  The sky hung smooth o'er the line of hill That shadowed the valley that seemed so still, And the blackbird whistled his love notes shrill. The church lay dreaming of God, and when The bodies should rise from her graveyard pen Where the high grass covered her poor dead men. The water meadows shone rich with gold, Gold that the buttercups had sold To the nibbling sheep of the red ring-fold. And even the river murmured rest As the sun sank low in the tender west, And the earth flowers slept on their mother's breast. Over the valley that seemed so still, Where the blackbird whistled his love-notes shrill I gazed, and all against my will I saw a vision beneath the hill. Centuries passed like a mist away And I stood in the glare of a burning day Whilst the church-bells clamoured a call to pray. War and its brother raced hand in hand, That brother called Death; and they seared the land With their fiery breath and the murder brand. And copses and dales were bleeding red, Naught was sacred, the living or dead, The old, old man, or the girl just wed. Men stormed the homestead, blazed the corn, Pillaged and sacked from night till morn, And spitted the babe that was newly born. Savage and brutal, like hell-hounds freed, They swarmed the hill, debauched with greed— Some slunk behind, their lust to feed. At last, when the streams ran human blood, Soaking the fields in a scarlet flood, A woman prayed with her child for food. All on their way those soldiers passed With a foetid jest at her hapless fast, And some men cut her down at last. They cut her down! Oh, woe is me, And they left her to rot in her misery, Naked and scorned for the world to see. They left her bare in the cold night air, Save only the comb in her coal-black hair, And they strangled the baby, helpless there. They did not trouble to wind them round In a sheet of earth in the dewy ground, They looted them both for the spoil they found. But the wind was kind. It wailed aloud And churned the dust, till it rose a cloud like a pearly mist, to form a shroud. And the leaves swooned down to the wind's sweet call And covered the mother and babe and all, Till they lay at peace in a soft green pall. The church still ponders, and wonders when Those bodies will rise from her graveyard pen, But she knows they are blessed, those poor dead men, For they sleep within her Christian fold Under her consecrated mould, Where a verse was read, and a prayer was told. But under the hill, in the leaves somewhere, Lie a mother and child all stark and bare, Save only a comb in the coal-black hair— Yet God will remember they lie out there.
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