Ballads of the Fleet and Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Two white stone crosses side by side
Mark where the true blood flowed,
Where Sidney and Fitzclarence died
To win the desert road.
And ringed about them close at hand
In trenches not too deep,
Unnamed, unnumbered in the sand,
Their dead black troopers sleep.

No cypress here, no English yew,
No trailing willow waves;
On wastes where never green thing grew
Lone blanch their outpost graves.
Through scanty fringe of thorn and palm
The Nile rolls on hard by,
Around them broods the desert calm,
Above the desert sky.

The sunrise scares the waning moon
And smites the dawn with fire,
The still mirage of torrid noon
Fades like a vain desire;
Time's wrinkled hand marks no impress
Across that desert wide,
And changeless there in changelessness
Shall those white graves abide.

For they that seek the river's flow
From the parched eastern waste,
And mark the evening's orange glow,
Push on in panic haste;

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And caravans from north to south
That through the desert fare,
Choose other spots to quench their drouth
When swift night falls—for there,

The dark folk tell, as evening dies,
A sentry's cry alarms
The graves from which dead soldiers rise
That hear the call to arms;
And till the new sun's level rays
Chase night across the sand,
On guard around their English beys
The dead battalions stand.

World-over thus, good comrades sleep,
By alien wilds and waves,
Where kindly hands are none to keep
And tend the frontier graves;
But here, though not in hallowed ground,
Beneath the Afric sky,
Inviolately fenced around
With love and awe they lie.