filed, Worthy of Husband, Lover, or --Child... Sweet as themselves at the core! BOND AND FREE (The Bapaume Road, _March_ 1917) Misty and pale the sunlight, brittle and black the trees; Roads powdered like sticks of candy for a car to crunch as they freeze... Then we overtook a Battalion... and it wasn't a roadway then, But cymbals and drums and dulcimers to the beat of the marching men! They were laden and groomed for the trenches, they were shaven and scrubbed and fed; Like the scales of a single Saurian their helmets rippled ahead; Not a sorrowful face beneath them, just the tail of a scornful eye For the car full of favoured mufti that went quacking and quaking by. You gloat and take note in your motoring coat, and the sights come fast and thick: A party of pampered prisoners, toying with shovel and pick; A town where some of the houses are so many heaps of stone, And some of them steel anatomies picked clean to the buckled bone. A road like a pier in a hurricane of mountainous seas of mud, Where a few trees, whittled to walking-sticks, rose out of the frozen flood Like the masts of the sunken villages that might have been down below-- Or blown off the festering face of an earth that God Himself wouldn't know! Not a yard but was part of a shell-hole--not an inch, to be more precise-- And most of the holes held water, and all the water was ice: They stared at the bleak blue heavens like the glazed blue eyes of the slain, Till the snow came, shutting them gently, and sheeting the slaughtered plain. Here a pile of derelict rifles, there a couple of horses lay-- Like rockerless rocking-horses, as wooden of leg as they, And not much redder of nostril--not anything like so grim As the slinking ghoul of a lean live cat creeping over the crater's rim! And behind and beyond and about us were the long black Dogs of War, With pigmies pulling their tails for them, and making the monsters roar