Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/169

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Cameron Wilson
131

break of the terrible things he had known, it is full too of a deeper knowledge that had come to him out of all that suffering:

On every road War spilled her hurried men,
And I saw their courage, young and eagle-strong.
They were sick for home—for far-off valley or moor,
For the little fields and lanes and the lamp-red door;
For the lit town and the traffic's husky song.
Great love I saw, though these men feared the name
And hid their greatness as a kind of shame....
I found honour here at last on the earth, where man faced man;
It reached up like a lily from the filth and flies,
It grew from war as a lily from manure.
Out of the dark it burst, undaunted, sure,
As the crocus, insolent under slaty skies,
Strikes a green sword-blade through the stubborn mould,
And throws in the teeth of winter its challenge of gold.

What these men, what he himself, in due time, died for he tells in the most poignant, most beautiful of his verses, 'On Leave.' When he landed at Folkestone, he says, neither the first bit of England nor the fields of Kent as he travelled through them had anything to say to him; but when he came at length into his own familiar county it was otherwise—