bang for the bomb-belt, racing like billy-be-damned.
Oh, it didn't take long to arrive there, those who arrived at all;
The machine guns were certainly chronic, the shindy enough to appal.
Oh yes, I omitted to tell you, I'd wounds on the chest and the head,
And my shirt was torn to a gun-rag, and my face blood-gummy and red.
I'm thinking I looked like a madman; I fancy I felt one too,
Half naked and swinging a rifle. . . . God! what a glorious "do".
As I sit here in old Piccadilly, sipping my afternoon tea,
I see a blind, bullet-chipped devil, and it's hard to believe that it's me;
I see a wild, war-damaged demon, smashing out left and right,
And humming "Ben Bolt" rather loudly, and hugely enjoying the fight.
And as for my men, may God bless 'em! I've loved 'em ever since then:
They fought like the shining angels; they're the pick o' the land, my men.
And the trench was a reeking shambles, not a Boche to be seen alive--
So I thought; but on rounding a traverse I came on a covey of five;
And four of 'em threw up their flippers,
but the fifth chap, a sergeant, was game,
And though I'd a bomb and revolver he came at me just the same.
A sporty thing that, I tell you; I just couldn't blow him to hell,
So I swung to the point of his jaw-bone, and down like a ninepin he fell.
And then when I'd brought him to reason, he wasn't half bad, that Hun;
He bandaged my head and my short-rib as well as the Doc could have done.
So back I went with my Boches, as gay as a two-year-old colt,
And it suddenly struck me as rummy, I still was a-humming "Ben Bolt".
And now, by Jove! how I've bored you. You've just let me babble away;
Let's talk of the things that _MATTER_--your car or the newest play. . . .

The Mourners

I look into the aching womb of night;
I look across the mist that masks the dead;
The moon is tired and gives but little light,
The stars have gone to bed.

The earth is sick and seems to breathe with pain;
A lost wind whimpers in a mangled tree;
I do not see the foul, corpse-cluttered plain,
The dead I do not see.

The slain I _WOULD_ not see . . . and so I lift
My eyes from out the shambles where they lie;
When lo! a million woman-faces drift
Like pale leaves through the sky.

The cheeks of some are channelled deep with tears;
But some are tearless, with wild eyes that stare
Into the shadow of the coming years
Of fathomless despair.

And some are young