“God! How I hate you, you young cheerful men”

God! How I hate you, you young cheerful men,

Whose pious poetry blossoms on your graves

As soon as you are in them, nurtured up

By the salt of your corruption, and the tears

Of mothers, local vicars, college deans,

And flanked by prefaces and photographs

From all you minor poet friends—the fools—

Who paint their sentimental elegies

Where sure, no angel treads; and, living, share

The dead’s brief immortality

                                                    Oh Christ!

To think that one could spread the ductile wax

Of his fluid youth to Oxford’s glowing fires

And take her seal so ill! Hark how one chants—

“Oh happy to have lived these epic days”—

“These epic days”! And he’d been to France,

And seen the trenches, glimpsed the huddled dead

In the periscope, hung in the rusting wire:

Chobed by their sickley fœtor, day and night

Blown down his throat: stumbled through ruined hearths,

Proved all that muddy brown monotony,

Where blood’s the only coloured thing. Perhaps

Had seen a man killed, a sentry shot at night,

Hunched as he fell, his feet on the firing-step,

His neck against the back slope of the trench,

And the rest doubled up between, his head

Smashed like and egg-shell, and the warm grey brain

Spattered all bloody on the parados:

Had flashed a torch on his face, and known his friend,

Shot, breathing hardly, in ten minutes—gone!

Yet still God’s in His heaven, all is right

In the best possible of worlds. The woe,

Even His scaled eyes must see, is partial, only

A seeming woe, we cannot understand.

God loves us, God looks down on this our strife

And smiles in pity, blows a pipe at times

And calls some warriors home. We do not die,

God would not let us, He is too “intense,”

Too “passionate,” a whole day sorrows He

Because a grass-blade dies. How rare life is!

On earth, the love and fellowship of men,

Men sternly banded: banded for what end?

Banded to maim and kill their fellow men—

For even Huns are men. In heaven above

A genial umpire, a good judge of sport,

Won’t let us hurt each other! Let’s rejoice

God keeps us faithful, pens us still in fold.

Ah, what a faith is ours (almost, it seems,

Large as a mustard-seed)—we trust and trust,

Nothing can shake us! Ah, how good God is

To suffer us to be born just now, when youth

That else would rust, can slake his blade in gore,

Where very God Himself does seem to walk

The bloody fields of Flanders He so loves!