| OUT in the blustering darkness, on the deck | |
| A gleam of stars looks down. Long blurs of black, | |
| The lean Destroyers, level with our track, | |
| Plunging and stealing, watch the perilous way | |
| Through backward racing seas and caverns of chill spray. | 5 |
| One sentry by the davits, in the gloom | |
| Stands mute: the boat heaves onward through the night. | |
| Shrouded is every chink of cabined light: | |
| And sluiced by floundering waves that hiss and boom | |
| And crash like guns, the troop-ship shudders ... doom. | 10 |
| |
| Now something at my feet stirs with a sigh; | |
| And slowly growing used to groping dark, | |
| I know that the hurricane-deck, down all its length, | |
| Is heaped and spread with lads in sprawling strength— | |
| Blanketed soldiers sleeping. In the stark | 15 |
| Danger of life at war, they lie so still, | |
| All prostrate and defenceless, head by head... | |
| And I remember Arras, and that hill | |
| Where dumb with pain I stumbled among the dead. | |
| |
| We are going home. The troop-ship, in a thrill | 20 |
| Of fiery-chamber’d anguish, throbs and rolls. | |
We are going home ... victims ... three thousand souls.
May 1918. | |
