INLAND.
(By A Samon's Wzrs.) SERBIAN and Russian, Belgian and French, British and Japanese— These are the flags that shiver and toss in the biting northerly breeze—
These are the flags on our village green at the edge of a Wiltshire down, And below are the names of our fighting men, fighting for hearth and crown.
William and Percy and Johnny and Co., puffing their cigarettes, Stood there on Sundays ere church was "out" chaffing and making bets
Only last summer,—it seems an age, but it's barely six months ago—
And now they're away in the North Sea Fleet or in Flanders entrenched in snow ; Or freezing in huts on Salisbury Plain, or stifling in sub- marine", ; But wherever they are they do men's work, though they're most of them in their 'teens,
And their mothers and sisters, and sweethearts too, have all got a stake in the war— Why, even the babies play "aeroplanes" and a bucket's an armoured car.
Not yet has the iron pierced their souls, not yet have they had to pay The crushing price of admiralty, the reckoning on "The Day The pinch of poverty, pain of loss not yet have reached them here; They still can smile, they still can sleep, and, sleeping, they cease to fear.
• • • •
But we're not muck more than a hundred miles from a port where women weep For the men who were sunk without firing a shot, for the men who were drowned in their sleep,
And for men who were maimed and are worse than dead. God pity the wives that bear Such burdens of grief as are here unknown; and yet—I would
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