The Silk-Hat Soldier

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Title: The Silk-Hat Soldier
And Other Poems in War Time
Author: Richard le Gallienne
Release Date: September 19, 2006 [EBook #19313]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
0. START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
SILK-HAT SOLDIER ***
Produced by Jason Isbell, Daniel Griffith and the Online
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Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
THE WORKS OF RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
Robert Louis Stevenson: An Elegy, and Other Poems, Mainly Personal.
English Poems. Revised.
Rudyard Kipling: A Criticism.
George Meredith: Some Characteristics.
With a bibliography (much
enlarged) by John Lane.

The Quest of the Golden Girl: A Romance.
The Romance of Zion Chapel.
The Worshipper of the Image: A Tragic Fairy Tale.
Sleeping Beauty and Other Prose Fancies.
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
A Paraphrase from Several Literary
Translations.
New edition with fifty additional quatrains.
With
cover design by Will Bradley.
Retrospective Reviews: A Literary Log.
(New edition.) 2 vols.
Prose Fancies. First series.
With portrait of the author by Wilson
Steer.
Prose Fancies. Second series.
Travels in England. New edition.
New Poems.
Attitudes and Avowals. With Some Retrospective Reviews.
The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems.
THE SILK-HAT SOLDIER
AND OTHER POEMS IN WAR TIME
BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
NEW YORK--JOHN LANE COMPANY
LONDON--JOHN
LANE--THE BODLEY HEAD
MCMXV
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
JOHN LANE COMPANY

Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Co.
New York
To His Majesty
ALBERT I.
King of the Belgians
THE HEROIC CAPTAIN OF AN HEROIC PEOPLE
CONTENTS
PAGE
To Belgium 9
The Silk-Hat Soldier 11
The Cry of the Little Peoples 15
The Illusion of War 20
Christmas in War-time 22
"Soldier Going to the War" 29
The Rainbow 30
TO BELGIUM
Our tears, our songs, our laurels--what are these
To thee in thy
Gethsemane of loss,
Stretched in thine unimagined agonies
On
Hell's last engine of the Iron Cross.
For such a world as this that thou shouldst die
Is price too vast--yet,
Belgium, hadst thou sold
Thyself, O then had fled from out the earth

Honour for ever, and left only Gold.

Nor diest thou--for soon shalt thou awake,
And, lifted high on our
victorious shields,
Watch the new sunrise driving for your sons
The
hated German shadow from your fields.
"British colonists resident in London volunteer, and
not even silk hats
are doffed before training begins"
--New York Times
THE SILK-HAT SOLDIER
I saw him in a picture, and I felt I'd like to cry--
He stood in line,
The man "for mine,"
A tall silk-hatted "guy"--
Right on the call,
Silk hat and all,
He'd hurried to the cry--
For he
loves England well enough for England to die.
I've seen King Harry's helmet in the Abbey hanging high--
The one he wore
At Agincourt;
But braver to my eye
That city toff
Too keen to doff
His stove-pipe--bless him--why?

For he loves England well enough for England to die.
And other fellows in that line had come too on the fly,
Their joys and toys,
Brave English boys,
For good and all put by;
O you brave best,
Teach all the rest
How pure the heart and high

When one loves England well enough for England to die.
One threw his cricket-bat aside, one left the ink to dry;
All peace and play
He's put away,
And bid his love good-bye--
O mother mine!
O sweetheart mine!
No man of yours am I--
If I
love not England well enough for England to die.

I guess it strikes a chill somewhere, the bravest won't deny,
All that you love,
Away to shove,
And set your teeth to die;
But better dead,
When all is said,
Than lapped in peace to lie--
If
we love not England well enough for England to die.
THE CRY OF THE LITTLE PEOPLES
The Cry of the Little Peoples went up to God in vain;
The Czech and
the Pole, and the Finn, and the Schleswig Dane:
We ask but a little portion of the green, ambitious earth; Only to sow
and sing and reap in the land of our birth.
We ask not coaling stations, nor ports in the China seas, We leave to
the big child-nations such rivalries as these.
We have learned the lesson of Time, and we know three things of
worth; Only to sow and sing and reap in the land of our birth.
O leave us little margins, waste ends of land and sea,
A little grass,
and a hill or two, and a shadowing tree;
O leave us our little rivers that sweetly catch the sky,
To drive our
mills, and to carry our wood, and to ripple by.
Once long ago, as you, with hollow pursuit of fame,
We filled all the
shaking world with the sound of our