Below your black priest’s heaven,

Above his tinselled hell,

Beyond the Circles Seven,

The Red-Steel Killers dwell—

The men who drave, to blade-ring home, behind the marching shell.

We knew not good nor evil,

Save only right of blade;

Yet neither god nor devil

Could hold us from our trade,

When once we watched the barrage lift, and splendidly afraid

Came scrambling out of cover,

And staggered up the hill....

The bullets whistled over;

Our sudden dead lay still;

And the mad machine-gun chatter drove us fighting-wild to kill.

Then the death-light lit our faces,

And the death-mist floated red

O’er the crimson cratered places

Where his outposts crouched in dread....

And we stabbed or clubbed them as they crouched; and shot them as they fled;

And floundered, torn and bleeding,

Over trenches, through the wire,

With the shrapnel-barrage leading

To the prey of our desire—

To the men who rose to meet us from the blood-soaked battle-mire;

Met them; gave and asked no quarter;

But, where we saw the Gray,

Plunged the edged steel of slaughter,

Stabbed home, and wrenched away....

Till red wrists tired of killing-work, and none were left to slay.

Now—while his fresh battalions

Moved up to the attack—

Screaming like angry stallions,

His shells came charging back,

And stamped the ground with thunder-hooves and pawed it spouting-black

And breathed down poison-stenches

Upon us, leaping past....

Panting, we turned his trenches;

And heard—each time we cast

From parapet to parados—the scything bullet-blast.

Till the whistle told his coming;

Till we flung away the pick,

So we laboured—while we lasted:

Soaked in rain or parched in sun;

Bullet-riddled; fire-blasted;

Poisoned: fodder for the gun:

So we perished, and our bodies rotted in the ground they won.

It heard the song of the First of the Dead, as It couched by the lintel-post;

And the coward-soul would have given Its soul to be back with the Red-Steel host....

But Eye peered down; and It quailed at the Eye; and NakÉd Truth said: “Lost.”

And Eye went out. But It might not move; for, droned in the dark, It heard

The Second Song of the Killer-men—word upon awful word

Cleaving the void with a shrill, keen sound like the wings of a pouncing bird.