More songs by the fighting men. Soldiers poets: second series/Wilfrid J. Halliday

WILFRID J. HALLIDAY

2nd Lieut., West Yorks

 

"An Unknown British Soldier'

'TIS just a little wooden cross
In lonely grandeur there
That smiles upon a rugged mound
Of weedy, unattended ground,
For he was no man's care.

A broken bayonet marked the spot
And troops would turn aside,
Till loving hands rough cast the wood
And shaped a cross, emblem of blood,
To tell where he had died.

He died unowned, for none could tell
The silent hero's name:
They saw the bloody wounds he bore,
The shattered limbs, but nothing more,
And knew not whence he came.

"An unknown British soldier"—that
Was all that they could say.
'Twas not for them to wet the eye,
Why lives a soldier but to die?
And so they went their way.

But I may pause and probe his heart
Before the shadow fell,
And think that he had still a prayer
For those frail souls who soon would share
The moment black as Hell.

······

The flowers had bloomed when last I looked,
The grass was freshly mown:
A shapely cross so chastely white
Shone in the dazzling noonday light,
Yet still the same "Unknown."

Unknown! Ah, no! thy name still lives,
For One had seen thee fall
And marked the sacrifice thus made,
The debt of love so nobly paid,
Faithful to Freedom's call.

France, August, 1917.