| |
| A MURDERED man, ten miles away, | |
| Will hardly shake your peace, | |
| Like one red stain upon your hand; | |
| And a tortured child in a distant land | |
| Will never check one smile to-day, | 5 |
| Or bid one fiddle cease. | |
| |
The News
It comes along a little wire, | |
| Sunk in a deep sea; | |
| It thins in the clubs to a little smoke | |
| Between one joke and another joke, | 10 |
| For a city in flames is less than the fire | |
| That comforts you and me. | |
| |
The Diplomats
Each was honest after his way, | |
| Lukewarm in faith, and old; | |
| And blood, to them, was only a word, | 15 |
| And the point of a phrase their only sword, | |
| And the cost of war, they reckoned it | |
| In little disks of gold. | |
| |
| They were cleanly groomed. They were not to be bought. | |
| And their cigars were good. | 20 |
| But they had pulled so many strings | |
| In the tinselled puppet-show of kings | |
| That, when they talked of war, they thought | |
| Of sawdust, not of blood; | |
| |
| Not of the crimson tempest | 25 |
| Where the shattered city falls: | |
| They thought, behind their varnished doors, | |
| Of diplomats, ambassadors, | |
| Budgets, and loans and boundary-lines, | |
| Coercions and re-calls. | 30 |
| |
The Charge
Slaughter! Slaughter! Slaughter! | |
| The cold machines whirred on. | |
| And strange things crawled amongst the wheat | |
| With entrails dragging round their feet, | |
| And over the foul red shambles | 35 |
| A fearful sunlight shone.… | |
| |
| The maxims cracked like cattle-whips | |
| Above the struggling hordes. | |
| They rolled and plunged and writhed like snakes | |
| In the trampled wheat and the blackthorn brakes, | 40 |
| And the lightnings leapt among them | |
| Like clashing crimson swords. | |
| |
| The rifles flogged their wallowing herds, | |
| Flogged them down to die. | |
| Down on their slain the slayers lay, | 45 |
| And the shrapnel thrashed them into the clay, | |
| And tossed their limbs like tattered birds | |
| Thro’ a red volcanic sky. | |
| |
