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

As they slithered back on their haunches, as they

put out their flaming tongues,

And spat a murderous message long leagues from

their iron lungs!

They were kennelled in every corner, and some

were in gay disguise,

But all kept twitching their muzzles and baying

the silvery skies!

A howitzer like a hyena guffawed point-blank at

the car—

But only the sixty - pounder leaves an absolute

aural scar!

(Could a giant but crack a cable as a stockman

cracks his whip,

Or tear up a mile of calico with one unthinkable

r-r-r-r-rip!

Could he only squeak a slate-pencil about the

size of this gun,

You might get some faint idea of its sound, which

is those three sounds in one.)

But certain noises were absent, we looked for

some sights in vain,

And I cannot tell you if shrapnel does really

descend like rain—

Or Big Stuff burst like a bonfire, or bullets

whistle or moan;

But the other figures I'll swear to—if some of

'em are my own!

Livid and moist the twilight, heavy with snow

the trees,

And a road as of pleated velvet the colour of new

cream-cheese...

Then we overtook a Battalion... and I'm

hunting still for the word

For that gaunt, undaunted, haunted, whitening,

frightening herd!

They had done their tour of the trenches, they

were coated and caked with mud,

And some of them wore a bandage, and some of

them wore their blood!

The gaps in their ranks were many, and none of

them looked at me...

And I thought of no more vain phrases for the

things I was there to see,

But I felt like a man in a prison van where the

rest of the world goes Free.