“None will break ranks.”
—Wilfred Owen
Folly in towns, like maggots in a corpse,
But wisdom breeds with leisure in the dorps;
Vain is the trek where haste with nature strives
If at the journey’s end a fool arrives;
Cool as the Roman, as the tortoise slow,
I lay my road around me as I go,
For there’s less wisdom in a hasty thing
Than in the daftest butterfly of spring.
I write no telegrams that cannot wait
Because to-morrow they’d be out of date,
What news I have (it’s not a vast amount)
Myself I carry, and myself recount—
No Reuter, but a postman of the sun
Who loves to loiter when the others run.
My pen the spur, my rhyme the jingled rein,
My hand the downswung stirrup of my brain,
Although I’ve had to spurt to save my hide
A canter is my ordinary stride;
I like to feel the landscape moving by
Gradual and smooth and almost on the sly,
For I’m the sort of guy that rides and sings.
Train-window, tourist insight into things
Was never in my line; the way I go
Zigzags too quickly but arrives too slow;
I call at friendly shelters by the way
And often turn the midnight into day;
My horse would bear me slumbering afar,
And I have been arrested by a Star!
They never could recruit me for their Scouts
Because I had so many ins-and-outs—
I’d plant my scouting pole to bear me fruit
And in its shade lie pillowed at the root
Absent from roll-call, by a dream delayed
When Bugles sound the Bolshevik parade.
When due for duty off to draw my cash,
To paint the city and to cut a dash
With saddle-bags ding-donging like the bells
That ring for dinner in the world’s hotels;
And when the duros cease their happy din
To greet my messmate, Hunger, with a grin—
That sterling chap sham bolshies do not know,
Whose hat the moon is, and his coat the snow,
So staunch a friend when all the rest depart
To sharpen wit and fortify the heart,
For fasts revive our pleasures when they cloy
And are the springboards of Eternal Joy:
You ask old Ghandi, or my friend the priest—
First in the fast is foremost in the feast!
Across the world more lightly we can sail
Than Attila (whose kitchen was his tail).
Diogenes to me was an esquire
Who thought his house insured against the fire,
While you and I with no more luggage pass
Than springbok bounding over plains of grass—
Free as the air, responsible to none,
Soldiers of chance, and troopers of the Sun.
Luck on our side, we play at pitch and toss
Christ for our king and Mithras for our boss;
Procrastination saves me half my time—
To live comes first with me—to them a crime:
That shadow-chorus to whose chant I act
In all their emptiness the only fact,
For having twice set foot upon their shore
As I have done on half a dozen more.
Cunctator, though no Fabian, I must fight
As best befits who travel swift and light.
I like this sort of warfare: a cadet
Of Bolivar, Sertorius, and de Wet
My forces I collect and then disband
And when the least expected am at hand
Although not there, forever in their mind,
Six years although I left them all behind.
I scorn the goose-step of their massed attack
And fight with my guitar slung on my back,
Against a regiment I oppose a brain
And a dark horse against an armoured train:
I like to trick their marksmen having shown
My dummy image from behind a stone,
To hear their yell of triumph when they score
And then to snipe off half a dozen more.
In their day-dreams they’ve killed me thrice a day
Swearing I’m dead they daily blaze away
And all their noisy shelling of the kop
Only proclaims who’s fighting there on top.
They’re the pink Tommies, all in order lined,
Poking each other onward from behind
To face one single muzzle-loading gun,
Because it gets its nitre from the sun.
But, as it is, the odds are on my side,
This age is broken ground on which we ride,
Fatal to heavy troops, this great Waste Land
Was for the neat guerilla nicely planned,
Whose only luggage is his light guitar,
Whose compass is the love-delighting Star,
Who takes advice from every winding stream
Or stone (the pillow of a Jacob’s dream),
Makes of the wilderness his posh hotel,
And drinks his fill where armies dry the well.
Of phalanxes this era breaks the line
And seems with my own tactics to combine;
Added to that, they’re loaded with despair
The meanest sin that blackens earth or air!
Weighed down by conscious guilt themselves they dread
More than the fiercest enemy ahead.
Vain is the frosty non-committal sneer,
Against the human laugh, the human tear,
And the sad rictus of each cynic grin
Betrays the toxins rioting within—
But may the Devil all my molars pull
When I grow tired of torrying John Bull!
For he was never braver with his gun
Than when he numbered ninety-nine to one;
Number and repetition are his law—
“None will break ranks,” as Owen long foresaw;
Jock Stot’s the same—but when the bullets whistle
Up goes the White flag, and down comes the Thistle …
… These are the guys that have no time to wait
Though wisdom has a trick of coming late,
A butterfly that stops at every flower
And with a golden leisure hoards the hour,
Which these have squandered in their breathless haste
And through their open bilges run to waste.
So how to round them up? and where impound
This legion of the lost that can’t be found?
No need to hurry; with an easy mind
We catch them—where they left themselves behind!
For without one exception to the rule
They just can’t keep from hanging round their school.
It holds the sum of all their earthly joys
And they’ll be Masters if they can’t be boys;
And here to prove it running to the minute
Shunts in the train with all the ‘Old Boys’ in it.
The chaps all shouted like a single fool
“Woodley! Old Woodley! Welcome home to School!”
Then the new Master from his study burst
Not quite so much a Coward as the first
He cracked a joke, made everybody laugh—
John Bull, Jock Stot, and little Jacky Calf.
Back to the fields where Waterloo was won,
Majuba lost (they blame it on the sun!),
They came out hiking in their shorts and specs
And the sun passed his brand around their necks,
So well Apollo knows that bovine crew
He always ropes them with a red lassoo;
One uniform he has for dons or scholars
Red knee-caps and the ringworm for their collars.
To find a red-neck cheap upon this day
You do not need to wander far away—
Each comes with his pink halter to your hand
And noosing one you seem to noose the band:
Rodin outdone, this concourse seems to be
A thousand Calais burghers on the spree,
So many of them and so like as fleas
You cannot see the Woodleys for the trees.
To you I hand them, with this bunch of keys.