Page:Armistice Day.djvu/145

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
 
PEACE AT MORNING
123

XV

In a moated castle in Holland sits a man with a shrunken arm;
He is smoking Turkish cigarettes and covering pages of foolscap with explanations of his innocence in the matter of the Blood-Storm—
There is a wall about him as of bodies heaped one upon another; and he walks in a fog of faces.
The eyes of the dead are on him, so he is never alone.
He sits at his endless Protest, crying his case into the teeth of the silence, and wondering whether he was an instrument of divinity after all....


XVI

Out of Russia, where the feet of Christ are bleeding on the snows,
Stalks a new phantom, wearing a coat of rags—
A huge and haggard figure, gaunt of visage, pale with hunger,

Whom high oppression had conceived out of the womb of Want when it was still the abominable custom of these two to lie together—