| 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 | 5 |
| 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 | 10 |
| 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 | 15 |
| 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, | 20 |
| 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; | 25 |
| The legions who have suffered and are dust. | |