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- This is the ballad of Langemarck,
- A story of glory and might;
- Of the vast Hun horde, and Canada's part
- In the great grim fight.
- It was April fair on the Flanders fields,
- But the dreadest April then
- That ever the years, in their fateful flight,
- Had brought to this world of men.
- North and east, a monster wall,
- The mighty Hun ranks lay,
- With fort on fort, and iron-ringed trench,
- Menacing, grim and gray.
- And south and west, like a serpent of fire,
- Serried the British lines.
- And in between, the dying and dead,
- And the stench of blood, and the trampled mud,
- On the fair, sweet Belgian vines.
- And far to the eastward, harnessed and taut,
- Like a scimitar, shining and keen,
- Gleaming out of that ominous gloom,
- Old France's hosts were seen.
- When out of the grim Hun lines one night,
- There rolled a sinister smoke; --
- A strange, weird cloud, like a pale, green shroud,
- And death lurked in its cloak.
- On a fiend-like wind it curled along
- Over the brave French ranks,
- Like a monster tree its vapour spread,
- In hideous, burning banks
- Of poisonous fumes that scorched the night
- With their sulphurous demon danks.
- And men went mad with horror, and fled
- From that terrible, strangling death,
- That seemed to sear both body and soul
- With its baleful, flaming breath.
- Till even the little dark men of the south,
- Who feared neither God nor man,
- Those fierce, wild fighters of Afric's steppes,
- Broke their battalions and run: --
- Ran as they never had run before
- Gasping, and faint for breath;
- For they knew 'twas no human foe that slew;
- And that hideous smoke meant death.
- Then red in the reek of that evil cloud,
- The Huns swept over the plain;
- And the murderer's dirk did its monster work,
- 'Mid the scythe-like shrapnel rain.
- Till it seemed that at last the brute Hun hordes
- Had broken that wall of steel;
- And that soon, through this breach in the freeman's dyke,
- His trampling hosts would wheel; --
- And sweep to the south in ravaging might,
- And Europe's peoples again
- Be trodden under the tyrant's heel,
- Like herds, in the Prussian pen.
- But in that line on the British right,
- There massed a corps amain,
- Of men who hailed from a far west land
- Of mountain and forest and plain;
- Men new to war and its dreadest deeds,
- But noble and staunch and true;
- Men of the open, East and West,
- Brew of old Britain's brew.
- These were the men out there that night,
- When Hell loomed close ahead;
- Who saw that pitiful, hideous rout,
- And breathed those gases dread;
- While some went under and some went mad;
- But never a man there fled.
- For the word was "Canada," theirs to fight,
- And keep on fighting still; --
- Britain said, fight, and fight they would,
- Though the Devil himself in sulphurous mood
- Came over that hideous hill.
- Yea, stubborn, they stood, that hero band,
- Where no soul hoped to live;
- For five, 'gainst eighty thousand men,
- Were hopeless odds to give.
- Yea, fought they on! 'Twas Friday eve,
- When the demon gas drove down;
- 'Twas Saturday eve that saw them still
- Grimly holding their own;
- Sunday, Monday, saw them yet,
- A steadily lessening band,
- With "no surrender" in their hearts,
- But the dream of a far-off land,
- Where mother and sister and love would weep
- For the hushed heart lying still; --
- But never a thought but to do their part,
- And work the Empire's will.
- Ringed round, hemmed in, and back to back,
- They fought there under the dark,
- And won for Empire, God and Right,
- At grim, red Langemarck.
- Wonderful battles have shaken this world,
- Since the Dawn-God overthrew Dis;
- Wonderful struggles of right against wrong,
- Sung in the rhymes of the world's great song,
- But never a greater than this.
- Bannockburn, Inkerman, Balaclava,
- Marathon's godlike stand;
- But never a more heroic deed,
- And never a greater warrior breed,
- In any war-man's land.
- This is the ballad of Langemarck,
- A story of glory and might;
- Of the vast Hun horde, and Canada's part
- In the great, grim fight.
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