Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/376

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376
THE FALLEN

All mangled now, where shells have burst,
And lead and steel have done their worst;
The tender tissues ploughed away,
The years' slow processes effaced:
The Mother of us all—disgraced.


And some leave wives behind, young wives;
Already some have launched new lives:
A little daughter, little son—
For thus this blundering world goes on.
But never more will any see
The old secure felicity,
The kindnesses that made us glad
Before the world went mad.
They'll never hear another bird,
Another gay or loving word—
Those men who lie so cold and lone,
Far in a country not their own;
Those men who died for you and me,
That England still might sheltered be
And all our lives go on the same
(Although to live is almost shame).


RIDDLES, R.F.C.[1] (1916)

HE was a boy of April beauty; one
Who had not tried the world; who, while the sun
Flamed yet upon the eastern sky, was done.


Time would have brought him in her patient ways—
So his young beauty spoke—to prosperous days,
To fullness of authority and praise.


He would not wait so long. A boy, he spent
His boy's dear life for England. Be content:
No honour of age had been more excellent.


  1. Lieutenant S. G. Ridley, Royal Flying Corps, sacrificed his life in the Egyptian desert in an attempt to save a comrade. He was twenty years of age.
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