Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/215

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And there is one who 'll softly creep

To kiss me ere I fall asleep

And tuck me 'neath the counterpane,

As if I were a boy again,

When I come home.

When I come home, from dark to light,

And tread the roadways long and white,

And tramp the lanes I tramped of yore,

And see the village greens once more,

The tranquil farms, the meadows free,

The friendly trees that nod to me,

And hear the lark beneath the sun,

'Twill be good pay for what I 've done,

When I come home.

Always this love for and longing after the quiet country places of little old England—'I have seen men shattered, dying, dead—all the sad tragedy of war,' he said in a letter home, when he was quartered near a devastated French village in July 1916. 'And this murder of old stone and lichened thatches, this shattering of little old churches and homesteads brings the tragedy home to me more acutely. I think to find an English village like this would almost break my heart.'

I knew Leslie Coulson from the days when he was a child in his mother's arms,