Ewart Alan Mackintosh: Verses about War

In Oxford now the lamps are lit.
The city bells ring low,
And up and down the silent town
The ghosts of friendship go.

With whispering laughs they meet and pass
As we were used to do,
And somewhere in the airy crowd
My spirit walks with you.

The troopers quarter in the rooms
That once were yours and mine,
And you are lying out to-night
Behind the firing-line.

But still in rooms that were our own
We wander, you and I,
And night and day our spirits walk
Along the empty High.

When you and I are buried
With grasses over head,
The memory of our fights will stand
Above this bare and tortured land,
We knew ere we were dead.

Though grasses grow on Vimy,
And poppies at Messines,
And in High Wood the children play,
The craters and the graves will stay
To show what things have been.

Though all be quiet in day-time,
The night shall bring a change,
And peasants walking home shall see
Shell-torn meadow and riven tree,
And their own fields grown strange.

They shall hear live men crying,
They shall see dead men lie,
Shall hear the rattling Maxims fire,
And see by broken twists of wire
Gold flares light up the sky.

And in their new-built houses
The frightened folk will see
Pale bombers coming down the street,
And hear the flurry of charging feet,
And the crash of Victory.

This is our Earth baptized
With the red wine of War.
Horror and courage hand in hand
Shall brood upon the stricken land
In silence evermore.

So I shall never see you more.
The northern winds will blow in vain
Brave and heart-easing off the shore.
You will not sail with them again.
I shall not see you wait for me
Where on the beach the dulse is brown,
Nor hear at night across the sea
Your chorus of the Nighean doun.

Are you so easy handled now
That Flanders soil can keep you still
Although the northern breezes blow
All day across the fairy's hill ?
And can an alien lowland clay
Hold fast your soul and body too,
Or will you rise and come away
To where our friendship waits for you ?

You cannot rest so far from home,
Your heart will miss the northern wind,
Back from the lowland fields will come
Your soul the grave can never bind.
Once more your hands will trim the sail
That carries us across the bay
To where the summer islands pale
Over the seas and far away.

And you will sail and watch with me
The things we saw and loved before.
The happy islands of the sea,
The breakers white against the shore.
A hundred joys that we held dear
Will call you from the Flanders town,
And in the evenings I shall hear
Your chorus of the Nighean doun

The air is still, the light winds blow
Too quietly to wake you now.
Dreamer, you dream too well to know
'Whose hand set death upon your brow,
The shrinking flesh the bullets tore
Will never pulse with fear again;

Sleep on, remembering no more
Your sudden agony of pain.

Oh, poor brave smiling face made naught,
Turned back to dust from whence you came,
You have forgot the men you fought,
The wounds that burnt you like a flame;

With stiff hand crumbling a clod,
And blind eyes staring at the sky,
The awful evidence of God
Against the men who made you die.

You have forgotten, sleeping well,
But what of them? shall they forget
Your body broken with the shell,
Your brow whereon their seal is set?
Does earth for them hold any place
Where they shall never see the flies
Clustered about your empty face
And on your blind, accusing eyes?

Good-night, good sleep to you. But they
Will never know good-night again,
Whose eyes are seeing night and day,
The humble men who died in vain.
Their ears are filled with bitter cries,
Their nostrils with the powder smell,
And shall see your mournful eyes
Across the reeking fires of hell.