Page:Old Melbourne Memories.djvu/264

But what avails the sabre sweep?
There rolls the awful sound,
Telling through heart, and limb, and brain,
That the cannon mows its ghastly lane,
And corses strew the ground.

Ha! Nolan flings his arms apart,
And a death-cry rings in air;
And see, may Heaven its mercy yield!
His charger from a hopeless field
Doth a dead rider bear.

The gunners lie by their linstocks dead,
While deep on every brow,
In the bloody scroll of our island swords,
Is the tale of each horseman's dying words,
"Our memory is deathless now."

Staggering back goes a broken band,
With standards soiled and torn,
With gory saddles and reeling steeds,
And ranks that are swaying like surging reeds
On a wild autumn morn.

Despair has gazed on many a field
Won by our fearless race;
And well the night wind, sighing low,
Knows where, with breast broad to the foe,
Is the dead Briton's place.

But never living horsemen rode
So near the eternal marge,
As those who ran the tilt that day
With Death, and bore their lives away
From the Balaclava charge.