The tall pines tower gauntly
Above my bedroom eaves.
With the moon, like a ghost behind
them,
Peering between their leaves.
The air is warm and balmy,
And the hillside bathed in light,
But a restless mood is on me
As I think of another night.
Still more bright was the moonlight,
For the fields were swathed in snow,
And the moon peered down through
pine-trees
On the hard white ground below.
But often to aid the moonbeams
A ‘starlight’ soared, and
fell,
And now and again to southward,
The flash of a bursting shell.
Deep, deep black the shadows
On the hard white surface showed,
Of the tall, steep, wooded hillside
Above where the Ancre flowed
Out from the German trenches
Silently through our own,
And we stood by the bank above it
Leslie and I, alone.
Near us a watchful sentry,
Gazing across the wire,
And three in a tiny dug-out,
Crouched round a brazier fire.
We talked, as we stood together,
As we often before had done,
Of the times we should have together
When at last the war was won!
Much we planned that evening
Of the wonderful days in store,
When trench life should be as a
nightmare,
And an ugly dream the war.
You went old man, before me;
You died as I knew you, game;
And the “wonderful days in
store” now
Could never appear the same.
With the best of pals to share them
What mad, glad days they would be!
But the best of my pals lies buried
In shell-scarred Picardy.
A cloud drifts over the moonface,
And the air has grown more chill;
I turn from the open window
While the shadow climbs the hill,
But my mind still runs on that
evening
When the moon shone through the pines
That grow by the Ancre river,
Behind the British lines;
When Leslie and I together
Stood in the crisp, white snow,
With the dug-out light above us,
And the running stream below;
And spoke of home and dear ones,
And mentioned not the war,
But only the days to follow,
The wonderful days in store.