William Dunseath Eaton

“ Clod upon clod, beneath the sod that time alone may sunder,
Held where the wind-blown grasses stir beneath an alien sky.
He’ll miss, perhaps, the poppy blooms that sway above the clover,
But rose-red wreaths of Arlington bend low above his dreams.
The reveille at dawn is done, the slogging hikes are over,
Where out the friendly lanes of home, a gay and careless rover,
His wild, free spirit seeks the hills and haunts the singing streams.
No more he moves by Meuse or Aisne, some shell-swept river wading,
No marching orders call him from his rough-hewn granite grave. ”

“ The time is too near us, the motive too deep, the theme too vast. But out of the dark came many voices, voices of lamentation, of home and love and hope and heroism and loftiest ideality, of romance, of strange comedy. These had their inspiration from a gigantic spectacle of elemental passions in cross-play, from the thoughts and emotions not of a single people, but of all that were fighting for the life and light of civilization. Poets great and poets minor followed{6} the war or fought in it, and expressed its spirit with a personal, passionate fidelity impossible to historians. ”

“ Flag of our Home: lead on—
Beneath thy folds we rest,
We live and love our best,
The fairest roses blow,
The richest harvests grow,
And care-free children play
And gladden every day.
Flag of our Home: lead on—
L’ENVOI—
Flag of our Faith, our Hope, our Love,
Flag of our Home, wave on above.
We’ll live, we’ll fight, we’ll die for you—
Flag Everlasting, Red, White and Blue.
THE BLUE AND THE GRAY IN FRANCE
GEORGE M. MAYO
HERE’s to the Blue of the wind-swept North,
When we meet on the fields of France;
May the spirit of Grant be with you all
As the sons of the North advance. ”

“ Only the sun and wind
Make merry in the places
The lads have left behind.
But, when the trooping shadows
Have put the day to flight,
The Gentlemen of Oxford
Come homing through the night.
From France they come, and Flanders,
From Mons, and Marne and Aisne.
From Greece and from Gallipoli
They come to her again;
From the North Sea’s grey waters,
From many a grave unknown,
The Gentlemen of Oxford
Come back to claim their own.
The dark is full of laughter,
Boy laughter, glad and young. ”

“ There will come to us wounds that will rack our bodies and drain the coursing blood of our vibrant veins. There will come to us the aching pain of suffering and loss—here on these red fields of France. But we will save our souls and our nation’s soul! And we will save our heritage and give to the billions of the world the right to theirs.
So the brown ribbon of youth winds across the sea—to Verdun and to the long, thin lines on either side. Here will we prove our right to life and liberty! ”

“ What is a service flag?
I see them everywhere.
There’s little stars sewed on them;
What are they doing there?
Sometimes there’s lots of little stars,
And sometimes just a few.
Poor Widow Jones has only one—
I saw her crying, too.
My darling boy, those little stars
Upon a field of white,
Are emblems of our glorious boys
Enrolling for the right.
The border, as you see, is red,
Which represents their blood;
The stars are blue, the heavenly hue;
The white is always good. ”

“ A poem, anonymous, sent to the Chicago Evening Post by one whose son’s regiment was leaving for France.
MY son, at last the fateful day has come
For us to part. The hours have nearly run.
May God return you safe to land and home;
Yet, what God wills, so may His will be done.
Draw tight the belt about your slender frame;
Flash blue your eyes! Hold high your proud young head!
Today you march in Liberty’s fair name,
To save the line enriched by France’s dead!
I would not it were otherwise. And yet
’Tis hard to speed your marching forth, my son! ”

“ And shorten the march on the weary way,
To know that at home the loving and true
Are knitting and hoping and praying for you?
Soft are the voices when speaking your name,
Proud are their glories when hearing your fame.
And the gladdest hour in their lives will be
When they greet you after the victory.
THE GOLDENROD
“ANCHUSA” From B. L. T.’s column in The Chicago Tribune
SOME day the fields of Flanders shall bloom in peace again,
Field lilies and the clover spread where once was crimson stain,
And a new, cheerful golden spray shine through the sun and rain. ”

“ PREFACE N a fateful day in 1914, without a warning flash or tremor, there fell upon the world such a blast of war as human reason could not have foreglimpsed, nor Apocalyptic vision raised, to appall the souls of men. Twenty-seven nations took the shock and were rocked to their foundations. Eleven were caught and knotted in the maddest agony of conflict that ever was known. Through four years the winds of destruction swirled and roared around the monstrous welter, before the evil forces failed and their exhaustion brought a breathing space such as lies at the heart of a typhoon. ”

“ For your dear lad, and my dear lad, are on their way to France.
Before them, through a mist of years, in soldier buff or blue,
Brave comrades from a thousand fields watch now in proud review;
The same old Flag, the same old Faith,—the Freedom of the World—{113}
Spells Duty in those flapping folds above long ranks unfurled.
Strong are the hearts which bear along Democracy’s advance,
As your dear lad, and my dear lad, go on their way to France. ”

“ And some are dreaming of the palms that bend in Afric rain.
The music of the barracks half awakes them from their dream;
They smile and sink back sleepily along the Flemish stream.
They dream the baobab’s white buds have opened over-night;
They dream they see the solemn cranes that bask in morning light:
I hear the great drums beating in the square across the plain.
Where are the tillers of the soil, the gallant, loyal train?
O little town in Senegal, amid the white-bud trees,
At Soissons, in Picardy, went north the last of these! ”

“ Wind of the east—ah, east wind blowing
Long, long leagues from a land o’erseas;
Empty hands that can know no sowing,
Passionate pleading hands are these—
Palms outstretched to us over the seas;
Ah, the heart of France is a thing to cherish!
But her werewolf, Hunger, cannot be slain
Till out of our largess, lest she perish,
We hasten the caravels of blessed grain.{165}
Till the sea-shark’s teeth forever are drawn,
And the dread great guns are stilled at the dawn,
We must hold high courage and carry on. ”

“ Through valleys where the crosses grow, as harvest wheat is growing,
And only dead men see the line that passes in review.
The gripping clay once more gives way before the Mighty Mother
Who waits with everlasting arms to guard her sleeping sons.
And lonely mates in silent fields call out to one another
The story of an empty grave, where each has lost a brother,
Who takes the long, long trail at last beyond the rusting guns.
Gently the east wind brought him home to meet the south wind sighing. ”

“ Love eternal, bleeding breasts of the French defiance,
Russians on enraptured quests, Freedom’s proud alliance.{138}
Through that hollow hush of doom, vast, unvisioned regions,
Led by Kitchener of Khartum, march the English legions:
Kilt and shamrock, maple leaf, dreaming Hindu faces,
Brows of glory, eyes of grief, arms of lost embraces.
Like a moaning tide of woe, midst those pale battalions
From the Danube and the Po, Arabs and Australians,
Pours a ghastly multitude that breaks the heart of pity,
Wreckage of some shell-bestrewed waste that was a city ”

“ None will ever do full justice to those Yankee troopers bold.
How they crawled upon their stomachs through the fields of golden wheat
With the bullets spitting at them in that awful battle heat.
It’s a tale too big for writing; it’s beyond the voice or pen,
But it glows among the splendor of the bravest deeds of men.
It’s recorded as a battle, but I fancy it will live,
As the brightest gem of courage human struggles have to give.
Inch by inch, they crawled to victory toward the flaming mounts of guns ”

“ Poppies in the wheat fields on the road to Monthiers—
Hark, the spiteful rattle where the masked machine guns play!
Over them the shrapnel’s song greets the summer morn—
Poppies in the wheat fields—but, ah, the fields are torn.
See the stalwart Yankee lads, never ones to blench,
Poppies in their helmets as they clear the shallow trench,
Leaping down the furrows with eager, boyish tread
Through the poppied wheat fields to the flaming woods ahead.
Poppies in the wheat fields as sinks the summer sun,
Broken, bruised and trampled—but the bitter day is won ”

“ Will shelter where the belching guns plowed deep;
The trees will whisper, and the nightingale
Chant golden monodies where heroes sleep.
There will be dreams again! The stars look down
On youthful lovers—oh, first love, how sweet!
And men will wed, and childish laughter crown
Life’s awe-compelling miracle complete.
There will be dreams again! Oh, thou forlorn
That crumbling trench or the slow heaving sea
Hath snatched thy dead—oh, pray thee, do not mourn! ”

“ Lieutenant Roche has deftly caught and preserved in words the strange vision of unannounced trains that flashed now and then past towns and villages bearing American troops from unknown camps to unknown ports of embarkation—the flash of faces of men about whom it was known only that they came from the shops and fields of home and were going across the seas to fight somewhere, for those who stood and gazed as they whirled by. ”

“ Once more the Flemish children shall laugh through Flemish lanes,
And gather happy garlands through fields of bygone pains,
And, as they run and cull their flowers, sing in their simple strains:
“These clovers are for English who fought to save this sod,
These lilies for the valiant French—may their souls rest in God!
And for the brave Americans we pluck this goldenrod.” ”

“ Here, over this land glorified by a nobility of deed than which there has been no more exalted, must our war be waged. Out of this hallowed ground comes the call of those who have given of their best—the call to our great land for Old Glory’s best! ”

“ Through field or forest, o’er river and lea;
No man may pass them, but aim you well
And Death rides across on the bullet or shell.{17}
But No Man’s Land is a goblin sight
When patrols crawl over at dead o’ night;
Boche or British, Belgian or French,
You dice with death when you cross the trench. ”

“ THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER ARMISTICE DAY AT ARLINGTON
GRANTLAND RICE in The New York Tribune
Permission to reproduce in this book
THE wind to-day is full of ghosts with ghostly bugles blowing,
Where shadows steal across the world, as silent as the dew. ”

“ The gaunt and sinister craters, one merging into the ragged rim of another, the bits of shell, the battered helmets,{168} broken guns, ill-assorted refuse of combat—each shattered particle a marker for some valiant soul “gone west” in service of humanity. ”

“ WE often sit upon the porch on sultry August nights,
When fireflies out upon the lawn are soft enchanted lights
From Fairyland; when, far away, a vagrant nightingale
Is sobbing from a bursting heart his tragic untold tale.
We often sit upon the porch, quite silently, for we
Are seeing golden wonder-worlds that no one else may see.
My mother sighs; I feel her hand upon my ruffled hair,
The while I know she thinks of one, of one who is not there.... ”

“ Let me try to tell the tale of Jean Desprez.
With fire and sword the Teuton horde was ravaging the land,
And there was darkness and despair, grim death on every hand;
Red fields of slaughter sloping down to ruin’s black abyss;
The wolves of war ran evil-fanged, and little did they miss.
And on they came with fear and flame, to burn and loot and slay,
Until they reached the red-roofed croft, the home of Jean Desprez.
“Rout out of the village, one and all!” the Uhlan Captain said.
“Behold! Some hand has fired a shot. My trumpeter is dead.{147}
Now shall they Prussian vengeance know ”

“ One thing we know, that love so greatly spent
Dies not when lovers die: From hand to hand
We pass the torch and perish—well content,
If in dark years to come our countrymen
Feel the divine flame leap in them again,
And so remember us and understand.
{121}
“BLIGHTY” AND “GONE WEST”
British soldiers in France have developed a terminology that is plain to them, but confusing to civilians. They speak of “Blighty,” for example, and of “Gone West.” These two terms express hopes—Blighty meaning home; in common acceptance, home for rest and recuperation. ”

“ The traditional friendship between the United States and France was recemented under the fire of German guns. In France they celebrated our Fourth of July; in this country, we celebrated the Fourteenth of July, the anniversary of the fall of the Bastile. Yank and Poilu are brothers in war, don’t mind the languages. The inextinguishable humor of France never showed more quaintly than in that word, “Poilu.” It means “unshaven.” More freely, “a man who needs a shave.” A whimsical comment upon the French soldier’s way of letting his beard grow while he is in the field. ”

“ This big Yankee soldier is lonesome—
Ah, now we’ll be friends, ma chérie.
We won’t understand one another,
Your round eyes are telling me so,
But the cling of your chubby fingers
Is a language that all daddies know. ”

“ Let us care for the widows and orphans: and for the men who came home maimed.
Truly God has been with us: these things were not done without His help.
O Lord our God, be Thou still our helper: make us worthy of those who died. ”

“ WHEN THE FRENCH BAND PLAYS
ANONYMOUS in The Stars and Stripes, A.E.F., France
THERE’s a military band that plays, on Sunday afternoons,
In a certain nameless city’s quaint old square.
It can rouse the blood to battle with its patriotic tunes,
And still render hymns as gentle as a prayer.
When it starts “Ave Maria” there is no one in the throng
But would doff his cap, his heart to heaven raise ”