America, shuffling, clattering
To her high moment-

A swelter of faint calls,

Upraised civilian arms, and then

Curdy floculations of vague color

Drifted about the boarded station-house,

Upholding it like an ark,

Ever more in the distance.

L Company drifted crankily down the track, Entrained in hasty coupled cars

For mobilization,

And left there, behind, Democracy,

Slack Democracy on the station boards;
Left America clattering into emotion
And shuffling heterogeneously home.
"Emotional-not spiritual," one said,
Who, with Company L, saw

The sheet of the morning Tribune bent

With thin crashing and clutters of sound.
Tight hands held it; its fabric

Rattled in fragile catastrophe.

Sudden figures in the morning Tribune-
Three with sudden, significant being
Among slight marks by thousands
Strewing the page-raised themselves
In lustreless knobs, small, black, metallic,
Above the dim paper breadth.

A man, Woodby, saw three numerals
That rose in dull, significant lumps
From the creaking page of the Tribune.
His own number! carved

Of hard, stupid material they seemed.

Woodby, drafted man, left

His familiar papers, his thesis

On an unfinished and ancient past,

Forever, to learn the cold accuracy

Of near material, of steel, of half-ounce bullets.

REVEILLE

Sleep-soaked bodies are pried

Out of the obese night; laziness,

Yearning in porous flesh,

Is squeezed as from a sponge.

Silver tubes lifted upward by young buglers

Spout glistening sound

Upon the murk of early day.

The sounds of first call

Clink and glisten in the early air;

Bright chips of sound tinkle and clash sweetly

Like ice in the dusky water of an urn.

Reveille and the murmur of men-
A murmurous cloud of dusk lifts
From the earthen floor. A murmur
Distant, huge, sweet with Being's joy,
Rises from the awakening thousands
Of earth-born bodies.

The blare of regimental bands
Hoists finally night's curtain
With distant shattering.

The world sweats

ON THE ROAD

In a bedding of throbbing, thick light;

Heat soaks like a bitter oil

Into the texture of being;

Dust steams from the earth

Under the feet of infantry

And coats the air with minute fur.

Along the smothered road men plod
Between silent horizons,

Between thin, yellow borders of the earth
Pressed flat under a burden of light.

Painted, vivid silence

Waits along the desert's rim.

SOUTHWARD

Forbidden Mexico

Four hundred yards away-
A drunken, tawny beast-

Slept across the southward path.
"There shall no soldier go,"

The order was, "beyond

The murky middle of the stream."

Forbidden Mexico!

Its drifting slopes

Slid back into sun-hid distance.

Its tawny skin, sleek

With clean aridity,

Lay unpunctured by man's growth.

Four hundred yards away—

A thousand years could sink

Into the gap between this river-bank and that.

MAJOR FITZPATRICK

His back had the sabre's curve,
Clean sitting on his mount.

His words were winged words, steel-tipped,

Loosed on drab men drilling.

His was the drama of the harpoon

Driving barbed oaths, driving deep
Into drab men drilling

On the battalion parade.

The dynamic of the oath was his,
Its knife energy, its thrust.
At the third battalion Major Fitz
Hurled personality like bitter shrapnel.

FREEBOURNE's rifle

"It's an old gun," the major said,
"But clean-give him excellent;"

And pushed the oil-scrubbed gun
Back on private Freebourne's chest.
"An old gun! Hell, yes!" said Freebourne,
When he tried to turn it in

To the Q. M. for a new one;
"I put two hours a day on it."
But Freebourne loved its steel;
He never took the other.

Two hours on steel, man's metal,

Till the inner twirl of bore

Carried the light in gleaming gutters