George Herbert Clarke, ed. (1873–1953). A Treasury of War Poetry. 1917.
John Finley
The Road to Dieppe
B
Close at my side, so silently he came
Nor gave a sign of salutation, save
To touch with light my sleeve and make the way
Appear as if a shining countenance
Had looked on it. Strange was this radiant Youth,
As I, to these fair, fertile parts of France,
Where Cæsar with his legions once had passed,
And where the Kaiser’s Uhlans yet would pass
Or e’er another moon should cope with clouds
For mastery of these same fields.—To-night
(And but a month has gone since I walked there)
Well might the Kaiser write, as Cæsar wrote,
In his new Commentaries on a Gallic war,
“Fortissimi Belgæ.”—A moon ago!
Who would have then divined that dead would lie
Like swaths of grain beneath the harvest moon
Upon these lands the ancient Belgæ held,
From Normandy beyond renowned Liège!—
From which all Europe woke to war, that we,
This beautiful Dawn-Youth, and I, had come,
He from afar. Beyond grim Petrograd
He’d waked the moujik from his peaceful dreams,
Bid the muezzin call to morning prayer
Where minarets rise o’er the Golden Horn,
And driven shadows from the Prussian march
To lie beneath the lindens of the stadt.
Softly he’d stirred the bells to ring at Rheims,
He’d knocked at high Montmartre, hardly asleep,
Heard the sweet carillon of doomed Louvain,
Boylike, had tarried for a moment’s play
Amid the traceries of Amiens,
And then was hast’ning on the road to Dieppe,
When he o’ertook me drowsy from the hours
Through which I’d walked, with no companions else
Than ghostly kilometer posts that stood
As sentinels of space along the way.—
Often, in doubt, I’d paused to question one,
With nervous hands, as they who read Moon-type;
And more than once I’d caught a moment’s sleep
Beside the highway, in the dripping grass,
While one of these white sentinels stood guard,
Knowing me for a friend, who loves the road,
And best of all by night, when wheels do sleep
And stars alone do walk abroad.—But once
Three watchful shadows, deeper than the dark,
Laid hands on me and searched me for the marks
Of traitor or of spy, only to find
Over my heart the badge of loyalty.—
With wish for bon voyage they gave me o’er
To the white guards who led me on again.
Made me forget the night as we strode on.
Where’er he looked a miracle was wrought:
A tree grew from the darkness at a glance;
A hut was thatched; a new château was reared
Of stone, as weathered as the church at Cæn;
Gray blooms were coloured suddenly in red;
A flag was flung across the eastern sky.—
Nearer at hand, he made me then aware
Of peasant women bending in the fields,
Cradling and gleaning by the first scant light,
Their sons and husbands somewhere o’er the edge
Of these green-golden fields which they had sowed,
But will not reap,—out somewhere on the march,
God but knows where and if they come again.
One fallow field he pointed out to me
Where but the day before a peasant ploughed,
Dreaming of next year’s fruit, and there his plough
Stood now mid-field, his horses commandeered,
A monstrous sable crow perched on the beam.
Far from my side, so silently he went,
Catching his golden helmet as he ran,
And hast’ning on along the dun straight way,
Where old men’s sabots now began to clack
And withered women, knitting, led their cows,
On, on to call the men of Kitchener
Down to their coasts,—I shouting after him:
“O Dawn, would you had let the world sleep on
Till all its armament were turned to rust,
Nor waked it to this day of hideous hate,
Of man’s red murder and of woman’s woe!”
But Dawn had made his way across the sea,
And, as I climbed with heavy feet the cliff,
Was even then upon the sky-built towers
Of that great capital where nations all,
Teuton, Italian, Gallic, English, Slav,
Forget long hates in one consummate faith.