Ewart Alan Mackintosh

“ And fighting and clean quick death to end and complete the
whole.
Never a hope of heaven, never a fear of hell,
Only the knowledge that you are a soldier, and all is well,
And whether the end be death or a merrier life be given,
We shall have died in the pride of our youth — and that will be
heaven. ”

“ Until you see delusive
Flash from the guardian down
A visioned land elusive,
Dream of an unknown town,
And longing for the wonder,
Strive what you dare not ask,
To rend the veil asunder
And pluck away the mask. ”

“ In the glen where I was young.
Well, the glen is empty now,
And far am I from them that love me,
Water to my knees below.
Shrapnel in the clouds above me;
Watching till I sometimes see.
Instead of death and fighting men. ”

“ Now the world is burning out
Mountain, glen and sea.
From their barrows all about
The dead are calling me.
When my hope is flown and dead
With my love of you.
When the heart of life is fled,
Shall not life go too ? ”

“ And hopes that strained to heaven in their fall.
And high dreams fashioned out of clay and fire.
The earth is black about me, and the sun
Is blotted out with darkness overhead,
There is no hope to comfort me not one. ”

“ So with the bullets above us flying,
⁠So in the midst of horror and pain
We shall come back from the sorrow of dying
⁠To wander your magical ways again.
For that you keep and grow not older
⁠All the beauty we ever knew.
As the fingers of death grow colder. ”

“ THE sun struck through the still unriven trees upon earth, baked by a month of drying suns and torn into fantastic heaps and hollows by the hands of men and the burst of shells; for the wood had been the centre of a ten-days’ struggle, and either side had hurled earth-shaking crumps into it, and had dug frantically little slit trenches to hide themselves from the death which was menaced by every whining shell. Now at last it was British, and save for a commodious dug-out here and there, and some torn grey equipment, no trace was left of the German occupation. ”

“ Out of my own hearth-fire,
The taint of blood goes up.
The scent of the burning pyre.
When the feasters' shout is high.
Or the spinning maidens sing,
I hear the dead man's cry,
The dead who was my king. ”

“ That was so dark in youth's old puppet-show,
And gazing on the far-ofE stage where stand
The misty figures that were you and I,
Each in the darkness will stretch out a hand
To touch the hand of love before we die. ”

“ But, oh, it is the little things that take the heart of me.
For all we knew of old, for little things and lovely.
We bow us to a greater life beyond our hope or fear.
To bear its heavy burdens, endure its toils unheeding. ”

“ ALONG the dusty highway,
And through the little town,
The people of the country
Are riding up and down.
Behind the lines of fighting
They gather in all day
The harvest, folk are reaping
At home and far away. ”

“ Are you come back to earth again,
About the battle do you go?
By trenches where with bitter cries
Men's spirits leave their tortured clay,
Oh, wanderer with the mournful eyes,
Are you on Flanders soil to-day? ”

“ Theirs by the years of fighting, theirs by the price they paid,
Making a son like them, careless of hell or heaven,
A man that can look in the face of the gods and be not afraid.
Poor and weak is my strength and I cannot war against heaven. ”

“ For still I see a girl I never knew
And see my own dear love without a change ;
And while young love is born within my heart,
As on his birthday half a year ago,
I mourn that we are kept so long apart. ”

“ And golden dreams must fade.
And all our loves are dying
With us beneath the shade ;
And buds that ripen never
Their bloomless leaves have shed,
For youth is dead for ever,
And all his thoughts are dead. ”

“ It is night, but the great tree shows blacker. Below it sits Angus in a wreath of mist.
Angus (sings) .
Let the gods awake, for memory has woken,
The little men that loved us remember us again,
The chains that were wrought of the love of Christ are broken,
And little men come back to our beauty and their pain.
Let the gods awake, for the hearts of men are waking
The little hearts that warmed us when we were a-cold.
The old time is back again, the old day is breaking—
What is man’s forgetting to us who wax not old? ”

“ In all the years before us
God knows what fate hangs o'er us,
What good or evil thing,
But we'll walk no more together
Whatever time may bring.
Love is not dead but sleeping,
Youth is not spent in vain. ”

“ Lest we see a worse thing than it is to die.
Live ourselves and see our friends cold beneath the sky,
God grant we too be lying there in wind and mud and rain
Before the broken regiments come stumbling back again. ”

“ A weapon to avenge the nation’s wrongs,
And they with many a discordant note
Shall chant in many a trench my poignant songs;
And the pale enemy (to whom I fear
For the rhyme’s sake I must refer as ‘‘Hunes”)
Shall tremble in their deep dug-outs to hear
Across the night those wild untuneful tunes,
And shall beseech their officers and cry,
“Let us retire at once, or else we die.” ”

“ The beauty that slew men, the golden eyes that shone,
The gods that would be walking on the rocks of the winds,
That little men would die for the love of looking on?
Are the gods forgotten in Morven of the stags,
The old gods, the fair gods, that were too high for love,
The white feet pressing on the grasses of the crags,
The black hair hidden in the black clouds above?
The gods are forgotten in Morven of the glens.
The sun shines clearly, and gentle is the day.
Like snow in summer corries, like mist upon the bens,
The lovely gods of darkness are vanished away. ”

“ Grenades that might have chilled the stoutest’s blood,
Only to hear that plaintive call from you,
Informing us it was another dud.
And when the gent from the Brigade was nigh,
Watching our Millses’ fizzing through the sky,
To see you hit him neatly in the eye
With little well-aimed lumps of harmless mud.
Often men came to me and said that they
Had done you in at last and heard you yell,
But ’twas my sorrow on th’ ensuing day
To hear again the voice I knew so well. ”

“ Before we came to Morven of the stags.
They have fled by like the light winds that blow
Swift shadows o’er a waveless loch. But we,
Like the loch water, bide the same for ever,
Since first the gods fashioned our souls of mist,
That at the end will take them back again.
Mairi. The gods are dead, or if they live I care not,
For over my poor heart they have no power.
Here in the changing world we stand alone,
Ourselves forever. ”

“ A wide fireplace with peats burning, and big chests along the walls. At a table sits Mairi Bain. Ian and Alastair come in.
Ian. Mairi put out more peats upon the fire,
For we have strangers in the house to-night.
Mairi. The blessings of our Lord be with you, stranger.
Alastair. Blessings be with you, woman of the house,
From older gods and greater lords than he.
Mairi. Stranger, that is no luck-word to the house.
Alastair. Have you forgotten too, and do you bow,
Pale lily of Morven, to the beaten god,
Who should be following the mist of love
Over the hills beneath a summer moon? ”

“ It’s hell.”
The British soldier is nothing if not inconsistent. When he’s in the trenches, sharing magnanimously and doing noble things with a will day and night, he likes to pose as a grumbler. One of his chief topics of conversation is the way he’ll “swing the lead” if ever he has the luck to be wounded and get out to Blighty. But when he does get back to Blighty, he isn’t content to stay there. He can’t rest. The heroism of the hell “out there”—a hell that has nothing romantic—shouts to him. It isn’t the fascination of the horror that draws him. It certainly isn’t the love of fighting. ”

“ Our pose of light-heartedness has succeeded too well; we have almost persuaded the world that we are incredible schoolboys out on a picnic. And so we are in a fashion; but it is a picnic with death.
The man at the Front is chiefly responsible for this impression, and yet he has a right to resent its acceptance. It is one thing to crack jokes about your own dying—quite another for the people whose lives you are preserving to laugh at them. The man at the Front is consciously risking his all for ideals. ”

“ Dream that the gods are mighty yet. But we
In Western Morven, by the winter fires,
Hear all night long above the talk of men
Our broken masters wailing on the hills.
Alastair. The gods are living yet, and have their thrones
In the invisible desires of men. ”

“ There is strangely little, indeed, about the war in any of them, but much about the minds and hearts of those who wage it. There shines through them a very triumph over war. This much loved gallant poet is of those whose living martyrdom rises whole-souled above the storm of violence and is humanity’s true victory. ”

“ The next few minutes seemed to MacTaggart interminable hours filled with the bursting of shells and the shrieks of the wounded men, as he pulled them along. Now he was lugging at one, now at the other, and now running back with Macdonald, screaming hysterical curses, to throw bombs into the Bosche trench. There was one moment of terror when their two land mines went up, and another, when Macdonald shouted “They’re coming, sir,” and he ran back, firing his revolver at grey figures that he fancied were looming through the smoke. ”

“ Flesh and blood and brain,
You’ve made an end of dying,
Hurts and cold and crying,
And all but quiet lying
Easeful after pain.
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Dead men at Beaumont,
Do you dream at all
When the leaves of summer
Ripen to their fall? ”

“ Shell-torn meadow and riven tree,
And their own fields grown strange.
They shall hear live men crying,
They shall see dead men lie,
Shall hear the rattling Maxims fire,
And see by broken twists of wire
Gold flares light up the sky. ”

“ Then he remembered a score of things—his promise that he wouldn’t go back and leave one of them alive in the German trench, his pride that the men had always trusted him and followed him, his affection for the men, and, above all, the eternal principle, as old as war, “An officer can’t desert his men.” He turned to Charlie MacRae, suddenly calm, “Will you watch the left,” he said; “Sergeant Godstone and I will bring these fellows along.”
The impassive MacRae climbed on to the parapet, and sat there with his revolver in his right hand and a bomb in his left. ”

“ We never see ourselves as silhouetted against the sky-line of eternity—our dislike for self-advertisement prevents that. We rarely invent fine phrases to accompany fine actions; we distrust the sincerity of words. Instead, we camouflage our deepest emotions with humour and slang. We are so disdainful of hysterics that we mask our exaltations with indifference. In our dread of striking attitudes our very indifference becomes a pose. ”

“ Discrownèd gods that are His enemies.
Alastair comes in.
Alastair. Christ’s love? Then even here men pray to Christ,
The pitiful intruder; even here
In Western Morven of the windy rocks,
Where once the old gods would be wandering
Along the outer fringes of the world,
The loving god is master.
The loving god is master. ”

“ One by one in the roads they lie,
Each one comes to his own home harbour,
Every one but you and I.
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Why can we not stay? we that are wanting
Nothing more than the others are,
A wife by the fire and a hearth to warm us,
Anchorage safe in the harbour far. ”

“ Clear lay the wood before us
In the clear summer weather,
But broken, broken, broken
Are the sons of the heather.
In the cold of the morning,
In the burning of the day,
The thin lines stumbled forward,
The dead and dying lay. ”

“ Fragments of the high Romance, the old Heroic fire.
All they dreamed of childishly, bravery and fame for them,
Charges at the cannon’s mouth, enemies they slew,
Bright across the waking world their romances came for them,
Is not life a little price when our dreams come true? ”

“ A stout and stolid Saxon with a healthy growth of beard,
And Hermann with his rifle is the pride of every German,
Until our Sandy gets on him, and Hermann gets afeared,
For when he hears the bullets come he slides down to the ground,
And tremblingly he gasps out to his comrades all around—
Chorus—“Sniper Sandy’s slaying Saxon soldiers,
Chorus—And Saxon soldiers seldom show but Sandy slays a few,
Chorus—And every day the Bosches put up little wooden crosses
Chorus—In the cemetery for Saxon soldiers Sniper Sandy slew.” ”

“ Bécourt, Authuille, Thiepval,
Henancourt, Avelay,
Their names are keys that open
Remembered doors to me.
Doors that will open never
Upon this tortured land.
I shall not see you ever,
Or take you by the hand. ”