The Ebb Of War

In the seven--times taken and re--taken town Peace! The mind stops; sense argues against sense. The August sun is ghostly in the street As if the Silence of a thousand years Were its familiar. All is as it was At the instant of the shattering: flat--thrown walls; Dislocated rafters; lintels blown awry And toppling over; what were windows, mere Gapings on mounds of dust and shapelessness; Charred posts caught in a bramble of twisted iron; Wires sagging tangled across the street; the black Skeleton of a vine, wrenched from the old house It clung to; a limp bell--pull; here and there Little printed papers pasted on the wall. It is like a madness crumpled up in stone, Laughterless, tearless, meaningless; a frenzy Stilled, like at ebb the shingle in sea--caves Where the imagined weight of water swung Its senseless crash with pebbles in myriads churned By the random seethe. But here was flesh and blood, Seeing eyes, feeling nerves; memoried minds With the habit of the picture of these fields And the white roads crossing the wide green plain, All vanished! One could fancy the very fields Were memory's projection, phantoms! All Silent! The stone is hot to the touching hand. Footsteps come strange to the sense. In the sloped churchyard, Where the tower shows the blue through its great rents, Shadow falls over pitiful wrecked graves, And on the gravel a bare--headed boy, Hands in his pockets, with large absent eyes, Whistles the Marseillaise: To Arms, To Arms! There is no other sound in the bright air. It is as if they heard under the grass, The dead men of the Marne, and their thin voice Used those young lips to sing it from their graves, The song that sang a nation into arms. And far away to the listening ear in the silence Like remote thunder throb the guns of France.