Title: The Silk-Hat Soldier, and Other Poems in War Time
Author: Richard Le Gallienne
Release date: September 19, 2006 [eBook #19313]
Most recently updated: July 5, 2020
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Jason Isbell, Daniel Griffith and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
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Rudyard Kipling: A Criticism.
George Meredith: Some Characteristics. With a bibliography (much enlarged) by John Lane.
The Quest of the Golden Girl: A Romance.
The Romance of Zion Chapel.
The Worshipper of the Image: A Tragic Fairy Tale.
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BY
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
NEW YORK—JOHN LANE COMPANY
LONDON—JOHN LANE—THE
BODLEY HEAD
MCMXV
Copyright, 1915, by
JOHN
LANE COMPANY
Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Co.
New York
To
His Majesty
ALBERT
I.
King of the Belgians
THE HEROIC CAPTAIN
OF
AN
HEROIC PEOPLE
PAGE | |
To Belgium | 9 |
The Silk-Hat Soldier | 11 |
The Cry of the Little Peoples | 14 |
The Illusion of War | 20 |
Christmas in War-time | 22 |
“Soldier Going to the War” | 29 |
The Rainbow | 30 |
Our tears, our songs, our laurels—what are these
To thee in thy Gethsemane of loss,
Stretched in thine unimagined agonies
On Hell's last engine of the Iron Cross.
For such a world as this that thou shouldst die
Is price too vast—yet, Belgium, hadst
thou sold
Thyself, O then had fled from out
the earth
Honour for ever, and
left only Gold.
Nor diest thou—for soon shalt thou awake,
And, lifted high on our victorious shields,
Watch the new sunrise driving for your sons
The hated German shadow from your fields.
I saw him in a picture, and I felt I'd like to cry—
He stood in line,
The man “for mine,”
A tall silk-hatted “guy”—
Right on the call,
Silk hat and all,
He'd hurried to the cry—
For he loves England well enough for England to die.
I've seen King Harry's helmet in the Abbey hanging high—
The one he wore
At Agincourt;
But
braver to my eye
That
city toff
Too keen
to doff
His stove-pipe—bless him—why?
For he loves England well enough for England to die.
And other fellows in that line had come too on the fly,
Their joys and toys,
Brave English boys,
For good and all put by;
O
you brave best,
Teach
all the rest
How pure the heart and high
When one loves England well enough for England to die.
One threw his cricket-bat aside, one left the ink to
dry;
All peace and play
He's put away,
And bid his love good-bye—
O mother mine!
O sweetheart mine!
No man of yours am I—
If I
love not England well enough for England to die.
I guess it strikes a chill somewhere, the bravest won't
deny,
All that you
love,
Away to
shove,
And set your teeth to die;
But better dead,
When all is said,
Than lapped in peace to lie—
If we love not England well enough for England to die.
The Cry of the Little Peoples went up to God in vain;
The Czech and the Pole, and the Finn, and the Schleswig
Dane:
We ask but a little portion of the green, ambitious
earth;
Only to sow and sing and reap in the
land of our birth.
We ask not coaling stations, nor ports in the China
seas,
We leave to the big child-nations
such rivalries as these.
We have learned the lesson of Time, and we know three
things of worth;
Only to sow and sing and
reap in the land of our birth.
O leave us little margins, waste ends of land and sea,
A little grass, and a hill or two, and a shadowing
tree;
O leave us our little rivers that sweetly catch the
sky,
To drive our mills, and to carry our
wood, and to ripple by.
Once long ago, as you, with hollow pursuit of fame,
We filled all the shaking world with the sound of our
name,
But now are we glad to rest, our battles and boasting
done,
Glad just to sow and sing and reap in
our share of the sun.
Of this O will ye rob us,—with a foolish mighty
hand,
Add with such cruel sorrow, so small
a land to your land?
So might a boy rejoice him to conquer a hive of bees,
Overcome ants in battle,—we are scarcely more
mighty than these—
So might a cruel heart hear a nightingale singing
alone,
And say, “I am mighty! See how
the singing stops with a stone!”
Yea, he were mighty indeed, mighty to crush and to gain;
But the bee and the ant and the bird were the mighty of
brain.
And what shall you gain if you take us and bind us and
beat us with thongs,
And drive us to sing
underground in a whisper our sad little songs?
Forbid us the very use of our heart's own nursery
tongue—
Is this to be strong, ye
nations, is this to be strong?
Your vulgar battles to fight, and your grocery
conquests to keep,
For this shall we break
our hearts, for this shall our old men weep?
What gain in the day of battle—to the Russ, to the
German, what gain,
The Czech, and the Pole,
and the Finn, and the Schleswig Dane?
The Cry of the Little Peoples goes up to God in vain,
For the world is given over to the cruel sons of Cain;
The hand that would bless us is weak, and the hand that
would break us is strong,
And the power of
pity is nought but the power of a song.
The dreams that our fathers dreamed to-day are laughter
and dust,
And nothing at all in the world
is left for a man to trust;
Let us hope no more, or dream, or prophesy, or pray,
For the iron world no less will crash on its iron way;
Yea! nothing is left but to watch, with a helpless,
pitying eye,
The kind old aims for the
world, and the kind old fashions die.
War
I abhor,
And yet how sweet
The
sound along the marching street
Of drum and
fife, and I forget
Wet eyes of widows, and
forget
Broken old mothers, and the whole
Dark butchery without a soul.
Without a soul—save this bright drink
Of heady music, sweet as hell;
And even my peace-abiding feet
Go
marching with the marching street,
For yonder,
yonder goes the fife,
And what care I for
human life!
The tears fill my astonished
eyes
And my full heart is like to break,
And yet 'tis all embannered lies,
A dream those little drummers make.
O it is wickedness to clothe
Yon hideous grinning thing that stalks
Hidden in music, like a queen
That
in a garden of glory walks,
Till good men
love the thing they loathe.
Art, thou hast
many infamies,
But not an infamy like this;
O snap the fife and still the drum,
And show the monster as she is.
This is the year that has no Christmas Day,
Even the little children must be told
That something sad is happening far away—
Or, if you needs must play,
As
children must,
Play softly children,
underneath your breath!
For over our hearts
hangs low the shadow of death,
Those hearts
to you mysteriously old,
Grim grown-up
hearts that ponder night and day
On the
straight lists of broken-hearted dead,
Black
narrow lists no tears can wash away,
Reading
in which one cries out here and here
And
falls into a dream upon a name.
Be happy
softly, children, for a woe
Is on us, a
great woe for little fame,—
Ah! in
the old woods leave the mistletoe,
And
leave the holly for another year,
Its
berries are too red.
And lovers, like to children, will not you
Cease for a little from your kissing mirth,
Thinking of other lovers that must go
Kissed back with fire into the bosom of earth,—
Ah! in the old woods leave the mistletoe,
Be happy, softly, lovers, for you too
Shall be as sad as they another year,
And then for you the holly be berries of blood,
And mistletoe strange berries of bitter tears.
Ah! lovers, leave you your beatitude,
Give your sad eyes and ears
To
the far griefs of neighbour and of friend,
To the great
loves that find a little end,
Long loves
that in a sudden puff of fire
With a wild
thought expire.
And you, ye merchants, you that eat and cheat,
Gold-seeking hucksters in a noble land,
Think, when you lift the wine up in your hand,
Of a fierce vintage tragically red,
Red wine of the hearts of English soldiers dead,
Who ran to a wild death with laughing feet—
That we may sleep and drink and eat and cheat.
Ah! you brave few that fight for all the rest,
And die with smiling faces strangely blest,
Because you die for England—O to do
Something again for you,
In
this great deed to have some little part;
To
send so great a message from the heart
Of
England that one man shall be as ten,
Hearing
how England loves her Englishmen!
Ah! think
you that a single gun is fired
We do not
hear in England. Ah! we hear,
And mothers
go with proud unhappy eyes
That say: It is
for England that he dies,
England that does
the cruel work of God,
And gives her well
beloved to save the world.
For this is
death like to a woman desired,
For this the
wine-press trod.
And you in churches, praying this Christmas morn,
Pray as you never prayed that this may be
The little war that brought the great world peace;
Undazzled with its glorious infamy,
O pray with all your hearts that war may cease,
And who knows but that God may hear the prayer.
So it may come about next Christmas Day
That we shall hear the happy children play
Gladly aloud, unmindful of the dead,
And
watch the lovers go
To the old woods to
find the mistletoe.
But this year,
children, if you needs must play,
Play very
softly, underneath your breath;
Be happy
softly, lovers, for great Death
Makes
England holy with sorrow this Christmas Day;
Yes!
in the old woods leave the mistletoe,
And
leave the holly for another year—
Its
berries are too red.
[Christmas, 1899—Written during the Boer War.]
Soldier going to the war—
Will you take my heart with you,
So that I may share a little
In the famous things you do?
Soldier going to the war—
If in battle you must fall,
Will you, among all the faces,
See
my face the last of all?
Soldier coming from the war—
Who shall bind your sunburnt brow
With the laurel of the hero,
Soldier, soldier—vow for vow!
Soldier coming from the war—
When the street is one wide sea,
Flags and streaming eyes and glory—
Soldier, will you look for me?
“These things are real,” said one, and bade
me gaze
On black and mighty
shapes of iron and stone,
On murder, on
madness, on lust, on towns ablaze,
And
on a thing made all of rattling bone:
“What,”
said he, “will you bring to match with these?”
“Yea! War is real,” I said,
“and real is Death,
A little while—mortal
realities;
But Love and Hope
draw an immortal breath.”
Think you the storm that wrecks a summer day,
With funeral blackness and with leaping
fire
And boiling roar of rain, more real
than they
That, when the
warring heavens begin to tire,
With tender
fingers on the tumult paint;
Spanning
the huddled wrack from base to cope
With
soft effulgence, like some haloed saint,—
The rainbow bridge eternal that is Hope.
Deem her no phantom born of desperate dreams:
Ere man yet was, 'twas hope that wrought him
man;
The blind earth, climbing skyward by
her gleams,
Hoped—and the
beauty of the world began.
Prophetic of all
loveliness to be,
Though God
Himself seem from His station hurled,
Still
shall the blackest hell look up and see
Hope's
rainbow on the summits of the world.