IX. ON ACCOUNT OF ILL HEALTH

You go, brave friends, and I am cast to stay behind,

To read with frowning eyes and discontented mind

The shining history that you are gone to make,

To sleep with working brain, to dream and to awake

Into another day of most ignoble peace,

To drowse, to read, to smoke, to pray that war may cease.

The spring is coming on, and with the spring you go

In countries where strange scents on the April breezes blow;

You'll see the primroses marched down into the mud,

You'll see the hawthorn-tree wear crimson flowers of blood

And I shall walk about, as I did walk of old,

Where the laburnum trails its chains of useless gold,

I'll break a branch of may, I'll pick a violet

And see the new-born flowers that soldiers must forget,

I'll love, I'll laugh, I'll dream and write undying songs

But with your regiment my marching soul belongs.

Men that have marched with me and men that I have led

Shall know and feel the things that I have only read,

Shall know what thing it is to sleep beneath the skies

And to expect their death what time the sun shall rise.

Men that have marched with me shall march to peace again,

Bringing for plunder home glad memories of pain,

Of toils endured and done, of terrors quite brought under,

And all the world shall be their plaything and their wonder.

Then in that new-born world, unfriendly and estranged,

I shall be quite alone, I shall be left unchanged.