Produced by Jason Isbell, Daniel Griffith and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE WORKS OF RICHARD LE GALLIENNE Robert Louis Stevenson: An Elegy, and Other Poems, Mainly Personal. English Poems. Revised. Rudyard Kipling: A Criticism. George Meredith: Some Characteristics. With a bibliography (much enlarged) by John Lane. The Quest of the Golden Girl: A Romance. The Romance of Zion Chapel. The Worshipper of the Image: A Tragic Fairy Tale. Sleeping Beauty and Other Prose Fancies. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A Paraphrase from Several Literary Translations. New edition with fifty additional quatrains. With cover design by Will Bradley. Retrospective Reviews: A Literary Log. (New edition.) 2 vols. Prose Fancies. First series. With portrait of the author by Wilson Steer. Prose Fancies. Second series. Travels in England. New edition. New Poems. Attitudes and Avowals. With Some Retrospective Reviews. The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems. THE SILK-HAT SOLDIER AND OTHER POEMS IN WAR TIME BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE NEW YORK--JOHN LANE COMPANY LONDON--JOHN LANE--THE BODLEY HEAD MCMXV COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY JOHN LANE COMPANY Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co. New York To His Majesty ALBERT I. King of the Belgians THE HEROIC CAPTAIN OF AN HEROIC PEOPLE CONTENTS PAGE To Belgium 9 The Silk-Hat Soldier 11 The Cry of the Little Peoples 15 The Illusion of War 20 Christmas in War-time 22 "Soldier Going to the War" 29 The Rainbow 30 TO BELGIUM Our tears, our songs, our laurels--what are these To thee in thy Gethsemane of loss, Stretched in thine unimagined agonies On Hell's last engine of the Iron Cross. For such a world as this that thou shouldst die Is price too vast--yet, Belgium, hadst thou sold Thyself, O then had fled from out the earth Honour for ever, and left only Gold. Nor diest thou--for soon shalt thou awake, And, lifted high on our victorious shields, Watch the new sunrise driving for your sons The hated German shadow from your fields. "British colonists resident in London volunteer, and not even silk hats are doffed before training begins" --New York Times THE SILK-HAT SOLDIER I saw him in a picture, and I felt I'd like to cry-- He stood in line, The man "for mine," A tall silk-hatted "guy"-- Right on the call, Silk hat and all, He'd hurried to the cry-- For he loves England well enough for England to die.