Classic Poem

All through the night in silence they come and go,
The Red Cross cars with headlights low,
And maimed humanity on stretchers lain
Glides down the streets of London—while I stand
Watching this slow processional of pain.
All through the night unending flows the stream
Whence now and then a weary, bloodless hand
Answers the greeting of the silent crowd;
A pale and stricken face smiles back again
Upon the kind, dim faces that throng as in a dream.

Over them as they journey, patiently bowed
A nurse keeps watch in fear lest now at last
The fluttering spirit leave the battered cage,
And, eager for eternity, slip past
The guardian tending the poor, broken frame
With its disc and number and stencilled name.
And as I watch, a rebel thought
Stirs in my mind, for strange it seems
That down this highway of pain unending
There flow the streams
Of human traffic homeward brought,
Broken and useless, marred with terrible scars,
Eyeless and limbless and shattered, while under the stars
Flow other streams that, outward wending,
Carry the youth of the nation in splendid vigor—
And those streams flow into these at the touch of a trigger!

Long months of training that splendid humanity needed,
The toil and brain of a nation evolved it, the wealth
Of the wide world's meadows and mines was brought for its use,
And with careful eyes and hands it was weeded and weeded
Until it was virile with courage and perfect health;
And here is the end of it all, and we count the loss
Recording the glory, forgetting this human refuse
Left by extravagant war—borne away in the night
Swiftly and silently. God! here again at a cross
Crucified man in a dark world dies; the sight
Burns to the brain, and I cry, as once One cried—
“My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken me?”—then
I watch with dumb anguish the endless procession of men,
The remnants picked up from the waste in the fields; they who died
Flow no more in the stream, they can rest; and only it matters
That Science should skilfully mend what it skilfully shatters.