rd.
I am going to offer peace to my people,
And abdicate, perhaps, as overlord.
I shall now take up My Cross as Count of Prussia--
Which is not a heavy burden, you'll agree.
Why, before the twenty million dead are rotten
There'll be yachting days again for you and me.
Cheer up!
It would mean a rope for anyone but Me."

_"Oh, take care!" said the Empress. "They are flying,
Endlessly round and round.
They have finished with the faces, the dreadful little faces,
The little eyeless faces of the drowned."_

THE VINDICTIVE

How should we praise those lads of the old _Vindictive_
Who looked Death straight in the eyes,
Till his gaze fell,
In those red gates of hell?

England, in her proud history, proudly enrolls them,
And the deep night in her remembering skies
With purer glory
Shall blazon their grim story.

There were no throngs to applaud that hushed adventure.
They were one to a thousand on that fierce emprise.
The shores they sought
Were armoured, past all thought.

O, they knew fear, be assured, as the brave must know it,
With youth and its happiness bidding their last good-byes;
Till thoughts, more dear
Than life, cast out all fear.

For if, as we think, they remembered the brown-roofed homesteads,
And the scent of the hawthorn hedges when daylight dies,
Old happy places,
Young eyes and fading faces;

One dream was dearer that night than the best of their boyhood,
One hope more radiant than any their hearts could prize.
The touch of your hand,
The light of your face, England!

So, age to age shall tell how they sailed through the darkness
Where, under those high, austere, implacable stars,
Not one in ten
Might look for a dawn again.

They saw the ferry-boats, _Iris_ and _Daffodil_, creeping
Darkly as clouds to the shimmering mine-strewn bars,
Flash into light!
Then thunder reddened the night.

The wild white swords of the search-lights blinded and stabbed them,
The sharp black shadows fought in fantastic wars.
Black waves leapt whitening,
Red decks were washed with lightning.

But, under the twelve-inch guns of the black land-batteries
The hacked bright hulk, in a glory of crackling spars,
Moved to her goal
Like an immortal soul;

That, while the raw rent flesh in a furnace is tortured,
Reigns by a law no agony ever can shake,
And shines in power
Above all s