And he cried to the men who had killed their man, “Who passes the rifleman? I! By the four I slew and the shell I stopped, if my feet be not too late, I speak the word for Rifleman Brown that a chap may speak for his mate!” The dead of lower Valhalla, the heroes of dumb renown, They pricked up their ears to a tale of the earth as they set their tankards down. “We were both on sentry this morning, when the General happened along. He asked us our job in a gas attack. Joe told him, ‘Beat on the gong.’ ‘What else?’ ‘Nothing else, sir,’ Joe answered. ‘Good God, man,’ our General said, ‘By the time you’d beaten that bloodstained gong the chances are you’d be dead. You’d put on your gas helmet, blast you, and you’d damn well put it on _first_!’ And Joe stood dumb to attention, and wondered why he’d been cursed.” The gashed heads turned to the Rifleman, and now it seemed that they knew Why the face that had never a smear of blood was stained to the jawbones blue. “It was black to-night in the trenches.” The scarred heads craned to the voice, As the man with the blood-red bayonet spoke up for the mate of his choice. “You know what it’s like in the listening-post, with the very candles aflare, Their bullets smacking the sandbags, our Vickers combing your hair; How your ears and your eyes get jumpy, till each known tuft that you scan Moves and crawls in the shadows till you’d almost swear it was man. You know how you peer and snuff at the night when the Northeast gas winds blow.” “_By the One who made us and maimed us_,” quoth lower Valhalla, “_we know!_” “He was forty yards from the Bosches when, sudden as Hell, there came The crash of a dozen machine guns, the orange spurts of their flame, And Joe stood up in the whistling spray to try and fathom their game. Sudden their guns cease firing, sudden his nostrils sniff The sickening reek of the rotten pears, the death that kills with a whiff. Sniffs, and spots what their game is, and bangs on his cartridge case, With the gas cloud’s teeth in his windpipe and the gas cloud’s claws on his face. We heard his gong in our dugout--he only whacked on it twice-- We whipped our gas bags over our heads and tucked them down in a trice. For the gas would have got us as sure as God if he’d taken the Staff’s advice!” His head was cleft with a great red wound from the chin to the temple bone, But his voice was as clear as a sounding gong, “I’ll be damned if I’ll drink alone, Not even in lower Valhalla! Is he free of the free Canteen, My mate who comes with the unfleshed point and the full-charged magazine?” The gashed heads rose at the Rifleman o’er the rings of the Endless Smoke, And loud as the roar of a thousand guns Valhalla’s answer broke,