Page:Poems of the Great War - Cunliffe.djvu/265

 ��III

The straight flagged road breaks into dust, into a

thin white cloud, About the feet of a regiment driven back league by

league, Rifles at trail, and standards wrapped in black

funeral cloths. Unhasting, proud in retreat, They smile as the Red Cross Ambulance rushes by. (You know nothing of beauty and of desolation who

have not seen That smile of an army in retreat.) They go : and our shining, beckoning danger goes

with them, And our jo\- in the harvests that we gathered in at

nightfall in the fields; And like an unloved hand laid on a beating heart Our safety weighs us down.

Safety hard and strange ; stranger and yet more hard As, league after dying league, the beautiful, desolate

Land Falls back from the intolerable speed of an Ambu- lance in retreat On the sacred, dolorous Way.

— May Siriclair.

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