No More Learning

"

_Henry William Hutchinson_




THE MESSINES ROAD


I

The road that runs up to Messines
Is double-locked with gates of fire,
Barred with high ramparts, and between
The unbridged river, and the wire.

None ever goes up to Messines,
For Death lurks all about the town,
Death holds the vale as his demesne,
And only Death moves up and down.


II

Choked with wild weeds, and overgrown
With rank grass, all torn and rent
By war's opposing engines, strewn
With debris from each day's event!

And in the dark the broken trees,
Whose arching boughs were once its shade,
Grim and distorted, ghostly ease
In groans their souls vexed and afraid.

Yet here the farmer drove his cart,
Here friendly folk would meet and pass,
Here bore the good wife eggs to mart
And old and young walked up to Mass.

Here schoolboys lingered in the way,
Here the bent packman laboured by,
And lovers at the end o' the day
Whispered their secret blushingly.

A goodly road for simple needs,
An avenue to praise and paint,
Kept by fair use from wreck and weeds,
Blessed by the shrine of its own saint.


III

The road that runs up to Messines!
Ah, how we guard it day and night!
And how they guard it, who o'erween
A stricken people, with their might!

But we shall go up to Messines
Even thro' that fire-defended gate.
Over and thro' all else between
And give the highway back its state.

_J. E. Stewart_




THE CHALLENGE OF THE GUNS


By day, by night, along the lines their dull boom rings,
And that reverberating roar its challenge flings.
Not only unto thee across the narrow sea,
But from the loneliest vale in the last land's heart
The sad-eyed watching mother sees her sons depart.

And freighted full the tumbling waters of ocean are
With aid for England from England's sons afar.
The glass is dim; we see not wisely, far, nor well,
But bred of English bone, and reared on Freedom's wine,
All that we have and are we lay on England's shrine.

A. N. Field




THE BEACH ROAD BY THE WOOD


I know a beach road,
A road where I would go,
It runs up northward
From Cooden Bay to Hoe;
And there, in the High Woods,
Daffodils grow.

And whoever walks along there
Stops short and sees,
By the moist tree-roots
In a clearing of the trees,
Yellow great battalions of them,
Blowing in the breeze.

While the spring sun brightens,
And the dull sky clears,
They blow their golden trumpets,
Those golden trumpeteers!
They blow their golden trumpets
And they shake their glancing spears.

And all the rocking beech-trees
Are bright with buds again,
And the green and open spaces
Are greener after rain,
And far to southward one can hear
The sullen, moaning rain.

Once before I die
I will leave the town behind,
The loud town, the dark town
That cramps and chills the mind,
And I'll stand again bareheaded there
In the sunlight and the wind.

Yes, I shall stand
Where as a boy I stood
Above the dykes and levels
In the beach road by the wood,
And I'll smell again the sea breeze,
Salt and harsh and good.

And there shall rise to me
From that consecrated ground
The old dreams, the lost dreams
That years and cares have drowned;
Welling up within me
And above me and around
The song that I could never sing
And the face I never found.

_Geoffrey Howard_




GERMAN PRISONERS


When first I saw you in the curious street
Like some platoon of soldier ghosts in grey,
My mad impulse was all to smite and slay,
To spit upon you--tread you 'neath my feet.
But when I saw how each sad soul did greet
My gaze with no sign of defiant frown,
How from tired eyes looked spirits broken down,
How each face showed the pale flag of defeat,
And doubt, despair, and disillusionment,
And how were grievous wounds on many a head.
And on your garb red-faced was other red;
And how you stooped as men whose strength was spent,
I knew that we had suffered each as other,
And could have grasped your hand and cried, "My brother!