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I
Happy are men who yet before they are killed
Can let
their veins run cold.
Whom no compassion fleers
Or
makes their feet
Sore on the alleys cobbled with
their brothers.
The front line withers,
But they
are troops who fade, not flowers
For poets' tearful
fooling:
Men, gaps for filling:
Losses who might
have fought
Longer; but no one bothers.
II
And some cease feeling
Even themselves or for
themselves.
Dullness best solves
The tease and
doubt of shelling,
And Chance's strange arithmetic
Comes simpler that the reckoning of their shilling.
They keep no check on armies' decimation.
III
Happy are these who lose imagination:
They have
enough to carry with ammunition.
Their spirit drags
no pack,
Their old woulds save with cold can not more
ache.
Having seen all things red,
Their eyes are
rid
Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.
And terror's first constriction over,
Their hearts
remain small-drawn.
Their senses in some scorching
cautery of battle
Now long since ironed,
Can laugh
among the dying, unconcerned.
IV
Happy the
soldier home, with not a notion
How somewhere, every
dawn, some men attack,
And many sighs are drained.
Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:
His days
are worth forgetting more than not.
He sings along
the march
Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,
The long, forlorn, relentless trend
From larger day
to huger night.
V
We wise, who with a
thought besmirch
Blood over all our soul,
How
should we see our task
But through his blunt and
lashless eyes?
Alive, he is not vital overmuch;
Dying, not mortal overmuch;
Nor sad, nor proud,
Nor curious at all.
He cannot tell
Old men's
placidity from his.
VI
But cursed are
dullards whom no cannon stuns,
That they should be as
stones;
Wretched are they, and mean
With paucity
that never was simplicity.
By choice they made
themselves immune
To pity and whatever moans in man
Before the last sea and the hapless stars;
Whatever
mourns when many leave these shores;
Whatever shares
The eternal reciprocity of tears.
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