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The Cause

Poems of the War: By Laurence Binyon

Binyon, Laurence (1869-1943)

TO THE ENEMY COMPLAINING

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THE ANTAGONISTS

I

Caverns mouthed with blackness more than night,
Fever-jungle deep in strangling brier,
Venom-breeding slime that loathest light,
Who has plumbed your secret? who the blind desire
Hissing from the viper's lifted jaws,
Maddening the beast with scent of prey
Tracked through savage glooms on robber paws
Till the slaughter gluts him red and reeking? Nay,
Man, this breathing mystery, this intense
Body beautiful with thinking eyes,
Master of a spirit outsoaring sense,
Spirit of tears and laughter, who has measured all the skies,—
Is he also the lair
Of a lust, of a sting
That hides from the air
Yet is lurking to spring

From the nescient core
Of his fibre, alert
At the trumpet of war
And hungry to hurt,
When he hears from abysses of time
Aboriginal mutters, replying
To something he knew not within him,
And the Demon of Earth crying:

“I am the will of the Fire
That bursts into boundless fury;
I am my own implacable desire.

“I am the will of the Sea
That shoulders the ships and breaks them;
There is none other but me.”

Heavy forests bred them,
The race that dreamed.
In the bones of savage earth
Their dreams had birth:
Darkness fed them.
And the full brain grossly teemed
With thoughts compressed, with rages
Obstinate, stark, obscure—

Thirsts no time assuages,
But centuries immure.
As the sap of trees, behind
Crumpled bark of bossy boles,
Presses up its juices blind,
Buried within their souls
The dream insatiate still
Nursed its fierceness old
And violent will,
Haunted with twilight where the Gods drink full
Ere they renew their revelry of slaying,
And warriors leap like the lion on the bull,
And harsh horns in the northern mist are braying.
Tenebrous in them lay the dream
Like a fire that under ashes
Smoulders heavy-heaped and dim
Yet with spurted stealthy flashes
Sends a goblin shadow floating
Crooked on the rafters—then
Sudden from its den
Springs in splendour. So should burst
Destiny from dream, from thirst
Rapture gloating

On a vision of earth afar
Stretched for a prize and a prey;
And the secular might of the Gods re-risen
Savage and glorious, waiting its day,
Should shatter its ancient prison
And leap like the panther to slay,
Magnificent! Storm, then, and thunder
The haughty to crush with the tame,
For the world is the strong man's plunder
Whose coming is swifter than flame;
And the nations unready, decayed,
Unworthy of fate or afraid,
Shall be stricken and torn asunder
Or yield in shame.

The Dream is fulfilled.
Is it this that you willed,
O patient ones?
For this that you gave
Young to the grave
Your valiant sons?
For this that you wore
Brave faces, and bore
The burden heart-breaking—
Sublimely deceived,

You that bled and believed—
For the Dream? or the Waking?

II

No drum-beat, pulsing challenge and desire,
Sounded, no jubilant boast nor fierce alarm
Cried throbbing from enfevered throats afire
For glory, when from vineyard, forge, and farm,
From wharf and warehouse, foundry, shop, and school,
From the unreaped cornfield and the office-stool
France called her sons; but loth, but grave,
But silent, with their purpose proud and hard
Within them, as of men that go to guard
More than life, yet to dare
More than death: France, it was their France to save!
Nor now the fiery legend of old fames
And that imperial Eagle whose wide wings
Hovered from Vistula to Finistère,
Who plucked the crown from Kings,
Filled her; but France was arming in her mind:

The world unborn and helpless, not the past
Victorious with banners, called her on;
And she assembled not her sons alone
From city and hamlet, coast and heath and hill,
But deep within her bosom, deeper still
Than any fear could search, than any hope could blind,
Beyond all clamours of her recent day,
Hot smouldering of the faction and the fray,
She summoned her own soul. In the hour of night,
In the hush that felt the armed tread of her foes,
Like a star, silent out of seas, it rose.

Most human France! In those clear eyes of light
Was vision of the issue, and all the cost
To the last drop of generous blood, the last
Tears of the orphan and the widow; and yet
She shrank not from the terror of the debt,
Seeing what else were with the cause undone,
The very skies barred with an iron threat,
The very mind of freedom lost

Beneath that shadow bulked across the sun.
Therefore did she abstain
From all that had renowned her, all that won
The world's delight: thought-stilled
With deep reality to the heart she burned,
And took upon her all the load of pain
Foreknown; and her sons turned
From wife's and children's kiss
Simply, and steady-willed
With quiet eyes, with courage keen and clear,
Faced Eastward.—If an English voice she hear,
That has no speech worthy of her, let this
Be of that day remembered, with what pride
Our ancient island thrilled to the oceans wide,
And our hearts leapt to know that England then,
Equal in faith of free and loyal men,
Stept to her side.

THE HARVEST

Red reapers under these sad August skies,
Proud War-Lords, careless of ten thousand dead,
Who leave earth's kindly crops unharvested
As you have left the kindness of the wise
For brutal menace and for clumsy lies,
The spawn of insolence by bragging fed,
With power and fraud in faith's and honour's stead,
Accounting these but good stupidities;

You reap a heavier harvest than you know.
Disnaturing a nation, you have thieved
Her name, her patient genius, while you thought
To fool the world and master it. You sought
Reality. It comes in hate and woe.
In the end you also shall not be deceived.

THE CAUSE

Out of these throes that search and sear
What is it so deep arises in us
Above the shaken thoughts of fear,—
Whatever thread the Fates may spin us,—
Above the horror that would drown
And tempest that would strike us down?

It is to stand in cleansing light,
The cloud of dullard habit lifted,
To use a certainty of sight
And breathe an air by peril sifted,
The things that once we deemed of price
Consumed in smoke of sacrifice.

It is to feel the world we knew
Changed to a wonder past our knowing;
The grass, the trees, the skiey blue,
The very stones are inly glowing
With something infinite behind
These shadows, ardently divined.

We went our ways; each bosom bore
Its spark of separate desire;
But each now kindles to the core
With faith from this transfusing fire,
Whereto our inmost longings run
To be made infinitely one

With that which nothing can destroy,
Which lives when all is crushed and taken,
The home of dearer than our joy,
By all save by the soul forsaken,—
The soul that strips her clean of care
Because she breathes her native air,

Yet not in scorn of lovely earth
And human sweetness born of living,
For these are grown of dearer worth,
A gift more precious in the giving,
Since through this raiment's hues and lines
The glory of the spirit shines.

Faces of radiant youth, that go
Like rivers singing to the sea!
You count no careful cost; you know;
Of that far secret you are free;
And life in you its splendour spending
Sings the stars' song that has no ending.

LOUVAIN

To Dom Bruno Destrée, O.S.B.

I

It was the very heart of Peace that thrilled
In the deep minster-bell's wide-throbbing sound
When over old roofs evening seemed to build
Security this world has never found.

Your cloister looked from Cæsar's rampart, high
O'er the fair city: clustered orchard-trees
Married their murmur with the dreaming sky.
It was the house of lore and living peace.

And there we talked of youth's delightful years
In Italy, in England. Now, O Friend,
I know not if I speak to living ears
Or if upon you too is come the end.

Peace is on Louvain; dead peace of spilt blood
Upon the mounded ashes where she stood.

II

But from that blood, those ashes there arose
Not hoped-for terror cowering as it ran,
But divine anger flaming upon those
Defamers of the very name of man,

Abortions of their blind hyena-creed,
Who for “protection” of their battle-host
Against the unarmed of them they had made to bleed,
Whose hearts they had tortured to the utter-most

Without a cause, past pardon, fired and tore
The towers of fame and beauty, while they shot
And butchered the defenceless in the door.
But History shall hang them high, to rot

Unburied, in the face of times unborn,
Mankind's abomination and last scorn.

TO GOETHE

Goethe, who saw and who foretold
A world revealed
New-springing from its ashes old
On Valmy field,

When Prussia's sullen hosts retired
Before the advance
Of ragged, starved, but freedom-fired
Soldiers of France;

If still those clear, Olympian eyes
Through smoke and rage
Your ancient Europe scrutinize,
What think you, Sage?

Are these the armies of the Light
That seek to drown
The light of lands where freedom's fight
Has won renown?

Will they blot also out your name
Because you praise

All works of men that shrine the flame
Of beauty's ways,

Wherever men have proved them great,
Nor, drunk with pride,
Saw but a single swollen State
And naught beside,

Nor dreamed of drilling Europe's mind
With threat and blow
The way professors have designed
Genius should go?

Or shall a people rise at length
And see, and shake
The fetters from its giant strength,
And grandly break

This pedantry of feud and force,
To man untrue,
Thundering and blundering on its course
To death and rue?

YPRES

On the road to Ypres, on the long road,
Marching strong,
We'll sing a song of Ypres, of her glory
And her wrong.

Proud rose her towers in the old time,
Long ago.
Trees stood on her ramparts, and the water
Lay below.

Shattered are the towers into potsherds—
Jumbled stones.
Underneath the ashes that were rafters
Whiten bones.

Blood is in the cellar where the wine was,
On the floor.
Rats run on the pavement where the wives met
At the door.

But in Ypres there's an army that is biding,
Seen of none.

You'd never hear their tramp nor see their shadow
In the sun.

Thousands of the dead men there are waiting
Through the night,
Waiting for a bugle in the cold dawn
Blown for fight.

Listen when the bugle's calling Forward!
They'll be found,
Dead men, risen in battalions
From underground,

Charging with us home, and through the foemen
Driving fear
Swifter than the madness in a madman,
As they hear

Dead men ring the bells of Ypres
For a sign,
Hear the bells and fear them in the Hunland
Over Rhine!

AT RHEIMS

Their hearts were burning in their breasts
Too hot for curse or cries.
They stared upon the towers that burned
Before their smarting eyes.

There where, since France began to be,
Anointed kings knelt down,
There where the Maid, the unafraid,
Received her vision's crown,

The senseless shell with nightmare scream
Burst, and fair fragments fell
Torn from their centuries of peace
As by the rage of hell.

What help for wrath, what use for wail?
Before a dumb despair
All ancient, high, heroic France
Seemed burning, bleeding there.

Within, the pillars soar to gloom
Lit by the glimmering Rose;
Spirits of beauty shrined in stone
Afar from mortal woes,

Hearing not, though their haunted shade
Is stricken, and all around
With splintering flash and brutal crash
The ghostly aisles resound.

And there, upon the pavement stretched,
The German wounded groan
To see the dropping flames of death
And feel the shells their own.

Too fierce the fire! Helped by their foes
They stagger out to air.
The green-grey coats are seen, are known
Through all the crowded square.

Ah, now for vengeance! Deep the groan:
A death-knell! Quietly
Soldiers unsling their rifles, lift
And aim with steady eye.

But sudden in the hush between
Death and the doomed, there stands
Against those levelled guns a priest,
Gentle, with outstretched hands.

Be not as guilty as they! he cries ...
Each lets his weapon fall,
As if a vision showed him France
And vengeance vain and small.

TO THE ENEMY COMPLAINING

Be ruthless, then; scorn slaves of scruple; avow
The blow, planned with such patience, that you deal
So terribly; hack on, and care not how
The innocent fall; live out your faith of steel.

Then you speak speech that we can comprehend.
It cries from the unpitied blood you spill.
And so we stand against you, and to the end
Flame as one man, the weapon of one will.

But when your lips usurp the loyal phrase
Of honour, querulously voluble
Of “chivalry” and “kindness,” and you praise
What you despise for weakness of the fool,

Then the gorge rises. Bleat to dupe the dead!
The wolf beneath the sheepskin drips too red.

EDITH CAVELL

She was binding the wounds of her enemies when they came—
The lint in her hand unrolled.
They battered the door with their rifle-butts, crashed it in:
She faced them gentle and bold.

They haled her before the judges where they sat
In their places, helmet on head.
With question and menace the judges assailed her, “Yes,
I have broken your law,” she said.

“I have tended the hurt and hidden the hunted, have done
As a sister does to a brother,
Because of a law that is greater than that you have made,
Because I could do none other.

“Deal as you will with me. This is my choice to the end,
To live in the life I vowed.”
“She is self-confessed,” they cried, “she is self-condemned.
She shall die, that the rest may be cowed.”

In the terrible hour of the dawn, when the veins are cold,
They led her forth to the wall.
“I have loved my land,” she said, “but it is not enough:
Love requires of me all.

“I will empty my heart of the bitterness, hating none.”
And sweetness filled her brave
With a vision of understanding beyond the hour
That knelled to the waiting grave.

They bound her eyes, but she stood as if she shone.
The rifles it was that shook
When the hoarse command rang out. They could not endure
That last, that defenceless look.

And the officer strode and pistolled her surely, ashamed
That men, seasoned in blood,
Should quail at a woman, only a woman,—dead
As a flower stamped in the mud.

And now that the deed was securely done, in the night
When none had known her fate,
They answered those that had striven for her, day by day:
“It is over, you come too late.”

And with many words and sorrowful-phrased excuse
Argued their German right
To kill, most legally; hard though the duty be,
The law must assert its might.

Only a woman! yet she had pity on them,
The victim offered slain
To the gods of fear that they worship. Leave them there,
Red hands, to clutch their gain.

She bewailed not herself, and we will bewail her not
But with tears of pride rejoice
That an English soul was found so crystal-clear
To be triumphant voice

Of the human heart that dares adventure all
But live to itself untrue,
And beyond all laws sees love as the light in the night,
As the star it must answer to.

The hurts she healed, the thousands comforted—these
Make a fragrance of her fame.
But because she stept to her star right on through death
It is Victory speaks her name.

THE DEPORTATION

I

In vain, in vain, in vain!
Conqueror, you are conquered: though you grind
These bodies, heel on neck; and though you twist
Out of them the exquisite last wrench of pain,
They rise, they rise again,
Rise quivering and eternally resist
All cunning that all cruelty can find
To mock the heart and lacerate the mind
In vain, in vain!

II

The train stands packed for exile, truck on truck.
Men thronged like oxen, pressed against each other,
With worse than anger in their dangerous eyes,
Look on their drivers, armed and helmeted,—
Then forget all in sudden stormy cries
As past the bayonets sister, wife, and mother

Strain up to them, clutch fingers tight, are struck
And beaten back, but struggle and press again,
Catch desolated kisses, fight for breath
To sob their widowed hearts out in a word
Their man shall hear, reckless of wound or death
So they come nigh him; a farewell insane,
A passion as if the earth that bore them heard
And in her bones groaned! And white children held
On shoulders where the torn dress hangs in strips
Cry Father! and mute answers wring the lips
Of the exiles, in their torture still unquelled.

A whistle screams. The guards drive, shout, beat. Then
An inspiration like an ecstasy
Seizes these women, and they rush to throw
Their sobbing bodies prone upon the tracks
Before the panting engine. If their men
Into that night of slavery must go,
They'll be with death before them! Prostrate there,

Tear-blinded, with tense arms and heaving backs,
Young wife and child and mother of grey hair
Clutch the rails, anguished and athirst to die,
While over them the towering engine throbs,
Blind, ignorant, deaf, and ready. But you spare
Such easiness of end, you who did this
Which the sun looked on, and which History
Shall see for ever. Though they cling with sobs
To their own earth, frenzied and bleeding, swift
They are harried up; the bayonets prise and lift
And tear away their hands' despairing grasp:
They are tossed on either side: at the engine's hiss
The wheels begin that road which curses pave
Between those piteous heaps that cry and gasp
Helpless, and cheated even of their grave.

III

But something lives and burns
More perilous to assail
Than flesh of bodies frail:
It waits and it returns.

And when in the night you dream
Of the day that you did this thing,
When you see those eyes and the bayonets' gleam
And the shrieks to your very heart's blood ring
As you do your deed in your dream again,
The soul of the race that you racked, to do
Your Lord's command, that you thought to have cowed,
Shall sharpen the bitterness thrice for you
As it rises before you, crying aloud:
You did it in vain, in vain!

105

ENGLAND'S POET

To other voices, other majesties,
Removed this while, Peace shall resort again.
But he was with us in our darkest pain
And stormiest hour: his faith royally dyes
The colours of our cause; his voice replies
To all our doubt, dear spirit! heart and vein
Of England's old adventure! his proud strain
Rose from our earth to the sea-breathing skies.

Even over chaos and the murdering roar
Comes that world-winning music, whose full stops
Sounded all man, the bestial and divine;
Terrible as thunder, fresh as April drops.
He stands, he speaks, the soul-transfigured sign
Of all our story, on the English shore.

106

THE SIBYLS

Rending the waters of a night unknown
The ship with tireless pulses bore me,
On the shadowy deck musing late and lone,
Over waste ocean.
The rustling of the cordage in the dewy wind
And the sound of idle surges
Falling prolonged and for ever again upthrown
Drowsed me; I slept, I dreamed.

Out of the seas that streamed
In ghostly turbulence moving and glimmering about me
I saw the rising of vast and visionary forms.

Like clouds, like continents of cloud, they rose,
August as the shape of storms
In the silence before the thunder, or of mountains
Alone in a sky of sunken light: they rose
Slowly, with shrouded grandeur

107

Of queenly bosom and shoulder; and afar
Their countenances were lifted, although veiled,
Although heavy as with thought and with silence,
In the heights where dimly gathered
Star upon solitary star.

And it seemed to me, as I dreamed,
That these were the forms of the Sibyls of old,
Prophetesses whose eyes were aflame with interior fire,
Who passionately prophesied and none comprehended,
In the womb of whose thought was quickened the world's desire,
Who saw, and because they saw, chastised
With voices terribly chanting on the wind
The folly of the faithlessness of men.

But not as they haunted then
In cavernous and wild places,
Each inaccessibly sequestered
And sought with furtive steps

108

Through wizard leaves of whispering laurel feared,
Now to me they appeared.
But rather like Queens of fabulous dominion,
Like Queens, voices of a voiceless people,
Queens of old time, with aweing faces,
With burdened brows but with proud eyes,
Assembled in solemn parley, to shape
Futurity and the nations' glory and doom,
They were met in the night together.

And lo! beneath them
The immeasurable circle of the gloom
Phantasmally disclosed
In apparition all the coasts of the world,
Veined with rivers afar to the frozen mountains.
And I saw the shadow of maniac Death
Like a reveller there stagger glutted and gloating.
I saw murdered cities
That raised like a stiffened arm
One blackened tower to heaven; I saw
Processions of the homeless crawling into the distances;

109

And sullen leagues of interminable battle;
And peoples arming afar; the very earth,
The very bowels of the earth infected
With the rages and the agonies of men.
For a moment the vision gleamed, and then was gone.
Gloom rushed down like rain.
But out of the midst of the darkness
My flesh was aware of a sound,
The peopled sound of moving millions
And the voices of human pain.

I lifted my gaze to the Sibyls,
The Sibyls of the Continents, where they rose
Looking one on another.
Ancestral Asia, mother of musing mind,
Was there; and over against her
Towered in the gates of the West a shape
Of youth gigantic, troubled and vigilant;
Patient with eager dumbness in dark eyes,
Africa rose; and ardent out of the South
The youngest of those great sisters; and proud,
With fame upon her for mantle, and regal-browed,
The stature of Europe old.

110

It seemed they listened to the murmur
Of the anguished lands beneath them
In sombre reverberation rising and upward rolled.
Everywhere battle and arming for battle,
Famine and torture, odour of burning and blood,
Doubt, hatred, terror,
Rage and lamenting!

I heard sweet Pity crying between the earth and sky:
But who had leisure for her call? or who hearkened to her cry?

Not with our vision, and not with our horizon
The gaze of the Sibyls was filled.
Their trouble was trouble beyond the shaping of our fear,
Their hope full-sailed upon oceans beyond our ken;
Their thoughts were the thoughts that build
Towers for the dawn unseen.

But nearer than ever before
They drew to each other, sister to shrouded sister,

111

Queen to superb Queen.
What counsel took they together? or what word
Of power and of parturition
Passed their lips? What saw they,
Conferring among the stars?
My blood tingled, and I heard
Syllables, O too vast
For capacity of my ears; yet within me,
In the innermost bones and caves of my being
I felt a voice like the voice of a sea,
And the sound of it seemed to be crying: “Endure!
Humble yourselves, O dreamers of dreams,
In whose bosom is peril fiercer than fire or beast,
Humble yourselves, O desolaters of your own dreams,
Then arise and remember!
Though now you cry in astonishment and anguish
‘What have we done to the beauty of the world
That ruins about us in ashes and blood?’

112

Remember the Spirit that moulded and made you
In the beauty of the body
Shaped as the splendour of speech to thought,
The Spirit that wills with one desire,
With infinite else unsatisfied desire,
Peace not made by conquerors and armies,
Peace born in the soul, that asks not shelter or a pillow.
The peace of truth, unshaken amid the thunder,
Unaffrighted by fury of shrivelling fire,
And neither time nor tempest,
Neither slumber nor calamity,
Neither rending of the flesh nor breaking of the heart,
Shall stay you from that desire.”

That sound floated like a cloud in heaven,
Lingering; and like an answer
Came the sound of the rushing of spirits triumphant,
Of young men dying for a cause.

I lifted my eyes in wonder,
And silence filled me.

113

And with the silence I was aware
Of a breath moving in the glimmer of the air.
The stars had vanished; but again
I beheld those Sibyls august
Over stilled ocean,
And on their faces the dawn.
Even as I looked they lifted up their heads,
They lifted their heads, like eagles
That slowly shake and widen their wondrous wings;
They arose and vanished like the stars.
The light of the changed world, the world new-born,
Brimmed over the silence of the seas;
But even in the rising of its beam
I remembered the light in their eyes.

114

BEFORE THE DAWN

Blacker the night grows ere the dawn be risen,
Keener the cost, and fiercer yet the fight.
But hark! above the thunder and the terror
A trumpet blowing splendid through the night.

It is the challenge of our dead undying,
Calling, Remember! We have died for you.
It is the cry of perilled earth's hereafter—
Sons of our sons—Be glorious! Be true!

Now in the hour when either world is witness,
Never or now shall we be proven great,
Rise to the height of all our strain and story,
Aye, and beyond! For we ourselves are Fate.

115

TO THE END

Because the storm has stript us bare
Of all things but the thing we are,
Because our faith requires us whole,
And we are seen to the very soul,
Rejoice! From now all meaner fears are fled.

Because we have no prize to win
Auguster than the truth within,
And by consuming of the dross
Magnificently lose our loss,
Rejoice! We have not vainly borne and bled.

Because we chose beyond recall
And for dear honour hazard all,
And summoned to the last attack
Refuse to falter or look back,
Rejoice! We die, the Cause is never dead.

THE END