The Battle Cry

My Love's gone a-fighting
Where war-trumpets call,
The wrongs of men righting
With carbine and ball,
And sabre for smiting,
And charger, and all!

Of whom does he think there
Where war-trumpets call?
To whom does he drink there,
With carbine and ball
On battle's red brink there,
And charger, and all?

He hears her voice a-humming
Where war-trumpets call,
"I wait, Love, thy coming
With carbine and ball,
And bandsmen a-drumming
Thee, charger and all!"

They come beset by riddling hail;
They sway like sedges in a gale;
They fail and win and win and fail;
Their mad assailants rave and reel
And face as men who scorn to feel.
Phantasmal fears
And the flop of the flame,
And the throb of the clock,
And the loosened slate,
And the blind night's drone
Which tiredly the spatial pines intone.
They come beset by riddling hail;
They sway like sedges in a gale;
They fail and win and win and fail;
Their mad assailants rave and reel
And face as men who scorn to feel.
Till faintness follows closing in 
When, faltering headlong down, they spin.
Pale Colonels, Captains, ranksmen lie,
Facing the earth or facing the sky.
They strove to live,
They stretch to die!
Friends, foemen mingle; heap and heap
Hide their hacked bones, earth deep!
Where harmless worms caress and creep
Hide their hacked bones, earth deep.
What man can grieve
What woman weep
Better than waking is to sleep.

Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet 
Right many a nipperkin!

But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

 ... 

He thought he'd enlist perhaps,
Offhand like - just as I -
Was out of work, had sold his traps,
No other reason why.

Yes, quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down 
You'd treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest 
Uncoffined - just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest 
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west 
Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew -
Fresh from his Wessex home -
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.

She sits in the tawny vapour
That the Thames-side lanes have uprolled,
Behind whose webby fold on fold
Like a waning taper
The street-lamp glitters cold.

A messenger's knock cracks smartly,
Flashed news is in her hand
Of meaning it dazes to understand
Though shaped so shortly:
He - has fallen - in the far South Land...

'Tis the morrow; the fog hangs thicker,
The postman nears and goes:
A letter is brought whose lines disclose
By the firelight flicker
His hand, whom the worm now knows:

Fresh-firm-penned in highest feather -
Page-full of his hoped return,
And of home-planned jaunts by brake and burn
In the summer weather,
And of new love that they would learn.

South of the Line, inland from far Durban,
A mouldering soldier lies - your countryman.
Awry and doubled up are his gray bones,
And on the breeze his puzzled phantom moans
Nightly to clear Canopus: "I would know
By whom and when the All-Earth-gladdening Law 
Of Peace, brought in by that Man Crucified,
Was ruled to be inept, and set aside?
And what of logic or of truth appears
In tacking "Anno domini" to the years?
Near twenty-hundred liveried thus have hied,
But tarries yet the Cause for which He died."