Page:Poems of the Great War - Cunliffe.djvu/74

 48 WILFRED CAMPBELL

And the murderer's dirk did its monster work, Mid the scythe-like shrapnel rain.

Till it seemed that at last the brute Hun hordes

Had broken that wall of steel ; And that soon, through this breach in the freeman's dyke.

His trampling hosts would wheel ; —

And sweep to the south in ravaging might,

And Europe's peoples again Be trodden under the tyrant's heel.

Like herds, in the Prussian pen.

But in that line on the British right,

There massed a corps amain, Of men who hailed from a far west land

Of mountain and forest and plain ;

Men new to war and its dreadest deeds,

But noble and staunch and true ; Men of the open, East and West, Brew of old Britain's brew.

These were the men out there that night,

When Hell loomed close ahead ; Who saw that pitiful, hideous rout.

And breathed those gases dread ; While some went under and some went mad ;

But never a man there fled.

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