Insensibility

I         Happy are men who yet before they are killed         Can let their veins run cold.         Whom no compassion fleers         Or makes their feet         Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.         The front line withers,         But they are troops who fade, not flowers         For poets' tearful fooling:         Men, gaps for filling         Losses who might have fought         Longer; but no one bothers.             II         And some cease feeling         Even themselves or for themselves.         Dullness best solves         The tease and doubt of shelling,         And Chance's strange arithmetic         Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.         They keep no check on Armies' decimation.             III         Happy are these who lose imagination:         They have enough to carry with ammunition.         Their spirit drags no pack.         Their old wounds save with cold can not more ache.         Having seen all things red,         Their eyes are rid         Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.         And terror's first constriction over,         Their hearts remain small drawn.         Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle         Now long since ironed,         Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.             IV         Happy the soldier home, with not a notion         How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,         And many sighs are drained.         Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:         His days are worth forgetting more than not.         He sings along the march         Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,         The long, forlorn, relentless trend         From larger day to huger night.             V         We wise, who with a thought besmirch         Blood over all our soul,         How should we see our task         But through his blunt and lashless eyes?         Alive, he is not vital overmuch;         Dying, not mortal overmuch;         Nor sad, nor proud,         Nor curious at all.         He cannot tell         Old men's placidity from his.             VI         But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,         That they should be as stones.         Wretched are they, and mean         With paucity that never was simplicity.         By choice they made themselves immune         To pity and whatever mourns in man         Before the last sea and the hapless stars;         Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;         Whatever shares         The eternal reciprocity of tears.