Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/294

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Than their blue-coated comrades whose great days

It was their pride to share—ay, share even to the death!

Nay, rather, France, to you they render thanks

(Seeing they came for honour, not for gain)

Who, opening to them your glorious ranks,

Gave them that grand occasion to excel,

That chance to live the life most free from stain

And that rare privilege of dying well.

And as surely he would have taken no word from his appeal to America to be proud of those sons of hers who thus had died:

And cry: Now Heaven be praised

That in that hour that most imperilled her,

Menaced her liberty who foremost raised

Europe's bright flag of freedom, some there were

Who, not unmindful of the antique debt,

Came back the generous path of Lafayette;

And when of a most formidable foe

She checked each onset, arduous to stem—

Foiled and frustrated them—

On those red fields where blow with furious blow

Was countered, whether the gigantic fray

Rolled by the Meuse or at the Bois Sabot,

Accents of ours were in the fierce mêlée;

And on those furthest rims of hallowed ground

Where the forlorn, the gallant charge expires,

When the slain bugler has long ceased to sound,

And on the tangled wires