The wind, which heralded the blackening night, Swirled in grey mists the sulphur-laden smoke. From sleep, in sparkling instancy of light, Crouched batteries like grumbling tigers woke And stretched their iron symmetry; they hurled Skyward with roar and boom each pregnant shell Rumbling on tracks unseen. Such tyrants reign The sullen masters of a mangled world, Grim-mothered in a womb of furnaced hell, Wrought, forged, and hammered for the work of pain. For six long days the common slayers played, Till, fitfully, there boomed a heavier king, Who, couched in leaves and branches deftly laid, And hid in dappled colour of the spring, Vaunted tornadoes. Far from that covered lair, Like hidden snares the sinuous trenches lay Mid fields where nodding poppies show their pride. The tall star-pointed streamers leap and flare, And turn the night’s immensity to day; Or rockets whistle in their upward ride. II The moment comes when thrice-embittered fire Proclaims the prelude to the great attack. In ruined heaps, torn saps and tangled wire And battered parapets loom gaunt and black: The flashes fade, the steady rattle dies, A breathless hush brings forth a troubled day, And men of sinew, knit to charge and stand, Rise up. But he of words and blinded eyes Applauds the puppets of his ghastly play, With easy rhetoric and ready hand. Unlike those men who waited for the word, Clean soldiers from a country of the sea; These were no thong-lashed band or goaded herd Tricked by the easy speech of tyranny. All the long week they fought encircling Fate, While chaos clutched the throat and shuddered past As phantoms haunt a child, and softly creep Round cots, so Death stood sentry at the Gate And beckoned waiting terror, till at last He vanished at the hurrying touch of sleep. The beauty of the Earth seemed doubly sweet With the stored sacraments the Summer yields-- Grass-sunken kine, and softly-hissing wheat, Blue-misted flax, and drowsy poppy fields. But with the vanished day Remembrance came Vivid with dreams, and sweet with magic song, Soft haunting echoes of a distant sea As from another world. A belt of flame Held the swift past, and made each moment long With the tense horror of mortality. That easy lordling of the Universe Who plotted days that stain the path of time, For him was happy memory a curse, And Man a scapegoat for a royal crime. In lagging moments dearly sacrificed Men sweated blood before eternity: In cheerful agony, with jest and mirth, They shared the bitter solitude of Christ In a new Garden of Gethsemane, Gethsemane walled in by crested earth.