IN THE MORNING
(Loos, 1915)
THE firefly haunts were lighted yet,
As we scaled the top of the parapet;
But the East grew pale to another fire,
As our bayonets gleamed by the foeman's wire;
And the sky was tinged with gold and grey,
And under our feet the dead men lay,
Stiff by the loopholed barricade;
Food of the bomb and the hand-grenade;
Still in the slushy pool and mud—
Ah! the path we came was a path of blood,
When we went to Loos in the morning.
A little grey church at the foot of a hill,
With powdered glass on the window-sill.
The shell-scarred stone and the broken tile,
Littered the chancel, nave and aisle—
Broken the altar and smashed the pyx,
And the rubble covered the crucifix;
This we saw when the charge was done,
And the gas-clouds paled in the rising sun,
As we entered Loos in the morning.
The dead men lay on the shell-scarred plain,
Where Death and the Autumn held their reign—
Like banded ghosts in the heavens grey
The smoke of the powder paled away;
Where riven and rent the spinney trees
Shivered and shook in the sullen breeze,
And there, where the trench through the graveyard wound,
The dead men's bones stuck over the ground
By the road to Loos in the morning.
The turret towers that stood in the air,
Sheltered a foeman sniper there—
They found, who fell in the sniper's aim,
