C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
William Wilfred Campbell (18611918)
Poems of the Great War: Langemarck at Ypres
T
A story of glory and might;
Of the vast Hun horde, and Canada’s part
In the great, grim fight.
But the dreadest April then,
That ever the years, in their fateful flight,
Had brought to this world of men.
The mighty Hun ranks lay,
With fort on fort, and iron-ringed trench,
Menacing, grim and gray.
Serried the British lines,
And in between, the dying and dead,
And the stench of blood, and the trampled mud,
On the fair, sweet Belgian vines.
Like a scimitar, shining and keen,
Gleaming out of that ominous gloom,
Old France’s hosts were seen.
There rolled a sinister smoke;—
A strange, weird cloud, like a pale, green shroud,
And death lurked in its cloak.
Over the brave French ranks,
Like a monster tree its vapors spread,
In hideous, burning banks
Of poisonous fumes that scorched the night
With their sulphurous demon danks.
From that terrible strangling death,
That seemed to sear both body and soul
With its baleful, flaming breath.
Who feared neither God nor man,
Those fierce, wild fighters of Afric’s steppes,
Broke their battalions and ran;—
Gasping, and fainting for breath;
For they knew ’twas no human foe that slew;
And that hideous smoke meant death.
The Hun swept over the plain;
And the murderer’s dirk did its monster work,
Mid the scythe-like shrapnel rain.
Had broken that wall of steel;
And that soon, through this breach in the freeman’s dyke
His tramping hosts would wheel;—
And Europe’s peoples again
Be trodden under the tyrant’s heel,
Like herds, in the Prussian pen.
There massed a corps amain,
Of men who hailed from a far west land
Of mountain and forest and plain;
But noble and staunch and true;
Men of the open, East and West,
Brew of old Britain’s brew.
When Hell loomed close ahead;
Who saw that pitiful, hideous rout,
And breathed those gases dread;
While some went under and some went mad;
But never a man there fled.
And keep on fighting still;—
Britain said fight, and fight they would,
Though the Devil himself in sulphurous mood
Came over that hideous hill.
Where no soul hoped to live;
For five, ’gainst eighty, thousand men,
Were hopeless odds to give.
When that demon gas drove down;
’Twas Saturday eve that saw them still
Grimly holding their own;
A steadily lessening band,
With “no surrender” in their hearts,
But the dream of a far-off land,
For the hushed heart lying still;—
But never a thought but to do their part,
And work the Empire’s will.
They fought there under the dark,
And won for Empire, God and Right,
At grim, red Langemarck.
Since the Dawn-God overthrew Dis;
Wonderful struggles of right against wrong,
Sung in the rhymes of the world’s great song,
But never a greater than this.
Marathon’s god-like stand;
But never a more heroic deed,
And never a greater warrior breed,
In any warman’s land.
A story of glory and might;
Of the vast Hun horde, and Canada’s part
In the great, grim fight.