A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919/Canada
CANADA
CANADA TO ENGLAND
GREAT names of thy great captains gone before
Beat with our blood who have that blood of thee:
Raleigh and Grenville, Wolfe, and all the free
Fine souls who dared to front a world in war.
Such only may outreach the envious years
Where feebler crowns and fainter stars remove,
Nurtured in one remembrance and one love
Too high for passion and too stern for tears.
O little isle our fathers held for home,
Not, not alone thy standards and thy hosts
Lead where thy sons shall follow, Mother Land:
Quick as the north wind, ardent as the foam,
Behold, behold the invulnerable ghosts
Of all past greatnesses about thee stand.
LANGEMARCK
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.
It was April fair on the Flanders Fields,
But the dreadest April then
That ever the years, in their fateful flight,
Had brought to this world of men.
North and east, a monster wall,
The mighty Hun ranks lay,
With fort on fort, and iron-ringed trench,
Menacing, grim and gray.
And south and west, like a serpent of fire,
Serried the British lines,
And in between, the dying and dead,
And the stench of blood, and the trampled mud,
On the fair, sweet Belgian vines.
And far to the eastward, harnessed and taut,
Like a scimitar, shining and keen,
Gleaming out of that ominous gloom,
Old France's hosts were seen.
When out of the grim Hun lines one night,
There rolled a sinister smoke—
A strange, weird cloud, like a pale, green shroud,
And death lurked in its cloak.
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 'twas 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 gasses 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! 'Twas Friday eve,
When that demon gas drove down;
'Twas 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.
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.