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Robert Laurence Binyon - The Ebb Of War
Work rating: Low

In the seven--times taken and re--taken town
 Peace! The mind stops; sense argues against sense.
 The August sun is ghostly in the street
 As if the Silence of a thousand years
 Were its familiar. All is as it was
 At the instant of the shattering: flat--thrown walls;
 Dislocated rafters; lintels blown awry
 And toppling over; what were windows, mere
 Gapings on mounds of dust and shapelessness;
 Charred posts caught in a bramble of twisted iron;
 Wires sagging tangled across the street; the black
 Skeleton of a vine, wrenched from the old house
 It clung to; a limp bell--pull; here and there
 Little printed papers pasted on the wall.
 It is like a madness crumpled up in stone,
 Laughterless, tearless, meaningless; a frenzy
 Stilled, like at ebb the shingle in sea--caves
 Where the imagined weight of water swung
 Its senseless crash with pebbles in myriads churned
 By the random seethe. But here was flesh and blood,
 Seeing eyes, feeling nerves; memoried minds
 With the habit of the picture of these fields
 And the white roads crossing the wide green plain,
 All vanished! One could fancy the very fields
 Were memory`s projection, phantoms! All
 Silent! The stone is hot to the touching hand.
 Footsteps come strange to the sense. In the sloped churchyard,
 Where the tower shows the blue through its great rents,
 Shadow falls over pitiful wrecked graves,
 And on the gravel a bare--headed boy,
 Hands in his pockets, with large absent eyes,
 Whistles the Marseillaise: To Arms, To Arms!
 There is no other sound in the bright air.
 It is as if they heard under the grass,
 The dead men of the Marne, and their thin voice
 Used those young lips to sing it from their graves,
 The song that sang a nation into arms.
 And far away to the listening ear in the silence
 Like remote thunder throb the guns of France.
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