* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook * This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding. This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE. Title: They are Returning Author: Pratt, E. J. [Edwin John Dove] (1882-1964) Date of first publication: 1945 Edition used as base for this ebook: Toronto: Macmillan, 1945 [first edition] Date first posted: 10 March 2016 Date last updated: 10 March 2016 Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1306 This ebook was produced by Al Haines PUBLISHER'S NOTE Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_. As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout. THEY ARE RETURNING E. J. PRATT TORONTO THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED 1945 All rights reserved--no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine or newspaper. PRINTED IN CANADA GILCHRIST-WRIGHT LIMITED TORONTO THEY ARE RETURNING _Cease Fire!_ Again the order Has closed the campaigns of the Western world. The bugles are silent: the flags are furled. Only the requiems remain to be sung And the knells rung Over the dust of Europe. And with the order Ceased, too, those all but animate forms, Mechanic myths of man's creative act Transfigured into fact, Endowed with perfect suicidal skill, With power to fight unbleeding, yet to kill-- The robots that had changed tail-winds To head-on storms, Had coasted past the Spitfires And given the speed of sound a run-- These now to the last one Have fallen from their lightning thoroughfares, Or else spoored by the Lancasters Were caught and smoked out from their Calais lairs. Ceased, too, the official bulletin, "With deep regrets" sent to the next-of-kin, The papers' daily pyramid of losses, The mass production of the wooden crosses-- The story of the unreturning. These put their bodies Between us and the flaming skies, Between us and a night as foul As ever fell on European eyes, And more incredible Than any picture lore of fables; Between us and a fear that tore apart The deepest instincts of the family ties, The Nazi deformation of the heart, The Quisling poison at the household tables, The son's metallic stare, the start At the troopers' rap upon the door, The bullet and the blood upon the floor, The camps, the pestilential breath That caught the thousands in the vans of death; Between us and the regimental boot Upon our altars, the enforced salute, The lie at the lips, the threat Of the unknown that kills the mind Before the body husk, the silhouette Of helmets on the window-blind, The laboratory shadow which combined Cunning of science, terror of the brute, And running back along the human tree, Could come up stemming from a simian root To learn how to congeal an infamy Like Buchenwald or Maidanek or Lidice-- Between us and all that they placed their whole Economy of body and of soul. We have known blood to run Like this before--blood of father, blood of son, And we had read That out of blood from hands and feet and side A faith once came to birth And found its test of worth, Or were we so misled And so unprofited, That in the self-same stream the faith has died, Lost in the periodic ebb and flow That left an aftermath upon the earth Of terror, greed and woe? And we have seen the way the sons of men Have passed through Moloch but to pass again Through Mammon--yet once more Out of the crumpled gunpits of a War, Faced with the sight of an entire Continent afire, We dare in this last phase of the eclipse To place the morning trumpets to our lips. _They are returning._ Was it five years ago or yesterday They spent their leisured hours at play, Were walking through the turnstiles To watch their heroes of the diamond smash Their homers, or a bantam flash Hang his opponent on the ropes? The world Was focused in the hit, the plate, the curled Pitch, in the yards won in the scrimmage, in the sight Of a puck flying through the posts. Then overnight The game was on another field With sacrificial gain and yield, The hedgerow inches grilling into yards Against the wire and the shrapnel shards. Five years ago, an age, Or yesterday, That with heads strained, Ears cocked, eyes on the sky, These boys were being trained To listen to the hum, identify By cut of wing, tail, fuselage, The models of the aeroplanes? So soon they found themselves with wings, And mingling in free comradeship with star And cloud and eagles, while far Below in microscopic spaces Were creeping things Like slugs and motor-cars and trains. So short a time, That women too should take their places, Behind the steering wheel, In front of the micrometer Spinning threads as fine as gossamer For the rifle mountings, Guiding turret lathes, or welding plates, Spark-testing steel, Assembling fuses, wires in cables, grinding Lenses and prisms, or finding The death-range near the Lines in Italy Where, standing by a soldier's bed, They could direct the pale-gold Drip of the plasma or the _mould_ Into a median vein and see It re-enact The Resurrection from the Dead. What brought the change? The rumble of the panzers into Poland, The stories of the camps, the latest tale Of the Gestapo, the _Athenia_, Rotterdam, That ominous thrust of the arrow-diagram Upon the maps, Dunkirk, and the fall Of Paris, following the ram Of the tanks against the civilian jam Upon the roads--(Of what avail The Lines against those fleet Arrows now east and south Towards Yugo-Slavia, Greece and Crete?) Was it but one of these, or all, The quick contagion of a bugle call, The highest note in the scale Of Churchill's voice--"We shall not fail"? Or was it something more That made those children of the first World War, Scarce come to their majority, Those heirs of Vimy and of Passchendaele, Gather around to read a legacy And guard it to the last terms of the will, Almost, it seemed to us, before Their fathers' blood was dry upon the codicil? And so they went, those boys turned into men. One who had read of ancient Northern France, And sketched the district known as Normandy, Knew Carentan, Saint Lô, Rouen, Crécy, As points within a pageant of Romance, Of Anglo-Gallic victory and defeat, Where longbows with their grey-goose feathers beat The crossbows--who knew Bayeux And its two hundred feet of tapestry Picturing the record of the Conqueror-- Could he have guessed the fateful chance That led his steps into an Abbey nave Where, with survivors of a battered corps, He would, with dust of Caen upon his tunic, Survey the Norman's grave? One who had followed in a Latin book The story of the Second Punic War, Of Hannibal's descent, and took As casual names--the Arno, Upper Tiber, Arezzo and Cassino,-- Could he, Foretell that in two years or three He would be fighting On the Tyrrhenian shore, Or dying at the beach of Trasimeno? And those whose summer hands had known Only the oars and paddles on a bay, The rigging of a catboat or a smack, Turned into leading seamen, Stemming the winter in Atlantic waters On the _Swansea_ or the _Chilliwack_, Or, in the _Skeena-Athabascan_ way, Putting the hulls as buffers Between the convoy and the pack. And to those youngsters out of school Came honours higher Than that to which ambition could aspire, Ribbons and bars and crosses, In that proud hour of their investiture, For diving with their Typhoon rocket-fire Upon the panthers at Esquay, Pinpointing targets on the Ruhr, For chasing Messerschmitts, Conceding odds of three to one, Under the Malta sun, Or driving through the North Sea winds to seal The exits to the artery of Kiel. They have met dangers that outfaced Homeric myths, gone journeys that outpaced The farthest-leagued Ulyssean strides. For they have lodged In foreign lands with winds and tides And mountain pines; Set up their tents under the Apennines; Or, clothed in ice, were tossed In the storm pockets of the Himalayas; Climbed over Burma; crossed The Irrawady; entered Kiska; took the raw North air on the deck of the _Iroquois_; Exchanged the _Scharnhorst's_ greetings; saw Murmansk; explored the reaches Of Scandinavian capes and Arctic seas; Came back; chugged through the Channel fogs to draw Around Gibraltar to Calabrian beaches Fresh lines upon the world's geographies. _They are returning._ No dole or bread line must await those hands That once had clawed at the Ortona sands, Or held that five-day bridgehead at the Scheldt, Those feet that raced to join The _Haida_ and _Assiniboine_. The pilots of the aeroplanes, Who made the sky their thoroughfare, Must breathe on earth an unpolluted air And take the sunlight through the slumless panes, Their young hearts washed by a great cause Acclaimed at the world's barricades. Those craftsmen of the arts of flying, Those foremen of the modes of dying-- They shall come back to new crusades, To set the red pine to the whirring blades Along the sky lanes for the marts of peace, To take the produce of their toil, to say To the machine, the drills and cranes, The dynamos and lathes--_Obey!_. To claim the right to reap the autumn stores And the shared yield of the earth's veins, Masters, not servants, of pre-Cambrian ores, To own their birthright as the free Citizens of earth and sky and sea. _They are returning_ To write a chapter on the history of beaches. To trace a line of Trojan spray Against the dawn of a Norman day; To draw the eyes that never looked on death, The frigid muscles and the cancelled breath; To coin the verb and seize the noun For the first stare as the bow doors opened And the ramp went down. To sing the songs for those whose names Were left unread In the citations of the hour-- The thousands of unsung amorphous dead, The sailors of the sweeper-craft, The ratings of the foc's'les, The stokers in the holds for whom no bells Tolled when they left their unberibboned toil Only to try their chances on a raft, Or plunge beneath the tanker's blazing oil. To squeeze the crimson from a tube And mix it with a natural green, To show how mortars, rockets, tanks, Could splash the khaki of the ranks-- To paint that scene On a broken wave of live June corn Somewhere within the fields between The Odon and the Orne. To find the way the colour drains Out of the paratroopers' veins, The moment at the dropping zone; to catch The flicker of the pulses at the hatch Above a rendezvous that lay Behind the German rim at Carpiquet. To write a ballad on a crew of eight In a patrolling Canso flying-boat, Measure the stresses to relate The curves, the dive, the way they came, Passed through the storm of the U-boat flak, With starboard engine dead and wings aflame, And then came back To sink her; tell the hours of drift and wait Of the rubber dinghy with her double freight. They shall come back to build in stubborn rhyme, Out of Laurentian rock and Norman lime, Memorial towers Canadian Across a continental span; To mix a mortar that shall never crumble Before the blasts of war or wear of time. To native tunes They shall arrange the old-world runes, Fingering those names keyed to the sound of shells Above the Benedictine cells-- Foggia, Adriatic, and Ancona, Ceprano, Florence, Capua, Ortona-- And make them ring new notes in Western steeples. And from those tonic syllables, Dieppe, Authie, Falaise, and Carpiquet, Kleve, Emmerich, Antwerp and Groningen, They shall learn how to wind Their souls into the reeds and strings To reach their own _Eroicas_, and find The _Chorals_, _Passions_, _Pathétiques_, To hymn their Iliad voyagings. [End of They are Returning, by E. J. Pratt]