Page:More songs by the fighting men, soldier poets, second series, 1917.djvu/68

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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.


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