Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/339

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I have listened in the gloaming

To your poets' tales of old;

I know when I am roaming

That I walk on hallowed mould.

I have lived and fought beside you,

And I trow your hearts are steel;

That the nations who deride you

Shall, like dogs, be brought to heel.

But I pine for the roar of the lion on the edge of the clearing;

The rustle of grass snake; the bird's flashing wing in the heath;

For the sun-shrivelled peaks of the mountains to blue heaven rearing;

The limitless outlook, the space, and the freedom beneath.

His book was not published till after he had gone to the front, and a copy of it reached him only a few days before he was killed in action there, in France.

Maybe because they both saw the truth of war too starkly to idealise it at all, I find myself linking William Hamilton in my mind with our English soldier poet Henry Simpson; and setting down the records in this chapter of one South African soldier, of a few from Canada, Australia, America, and inevitably leaving so many unnamed, one's thoughts turn