambled to his hands and knees ascare,

Dragging his wounded foot through puddled clay,

And tumbled in a hole a shell had scooped

At random in a turnip-field between

The unseen trenches where the foes lay cooped

Through that unending battle of unseen,

Dead-locked, league-stretching armies; and quite spent

He rolled upon his back within the pit,

And lay secure, thinking of all it meant

His lying in that little hole, sore hit,