Page:Poems for Workers - ed. Manuel Gomez (1925).djvu/52

 Night on the Convoy Alexandria-Marseilles

By SIGFRIEDSIEGFRIED [sic] SASSOON

Out in the blustering darkness, on the deck

A gleam of stars looks down. Long blurs of black,

The lean Destroyers, level with our track,

Plunging and stealing, watch the perilous way,

Through backward racing seas and caverns of chill spray.

One sentry by the davits, in the gloom

Stands mute; the boat heaves onward through the night.

Shrouded is every chink of cabined light:

And sluiced by floundering waves that hiss and boom,

And crash like guns, the troop-ship shudders doom.

Now something at my feet stirs with a sigh;

And slowly growing used to groping dark,

I know that the hurricane-deck, down all its length,

Is heaped and spread with lads in sprawling strength,—

Blanketed soldiers sleeping. In the stark

Danger of life at war, they lie so still,

All prostrate and defenceless, head by head

And I remember Arras, and that hill

Where dumb with pain I stumble among the dead.

We are going home. The troop-ship, in a thrill

O fiery-chamber'd anguish, throbs and rolls.

We are going home victims  three thousand souls