Ewart Alan Mackintosh: Verses about Time

City of hopes and golden dreaming
Set with a crown of tall grey towers,
City of mist that round you streaming
Screens the vision of vanished hours,
All the wisdom of youth far-seeing,
All the things that we meant to do.
Dreams that will never be clothed in being,
Mother, your sons have left with you.

Clad in beauty of dreams begotten
Strange old city for ever young,
Keep the visions that we've forgotten.
Keep the songs we have never sung.
So shall we hear your music calling.
So from a land where songs are few
When the shadows of life are falling.
Mother, your sons come back to you.

So with the bullets above us flying,
So in the midst of horror and pain
We shall come back from the sorrow of dying
To wander your magical ways again.
For that you keep and grow not older
All the beauty we ever knew.
As the fingers of death grow colder.
Mother, your sons come back to you.

Here in the narrow broken way
Where silently we go.
Steadfast above their valiant clay
Forgotten crosses show.
Our whispers call to many a ghost
Across the flare-light pale,
And from their graves the Breton host
Stand up beside the Gael.

Year upon year of ancient sleep
Have rusted on our swords,
But once again our place we keep
Against the Saxon hordes.
Since Arthur ruled in Brittany,
And all the world was new.
The fires that burned our history,
Bum in our spirits too.

One speech beyond their memory
Binds us together still,
One dream of home wherein we see
River and sea and hill.
When in the night-time Fingal's peers
Fight their old wars again,
The blood of twice two thousand years
Leaps high in every vein.

Old songs that waked King Arthur's knights
Stir in our memory yet.
Old tales of olden heroes fights
That we cannot forget,
To die as Fingal's warriors died
The great men long ago,
Breton and Gael stand side by side
Against the ancient foe.

So you were David's father,
And he was your only son,
And the new-cut peats are rotting
And the work is left undone,
Because of an old man weeping,
Just an old man in pain,
For David, his son David,
That will not come again.

Oh, the letters he wrote you,
And I can see them still,
Not a word of the fighting
But just the sheep on the hill
And how you should get the crops in
Ere the year got stormier,
And the Bosches have got his body,
And I was his officer.

You were only David's father,
But I had fifty sons
When we went up that evening
Under the arch of the guns,
And we came back at twilight
— O God! I heard them call
To me for help and pity
That could not help at all.

Oh, never will I forget you,
My men that trusted me,
More my sons than your fathers'
For they could only see
The little helpless babies
And the young men in their pride.
They could not see you dying
And hold you while you died.

Happy and young and gallant,
they saw their first born go,
But not the strong limbs broken
And the beautiful men brought low,
The piteous writhing bodies,
They screamed, 'Don't leave me Sir,'
For they were only fathers
But I was your officer.

Under the sky of battle, under the arch of the guns,
Where in a mad red torrent the river of fighting runs.
Where the shout of a strong man sounds no more than a broken groan,
And the heart of a man rejoicing stands up in its strength alone,
There in the hour of trial ; and when the battle is spent,
And we sit drinking together, laughing and well content.
Deep in my heart I am hearing a little still voice that sings,
' Well, but what will you do when there comes an end of these things ? '

Laughter, hard drinking and fighting, quarrels of friend and friend.
The eyes of the men that trust us, of all these there is an end.
No more in the raving barrage in one swift clamorous breath
We shall jest and curse together on the razor-edge of death.
Old days, old ways, old comrades, for ever and ever good-bye !

We shall walk no more in the twisted ways of the trenches, you and I,
For the nations have heard the tidings, they have sworn that wars shall cease,
And it's all one damned long Sunday walk down the straight , flat road of peace.

Yes, we shall be raptured again by the frock-coat's singular charm,
That goes so well with children and a loving wife on your arm,
Treading a road that is paved with family dinners and teas,
A sensible dull suburban road planted with decorous trees,
Till we come at last to the heaven our peaceable saints have trod,
Like the sort of church that our fathers built and called it a house of God,
And a God like a super-bishop in an apron and nice top-hat —
God, you are God of battles. Forbid that we come to that !

God, you are God of soldiers, merry and rough and kind,
Give to your sons an earth and a heaven more to our mind.
Meat and drink for the body, laughter and song for the soul,
And fighting and clean quick death to end and complete the whole.

Never a hope of heaven, never a fear of hell,
Only the knowledge that you are a soldier, and all is well,
And whether the end be death or a merrier life be given,
We shall have died in the pride of our youth — and that will be heaven.