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Catching his golden helmet as he ran,
And hast'ning on along the dun straight way,
Where old men's sabots now began to clack
And withered women, knitting, led their cows,
On, on to call the men of Kitchener

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Down to their coasts, I shouting after him:
"O Dawn, would you had let the world sleep on
Till all its armament were turned to rust,
Nor waked it to this day of hideous hate,
Of man's red murder and of woman's woe!"

Famished and lame, I came at last to Dieppe,
But Dawn had made his way across the sea,
And, as I climbed with heavy feet the cliff,
Was even then upon the sky-built towers
Of that great capital where nations all,
Teuton, Italian, Gallic, English, Slav,
Forget long hates in one consummate faith.

- John Finley

I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH

I have a rendezvous with Death

At some disputed barricade,

When Spring comes round with rustling shade
And apple blossoms fill the air

I have a rendezvous with Death

When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land

And close my eyes and quench my breath-
It may be I shall pass him still.

I have a rendezvous with Death

On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear.
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,

I shall not fail that rendezvous.

DAWN

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Alan Seeger

The moon had long since sunk behind the mists;
The guns had ceased awhile their weary thunder;
And all war's foulest vapors seemed to rise
In silent protest to the peaceful skies

Gazing in wonder.

Silently, his sheaves on either hand,
Death walked in No-Man's Land.

Grimly he gazed on each, and carefully
Counted his harvest as it ripened there,
Many in tranquil pose, as if they slept;

While Mother Earth o'er each her dew had wept,
Moistening their hair.

And by each side a rusty bayonet lay,

Pointing the way.

Thus he came; and ever and anon

Lingering o'er something precious lying numbly,
Some sodden, shapeless thing, which to the sky
Mutely displayed its mangled agony,

Pleading humbly.

For this, which human eyes might shrink to scan. — Had been a man.

A drowsy sentry saw him as he passed,
Challenged: and receiving no reply,

Fired at the darkness; - but the bullet found
Only the mist whereout there came a sound
Of laughing mockery.

And from the east the morning's icy breath
Whispered of death.

A sudden star-shell leaped toward the sky,
Where high and searchingly its fiery head
Reigned in brief tyranny and with its spell
Froze the black earth — till falteringly it fell
Among the dead,

On either side a coldly staring eye
Watching it die.

Wearily the sun climbed to his post

To watch the struggling world as on it rolls

Dripping with blood from youth's best vintage pressed,
And ceaselessly from out its heaving breast
Breathing souls . . .

Up out from yonder where the dead repose
A lark arose.

- P. S. M.

THE TRENCHES1

Endless lanes sunken in the clay,

Bays, and traverses, fringed with wasted herbage,
Seed-pods of blue scabious, and some lingering blooms;
And the sky, seen as from a well,

Brilliant with frosty stars.

We stumble, cursing, on the slippery duck-boards.
Goaded like the damned by some invisible wrath,

A will stronger than weariness, stronger than animal fear,
Implacable and monotonous.

Here a shaft, slanting, and below

A dusty and flickering light from one feeble candle

And prone figures sleeping uneasily,

Murmuring,

And men who cannot sleep,

With faces impassive as masks,

Bright, feverish eyes, and drawn lips,

Sad, pitiless, terrible faces,

Each an incarnate curse.

Here in a bay, a helmeted sentry

Silent and motionless, watching while two sleep,
And he sees before him

With indifferent eyes the blasted and torn land
Peopled with stiff, prone forms, stupidly rigid,
As tho' they had not been men.

Dead are the lips where love laughed or sang,
The hands of youth eager to lay hold of life,
Eyes that have laughed to eyes,

And these were begotten,

1 By permission, from Eidola. Copyright by E. P. Dutton & Company.

O Love, and lived lightly, and burnt

With the lust of a man's first strength: ere they were rent,

Almost at unawares, savagely; and strewn

In bloody fragments, to be the carrion

Of rats and crows.

And the sentry moves not, searching

Night for menace with weary eyes.

- Frederic Manning

NO-MAN'S LAND

No-Man's Land is an eerie sight
At early dawn in the pale gray light.
Never a house and never a hedge
In No-Man's Land from edge to edge,
And never a living soul walks there
To taste the fresh of the morning air; —
Only some lumps of rotting clay,
That were friends or foemen yesterday.
What are the bounds of No-Man's Land?
You can see them clearly on either hand,
A mound of rag-bags gray in the sun,

Or a furrow of brown where the earthworks run
From the Eastern hills to the Western sea,
Through field or forest o'er river and lea;
No man may pass them, but aim you well,
And Death rides across on the bullet or shell.

But No-Man's Land is a goblin sight

When patrols crawl over at dead o' night;
Boche or British, Belgian or French,

You dice with death when you cross the trench.

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