Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/295

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The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops,

Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers:

Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave drops;

Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours.

When the right hour struck, all the youth of America uprose, as Seeger and his gallant companions had risen, to go back along 'the generous path of Lafayette,' and take their stand by the legions of France and Britain, and carry the Stars and Stripes to victory. And among the earliest regiments to land in France from America came Joyce Kilmer, a private of the 165th U.S.A. Infantry, a brilliant and distinguished journalist who had thrown up his post on the New York Times to go and enlist. He was born at New Brunswick, New Jersey, on the 6th December 1886. His mother came of an old English family that went to Connecticut in 1638; and though it is said there were Scottish as well as English strains in him, and he himself claimed, on no particular evidence, to be half Irish, it is safer to say that he was keenly Irish