Prelude: The Troops

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
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
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
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,
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;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.