SIGNALS

The hot wax drips from the flares

On the scrawled pink forms that litter

The bench where he sits; the glitter

Of stars is framed by the sandbags atop of the dug-out stairs.

And the lagging watch-hands creep;

And his cloaked mates murmur in sleep,—

Forms he can wake with a kick,—

And he hears, as he plays with the pressel-switch, the strapped receiver click

On his ear that listens, listens;

And the candle-flicker glistens

On the rounded brass of the switch-board where the red wires cluster thick.

Wires from the earth, from the air;

Wires that whisper and chatter

At night, when the trench-rats patter

And nibble among the rations and scuttle back to their lair;

Wires that are never at rest,—

For the linesmen tap them and test,

And ever they tremble with tone:—

And he knows from a hundred signals the buzzing call of his own,

The breaks and the vibrant stresses,—

The Z and the G and the S's

That call his hand to the answering key and his mouth to the microphone.

For always the laid guns fret

On the words that his mouth shall utter,

When rifle and Maxim stutter

And the rockets volley to starward from the spurting parapet;

And always his ear must hark

To the voices out of the dark,—

For the whisper over the wire,

From the bombed and the battered trenches where the wounded moan in the mire,—

For a sign to waken the thunder

Which shatters the night in sunder

With the flash of the leaping muzzles and the beat of battery-fire.