Page:More songs by the fighting men, soldier poets, second series, 1917.djvu/68

 WILFRID J. HALLIDAY

"An Unknown British Soldier&apos;

IS just a little wooden cross

In lonely grandeur there

That smiles upon a rugged mound

Of weedy, unattended ground,

For he was no man's care.

A broken bayonet marked the spot

And troops would turn aside,

Till loving hands rough cast the wood

And shaped a cross, emblem of blood,

To tell where he had died.

He died unowned, for none could tell

The silent hero's name:

They saw the bloody wounds he bore,

The shattered limbs, but nothing more,

And knew not whence he came.

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