The hot wax drips from the flares On the scrawled pink forms that litter The bench where he sits; the glitter Of stars is framed by the sandbags atop of the dug-out stairs. And the lagging watch-hands creep; And his cloaked mates murmur in sleep,-- Forms he can wake with a kick,-- And he hears, as he plays with the pressel-switch, the strapped receiver click On his ear that listens, listens; And the candle-flicker glistens On the rounded brass of the switch-board where the red wires cluster thick.
Wires from the earth, from the air; Wires that whisper and chatter At night, when the trench-rats patter And nibble among the rations and scuttle back to their lair; Wires that are never at rest,-- For the linesmen tap them and test, And ever they tremble with tone:-- And he knows from a hundred signals the buzzing call of his own, The breaks and the vibrant stresses,-- The Z and the G and the S’s That call his hand to the answering key and his mouth to the microphone.
For always the laid guns fret On the words that his mouth shall utter, When rifle and Maxim stutter And the rockets volley to starward from the spurting parapet; And always his ear must hark To the voices out of the dark,-- For the whisper over the wire, From the bombed and the battered trenches where the wounded moan in the mire,-- For a sign to waken the thunder Which shatters the night in sunder With the flash of the leaping muzzles and the beat of battery-fire.
Ere the last light that leaps the night has hung and shone and died, While yet the breast-high fog of dawn is swathed about the plain, By hedge and track our slaves go back, the waning stars for guide, Eyes of our mouths; the mists have cleared, the guns would speak again!
Faint on the ears that strain to hear, their orders trickle down "Degrees--twelve--left of zero line--corrector one three eight-- Three thousand." ... Shift our trails and lift the muzzles that shall drown The rifle’s idle chatter when our sendings detonate.
Sending or still, these serve our will; the hidden eyes that mark From gutted farm, from laddered tree that scans the furrowed slope, From coigns of slag whose pit-ropes sag on burrowed ways and dark, In open trench where sandbags hold the steady periscope.