Prelude: The Troops

Dim, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom     Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals     Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots     And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky     Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down     The stale despair of night, must now renew     Their desolation in the truce of dawn,     Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace.     Yet these, who cling to life with stubborn hands,     Can grin through storms of death and find a gap     In the clawed, cruel tangles of his defence.     They march from safety, and the bird-sung joy     Of grass-green thickets, to the land where all     Is ruin, and nothing blossoms but the sky     That hastens over them where they endure     Sad, smoking, flat horizons, reeking woods,     And foundered trench-lines volleying doom for doom.     O my brave brown companions, when your souls     Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead     Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,     Death will stand grieving in that field of war     Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.     And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass     Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;     The unreturning army that was youth;     The legions who have suffered and are dust.