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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 L, Rouen, Crcy,
  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_, _Pathtiques_,
  To hymn their Iliad voyagings.






[End of They are Returning, by E. J. Pratt]
