Page:Poems (1915) G K Chesterton.djvu/120



HIS is their trumpet ripe and rounded,

They have burnt the wheat and gathered the chaff,

And we that have fought them, we that have watched them,

Have we at least not cause to laugh?

Never so low at least we stumbled—

Dead we have been but not so dead

As these that live on the life they squandered,

As these that drink of the blood they shed.

We never boasted the thing we blundered,

We never flaunted the thing that fails,

We never quailed from the living laughter,

To howl to the dead who tell no tales.

'Twas another finger at least that pointed

Our wasted men or our emptied bags,

It was not we that sounded the trumpet

In front of the triumph of wrecks and rags.