Page:More songs by the fighting men, soldier poets, second series, 1917.djvu/93

Frank C. Lewis The Downs, looking from Savernake Forest

ITH eager steps I climbed the hill

Ploughed with deep, age-old furrows, till

I reached the forest's edge and gazed

Across the low red town smoke-hazed,

Upon the downs, windy and bare,

Ridge upon ridge unending. There

No sound is heard save only these,

The wind's wild song 'mid lonely trees,

The echo of sheep-bells, and the cry

Of peewits circling in the sky.

Back in the dawn of time on earth,

Before she brought her sons to birth,

You stood the same as now you stand—

Untroubled, vast, majestic, grand:

Only you had not heard the tramp,

Old Hackpen Hill and Barbury Camp,

Of many an army passing by

Under a blue and cloud-flecked sky.

And happy they who fell in fight

Upon your clear and wind-swept height:

With thunder for their requiem

And the dark clouds to weep for them, 89