No More Learning

On a fiend-like wind it curled along
Over the brave French ranks,
Like a monster tree its vapours spread,
In hideous, burning banks
Of poisonous fumes that scorched the night
With their sulphurous demon danks.

And men went mad with horror, and fled
From that terrible, strangling death,
That seemed to sear both body and soul
With its baleful, flaming breath.

Till even the little dark men of the south,
Who feared neither God nor man,
Those fierce, wild fighters of Afric's steppes,
Broke their battalions and ran:--

Ran as they never had run before,
Gasping, and fainting for breath;
For they knew 't was no human foe that slew;
And that hideous smoke meant death.

Then red in the reek of that evil cloud,
The Hun swept over the plain;
And the murderer's dirk did its monster work,
'Mid the scythe-like shrapnel rain;

Till it seemed that at last the brute Hun hordes
Had broken that wall of steel;
And that soon, through this breach in the freeman's dyke,
His trampling hosts would wheel;--

And sweep to the south in ravaging might,
And Europe's peoples again
Be trodden under the tyrant's heel,
Like herds, in the Prussian pen.

But in that line on the British right,
There massed a corps amain,
Of men who hailed from a far west land
Of mountain and forest and plain;

Men new to war and its dreadest deeds,
But noble and staunch and true;
Men of the open, East and West,
Brew of old Britain's brew.

These were the men out there that night,
When Hell loomed close ahead;
Who saw that pitiful, hideous rout,
And breathed those gases dread;
While some went under and some went mad;
But never a man there fled.

For the word was "Canada," theirs to fight,
And keep on fighting still;--
Britain said, fight, and fight they would,
Though the Devil himself in sulphurous mood
Came over that hideous hill.

Yea, stubborn, they stood, that hero band,
Where no soul hoped to live;
For five, 'gainst eighty thousand men,
Were hopeless odds to give.

Yea, fought they on! 'T was Friday eve,
When that demon gas drove down;
'T was Saturday eve that saw them still
Grimly holding their own;

Sunday, Monday, saw them yet,
A steadily lessening band,
With "no surrender" in their hearts,
But the dream of a far-off land,

Where mother and sister and love would weep
For the hushed heart lying still;--
But never a thought but to do their part,
And work the Empire's will.

Ringed round, hemmed in, and back to back,
They fought there under the dark,
And won for Empire, God and Right,
At grim, red Langemarck.

Wonderful battles have shaken this world,
Since the Dawn-God overthrew Dis;
Wonderful struggles of right against wrong,
Sung in the rhymes of the world's great song,
But never a greater than this.

Bannockburn, Inkerman, Balaclava,
Marathon's godlike stand;
But never a more heroic deed,
And never a greater warrior breed,
In any war-man's land.

This is the ballad of Langemarck,
A story of glory and might;
Of the vast Hun horde, and Canada's part
In the great, grim fight.

_Wilfred Campbell_




CANADIANS


With arrows on their quarters and with numbers on their hoofs,
With the trampling sound of twenty that re-echoes in the roofs,
Low of crest and dull of coat, wan and wild of eye,
Through our English village the Canadians go by.
Shying at a passing cart, swerving from a car,
Tossing up an anxious head to flaunt a snowy star,
Racking at a Yankee gait, reaching at the rein,
Twenty raw Canadians are tasting life again!

Hollow-necked and hollow-flanked, lean of rib and hip,
Strained and sick and weary with the wallow of the ship,
Glad to smell the turf again, hear the robin's call,
Tread again the country road they lost at Montreal!

Fate may bring them dule and woe; better steeds than they
Sleep beside the English guns a hundred leagues away;
But till war hath need of them, lightly lie their reins,
Softly fall the feet of them along the English lanes.

_Will H. Ogilvie_




THE KAISER AND BELGIUM


He said: "Thou petty people, let me pass.
What canst thou do but bow to me and kneel? "
But sudden a dry land caught fire like grass,
And answer hurtled but from shell and steel.

He looked for silence, but a thunder came
Upon him, from Liege a leaden hail.
All Belgium flew up at his throat in flame
Till at her gates amazed his legions quail.

Take heed, for now on haunted ground they tread;
There bowed a mightier war lord to his fall:
Fear! lest that very green grass again grow red
With blood of German now as then with Gaul.

If him whom God destroys He maddens first,
Then thy destruction slake thy madman's thirst.

_Stephen Phillips_




THE BATTLE OF LIEGE


Now spake the Emperor to all his shining battle forces,
To the Lancers, and the Rifles, to the Gunners and the Horses;--
And his pride surged up within him as he saw their banners stream! --
"'T is a twelve-day march to Paris, by the road our fathers travelled,
And the prize is half an empire when the scarlet road's unravelled--
Go you now across the border,
God's decree and William's order--
Climb the frowning Belgian ridges
With your naked swords agleam!
Seize the City of the Bridges--
Then get on, get on to Paris--
To the jewelled streets of Paris--
To the lovely woman, Paris, that has driven me to dream! "

A hundred thousand fighting men
They climbed the frowning ridges,
With their flaming swords drawn free
And their pennants at their knee.