| Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 1912–22. | | | | The Song of the Cheechas | | By John Curtis Underwood |
| | From “War Times”
THE CHEECHAS defended Chachak. | |
| The grandfathers of Serbia’s fourth line held her third capital: | |
| For a man is a grandfather here at forty, and a fighter at eighty until he dies. | |
| And the Germans found it out and flinched and fled from them. | |
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| They had no uniform but their gray hair and beards, and needed none. | 5 |
| They had no rations but half a pound of dry bread a day, and it sufficed them. | |
| They were armed with rifles as old and battered as themselves, and they battered the Germans back. | |
| Three times they drove them back, and took that shattered and exploding capital away from them. | |
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| Then in the fourth attack, when four in every five of them were down, | |
| The rest of the oldest men who had seen free Serbia born and were seeing her die— | 10 |
| So they believed with the rest—went away muttering, “What do I care for myself, what do I count for? | |
| Three million people lost, nothing else matters, three million people lost, three million lost.” | |
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| And many of them died by the way, where hundreds were lying starving and freezing— | |
| Dying on high Montenegrin mountains in the wind and the snow that grew sleet, | |
| So gray icicles grew on their beards and the sleet cut cold skin on their faces. | 15 |
| And the wind cut their song into shreds, the song they were singing when they died: | |
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| The Suabas are building houses, the Serbs shall live in them. | |
| The Suabas are planting corn, the Serbs shall eat it up. | |
| The Suabas are pressing wine, the Serbs shall drink of it. | |
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| And they drank to their fill of the war that the Huns and their helots had brewed. | 20 |
| But the Serbs and their brothers shall finish it. | | | | |
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