tter lying fallen, death-struck, breathless, bleeding, on your face,
With your bright sword pointing onward, dying happy in your place!
Better to have passed in spirit from the battle-storm's eclipse
With the great Cause in your heart and with the war-shout on your
lips!
Better to have fallen charging, having known the nobler time,
In the fiery cheer and impulse of our serried battle-line--
Than to stand and watch your comrades, in the hail of fire and lead,
Up the slopes and thro' the smoke-clouds, thro' the dying and the
dead,
Till the sun strikes through a moment, to our one victorious shout,
On our bayonets bristling brightly as we carry the redoubt!
O half-hearted, pusillanimous, faltering heart and fuddled brain
That remembered Egypt's flesh-pots, and turned back and dreamed
again--
Left the plain of blood and battle for the quiet of the hills,
And the sunny soft contentment that the woody homestead fills.
There you sat and sang of Egypt, of its sober solid graves,
(Pyramids, you call them, Sphinxes), mortared with the blood of
slaves,
Houses, streets and stately palaces, the mart, the regal stew
Where freedom "broadens down" so slow it stops with lords and you!
O you mocked at our confusion, O you told us of our crimes,
Us ungentle, not like warriors of the sweet idyllic times,
Flowers of eunuch-hearted kings and courts where pretty poet knights
Tilted gaily or slew stake-armed peasants, hundreds, in the fights?
O you drew the hideous picture of our bravest and our best,
Patient martyrs, desperate swordsmen, for the Cause that gives not
rest--
Men of science, "vivisectors!"--democrats, the "rout of beasts"--
Writers, essayists and poets, "Belial's prophets, Moloch's priests!"
Coward, you have made the great refusal? you have won the gilded
praise
Of the wringers of his heart's-blood from the peasant's sunless days,
Of the lord and the land-owner, of the rich man who has bound
Labour on the wheel to break him, strew his rent limbs on the ground,
With a vulture eye aglare on brothers, sisters that he had,
Crying, "Troops and guns to shoot them, if the hunger drive them mad!"
Coward, faithless, unbelieving, that had courage but to take
What of pleasure and of beauty men have won for manhood's sake,
Blustering long and loudest at the hideousness and pain
These you praise have brought upon us;