The Ypres Times.
73
That same morning he lay, with glassy eyes, and face upturned to the sky, a smashed
cog in the war machine, while the mists rolled sullenly over his battered body, encased in
its khaki shroud. No pomp, nor banners, nor Christianity here only unspeakable
tortureand death in its most hideous form.
Down by the river, on the outskirts of London, the mother sat, lonely and sad in her
cottage, of an autumn evening. The world seemed to have gone mad. In spite of her
first lad's death, she had no hate for the Germans, but gazed with anger and shame upon
the unique sight of women urging youths into the fight and she prayed to God to take
pity on the last life dear to her. No letter from France had come for a long while but,
she told herself, he was never a letter writer, and no news is good news. Official notes
and veiled hints of a great retreat meant nothing to her amidst this times fantastic
revel of death and lies, she clung with childlike faith to one idea, that her boy was alive,
somewhere. Friends said they had seen his name among the missing." She hoped
on, until one day she heard that his pal was lying badly wounded in hospital.
Pte. Jones lay quietly in the ward, fluttering over the borderlands of idiocy, for his
skull had been dented by a blow from a German rifle-butt, and every fortnight or so he
drifted into sanity to meditate on the sweetness of civilisation. With her body and soul
in torment she waited, and, getting to his bedside at last, brokenly asked Where
is hewhere is Jacka prisoner
The motionless figure on the bed looked intently at her. He's dead I saw
themWith a wild cry the mother staggered from him into the streets. Dead!
The last baby, for whose life she would eagerly have offered her own. Killed! Heedless
whether she lived or died, or what empires rose and fell, hopeless and desperate, she
muttered about her trivial daily tasks, crushed on the wheel of war.
At the hour when the signal guns spoke the Armistice and folks went delirious with
joy, she wandered, stupefied, through the empty rooms, never again to echo to the footsteps
of her boys.
Well played! princes and politicians, prelates and profiteers, captains and kings
you have won against mighty oddsone poor old woman and the stake was the life
of her last son. Well played! Truth is stranger and more potent than fiction. You
may see them to-day, those motherssometimes creeping, ragged and dirty, round corners
into gin palaces sometimes, clean and shabby, trying to forget their sorrows in country
villages, but all feeling, in some dim way, that a tremendous wrong has been done to
thema lasting memory to the glory of war.
NEMO.
A NAME ON A CROSS.
JOHN CHARLES SMITH.
I see across the shrapnel-seeded meadows
The jagged rubble heap of Julien,
Blood-guilty Pilckem brooding in the shadows
And Hooge's chateau empty as a shell.
Down Ypres' riven streets the moon is leering,
The Langemarck hillside takes its bitter ray
And all the road from Poperinghe I'm hearing
The shrapnel and the lyddite deadly spray.
Once more within the sky's deep sapphire hollow
I see a swimming Taube, a fairy thing,
I watch the angry shell flame flash and follow
In feather puffs that flick a tilted wing.
And then I see, with a devil magic wrought,
The crawling green of gas fumes slimy death
The batteries are rancorously crashing
And life depends on just another breath.
Oh spacious day of glory and of grieving 1
Oh sounding hours of lustre and of loss
Let us be glad we lived you, still believing
The God who gave the cannon gave the Cross.
Let us remember well the men whose crosses stand
Prom Zonnebeke to Brielen, Hooge to Keerselie
Remember those who held the line there, and fell.
And he who fought, and now comes home to die.
-Adapted from Service.
