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Pyres in the night, in the night!
In the plain, on the hill.
No volleys for their last rite.

We need our powder — to kill.
High on their golden bed,
Pile up the dead!

Pyres in the night, in the night!
Torches, piercing the gloom!
Look! How the sparks take flight!
Stars, stars, make room!
Smoke, that was bone and blood!
Hark! the deep roar.
It is the souls telling God

The glory of WAR!

WAR AND PEACE

Extract from Epilogue to Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava

ALFRED TENNYSON

I WOULD that wars should cease,
I would the globe from end to end
Might sow and reap in peace,
And some new Spirit o'erbear the old,
Or Trade refrain the Powers
From war with kindly links of gold,
Or Love with wreaths of flowers.
Slav, Teuton, Kelt, I count them all

My friends and brother souls,

With all the peoples, great and small,
That wheel between the poles.
But since our mortal shadow, Ill,

To waste this earth began

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Perchance from some abuse of Will
In worlds before the man

Involving ours-he needs must fight
To make true peace his own,

He needs must combat might with might,
Or Might would rule alone;
And who loves war for war's own sake
Is fool, or crazed, or worse;
But let the patriot-soldier take
His meed of fame in verse;

Nay

tho' that realm were in the wrong For which her warriors bleed,

It still were right to crown with song

The warrior's noble deed.

TRUE PEACE

Extracts from Casa Guidi Windows

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

CHILDREN use the fist

Until they are of age to use the brain;
And so we needed Cæsars to assist
Man's justice, and Napoleons to explain

God's counsel, when a point was nearly missed,

Until our generations should attain

Christ's stature nearer. Not that we, alas,

Attain already; but a single inch

Will raise to look down on the swordsman's pass, As knightly Roland on the coward's flinch;

And, after chloroform and ether-gas,

We find out slowly what the bee and finch

Have ready found, through Nature's lamp in each, How to our races we may justify

Our individual claims and, as we reach

Our own grapes, bend the top vines to supply
The children's uses, — how to fill a breach
With olive-branches, - how to quench a lie
With truth, and smite a foe upon the cheek
With Christ's most conquering kiss. Why, these are
things

Worth a great nation's finding, to prove weak
The "glorious arms" of military kings.

And so with wide embrace, my England, seek To stifle the bad heat and flickerings

Of this world's false and nearly expended fire! Draw palpitating arrows to the wood,

And twang abroad thy high hopes and thy higher
Resolves, from that most virtuous altitude!

Till nations shall unconsciously aspire
By looking up to thee, and learn that good
And glory are not different. Announce law
By freedom; exalt chivalry by peace;

Instruct how clear calm eyes can overawe,
And how pure hands, stretched simply to release
A bond-slave, will not need a sword to draw
To be held dreadful. O my England, crease
Thy purple with no alien agonies,

No struggles toward encroachment, no vile war!
Disband thy captains, change thy victories,
Be henceforth prosperous as the angels are,
Helping, not humbling.

Drums and battle-cries

Go out in music of the morning-star

And soon we shall have thinkers in the place
Of fighters, each found able as a man
To strike electric influence through a race,
Unstayed by city-wall and barbican.

The poet shall look grander in the face
Than even of old (when he of Greece began

To sing "that Achillean wrath which slew So many heroes"), - seeing he shall treat

The deeds of souls heroic toward the true,
The oracles of life, previsions sweet

And awful like divine swans gliding through
White arms of Ledas, which will leave the heat
Of their escaping godship to endue
The human medium with a heavenly flush.

A cry is up in England, which doth ring

The hollow world through, that for ends of trade And virtue and God's better worshiping,

We henceforth should exalt the name of Peace And leave those rusty wars that eat the soul,

Besides their clippings at our golden fleece. I, too, have loved peace, and from bole to bole Of immemorial undeciduous trees

Would write, as lovers use upon a scroll,

The holy name of Peace and set it high

Where none could pluck it down. On trees, I say
Not upon gibbets! With the greenery
Of dewy branches and the flowery May,
Sweet mediation betwixt earth and sky
Providing, for the shepherd's holiday.

Not upon gibbets! though the vulture leaves
The bones to quiet, which he first picked bare.

Not upon dungeons! though the wretch who grieves And groans within, less stirs the outer air

Than any little field-mouse stirs the sheaves.
Not upon chain-bolts! though the slave's despair
Has dulled his helpless miserable brain
And left him blank beneath the freeman's whip
To sing and laugh out idiocies of pain.

Nor yet on starving homes! where many a lip
Has sobbed itself asleep through curses vain.

I love no peace which is not fellowship

And which includes not mercy. I would have Rather the raking of the guns across

The world, and shrieks against Heaven's architrave; Rather the struggle in the slippery fosse

Of dying men and horses, and the wave

Blood-bubbling . . Enough said! - by Christ's own

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And by this faint heart of my womanhood, Such things are better than a Peace that sits Beside a hearth in self-commended mood, And takes no thought how wind and rain by fits Are howling out of doors against the good

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