The News

Once more was all about her as she thought

Of home, the new home that the future held
For them they three together. Fear was quelled
By this new happiness that all unsought
Had sprung from the old happiness.

And he, When he stepped

Watching her, thought of home too.
With her across the threshold first, and slept
That first night in her arms so quietly,
For the first time in all his life he'd known
All that home meant- -or nearly all, for yet
Each night brought him new knowledge as she met
Him, smiling on the clean white threshold stone
When he returned from labor in the Yard.
And she'd be waiting for him soon, while he
Was fighting with his fellow oversea―
She would be waiting for him.

It was hard
For him that he must go, as go he must,
But harder far for her: things always fell
Harder upon the women. It was well
She didn't dream yet.

He could only trust

She too would feel that he had got to go,
Then 'twould not be so hard to go, and yet
Dreaming, he saw the lamplit table, set
With silver pot and cups and plates aglow
For tea in their own kitchen bright and snug,
With her behind the tea-pot-saw it all,

The colored calendars upon the wall,

The bright fire-irons, and the gay hearth-rug
She'd made herself from bright-hued rags; his place
Awaiting him, with something hot-and-hot-
His favorite sausages as like as not,

Between two plates for him-as, with clean face
Glowing from washing in the scullery,

And such a hunger on him, he would sink

Content into his chair.

Her thoughts too were at home. She heard the patter
Of tiny feet beside her, and the chatter

Of little tongues.

Then loudly through their dream

The buzzer boomed; and all about them rose
The men and women: soon the wives were on
The ferry-boat, now puffing to be gone;

The husbands hurrying, ere the gates should close,
Back to the Yard.

She, in her dream of gold,

And he, in his new desolation, stood.

Then soberly, as wife and husband should,
They parted with their news as yet untold.

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

A LETTER OF FAREWELL

Mother, little mother,

They will tell you,

After they have shot me at sunrise,

I died a coward.

It is not true, little mother

You will believe me.

You know how we marched awayBanners-bright bayonets-the Marseillaise. I shut up the old chansons

Ah, my diplome!—

France needed her sons for war.

We waited, aching for the hour.

At last it came

I had my turn in the trenches.

I won't tell you all

What it meant to learn the new trade.

A scholar, was I?—and young?

Youth died in me.

And all the old epics, the beautiful songs long silent-
Ah, that was another life.

At first it sickened me

The torn flesh bleeding, the horrible bodies long dead,
The ruined towns sprawling like toothless hags,

The mud, the lice, the stenches,

The stupefying noise

A crashing of damned worlds;

And then the command to kill—

At first the loathing was a vomit in my heart.

Then something rose in me

From the abyss.

Life, the great cannibal,

Killing and feeding on death

I was his workman through ten million years.
I ran to the slaughter singing.

I killed with a shout.

The red rage sucked me up

In its whirlwind,

Dashed me on dancing feet

Against the enemy,

The enemy everlasting.

And my life, tossed on bayonets,

Blown against guns

Staked, like a last piece of gold, on the hundredth chance

Always my life came back to me unscathed.

Was it man to man

The haughty beauty of war?

I grew numb at last,

I felt no more.

I slipped off man's pride like a garment,

A rotten rag

It was brute to brute in a wallow of blood and filth.

A Letter of Farewell

And so, in that last charge on Thiaumont

Little shattered city

Lost and won, won and lost

Day after day

In the interminable battle

In that hot rush I killed three Boches,

Stuck them like squeaking pigs.

The soft flesh sputtering,

The nick of the steel at bones

I felt them no more than the crunch of an insect under my

When life came back a big Boche was standing over me

He had my gun, but his face was kind.

"I thought you were dead," he said, and stood looking at me. Then he unscrewed his canteen

"Drink," he said, "poor little one

I won't kill you."

I sprang up, as tall as he, and took his hand, Babbling, "It's foolish business-why should we?