So there 's just a laughing death-song in my heart as up I plod
To the trenches, where my meed will be a six-foot stretch of sod
With a plain wood cross above it—leave the rest of me to God.
Littlejohn joined the Territorial branch of the Middlesex Regiment when it was inaugurated, and had become a sergeant before the war. It is likely that the man whose story he tells was one of the motley new recruits who marched in his platoon. He had risen to be company-sergeant-major when he was sniped at the battle of Arras, while in the act of cheering his company in the moment of victory. Before he went to France, he had fought at Gallipoli, and several of his ballads and poems are of incidents in that campaign, but I think I like best some later verse of his in which he accepts the probability of death for himself, not 'with a laughing death-song' but with a prayer that matches it in perfect courage, and that, in the manner of his going, would seem to have been granted:
