There we stood, resplendent, in our articles of war
daring for a moment to forget the matters core--
that death and dying looming, like mountains in the night,
would be the grim reward for those who'd dared to fight.
The British expedition, in that humid august air,
would hoist the recognition of mankind's new despair;
the wave of Schlieffen's reckoning had broken us that day
and the yeoman of Agincourt had come and gone away.
We fought and bled and fought and died a day or two at Mons,
but soon retreat was sounded, a melody to pawns.
French soil stained in English blood and washed in English tears
then tilled by German cannons for four more ******* years
was less the blessing we first conceived, that bitter, deafening fall,
so late in 1914, when the Great War came to call.
The salient crumbled, frailly; a grave portent it seemed,
soon would come the Somme, Verdun, and horrors never dreamed.