gray tweed suit, a very large panama hat, I can see my gnarled
but beautifully groomed hands as they tremblingly pour out the
glass of dry sherry which belongs to every old man’s breakfast.
I cannot think of myself at seventy or eighty--I grow
hysterical with applause--I am lost in a delirium of massive
ebony canes, golden snuff-boxes, and dainty silk hats.
“When we first met over here,” wrote Kilmer’s friend Charles L.
O’Donnell, Chaplain 332d Infantry, in a letter to Thomas Walsh which
should be written into the record, “he was in the personnel department
of his regiment, having had his time of service in the field and done
some particularly good work in the intelligence line. He was then about
to go into the intelligence permanently and so avid of it was he as
to be ready to relinquish his hard-earned sergeant’s chevrons. In the
event, however, that sacrifice was not demanded. After this change in
his work he was much more agreeably placed, in particular he had more
freedom and more time to see his friends. He was worshipped by the men
about him. I have heard them speak with awe of his coolness and his
nerve in scouting patrols in No Man’s Land. As an intelligence man he
made personally a few very valuable discoveries: this was when I was
with him in our comparatively quiet sector. I can only conceive that he
distinguished himself later in the larger opportunities that came his
way.” The letter continues:
We were both in the army but he was also of it. I was amazed
to find him so quickly become a soldier with the soldier’s
point of view. But he had seen so much more than I, even then,
and each day in this war is equivalent to long campaigns of
other times. I felt, and was a rookie beside him. He had got
a perspective on his life at home that made him smile with
indulgent pity on some literary aspects of it. I spoke of what
must have been his earlier views, the good he was doing and the
need of doing it. But he was not ready to relinquish a position
he had bought at the price of suffering, cold, hunger, fatigue,
with the hourly self denials that military discipline means.
Not that he spoke of these things in this way, but I knew they
had gone into the creation of his new stand and I knew in my
heart it was higher ground.
A closer witness is Sergeant-Major Lemist Esler, who served side by
side with Kilmer in the Marne advance. Shortly afterward returned to
the United States for service as an instructor at an army cantonment,
he said in an interview in the _New York Times_: “The front was his
goal and no sooner had the regiment reached France than he made every
possible effort to be transferred.”
He finally had himself moved to the Intelligence Department.
It was in that department that he was elevated to the rank of
Sergeant. I was supply sergeant at the time and Joyce Kilmer
was a perfect trial to me. He would always be doing more than
his orders called for--that is, getting much nearer to the
enemy’s positions than any officer would ever be inclined to
send him. Night after night he would lie out in No Man’s Land,
crawling through barbed wires, in an effort to locate enemy
positions, and enemy guns, and tearing his clothes to shreds.
On the following day he would come to me for a new uniform.
“There was something of what the Scots call ‘fey’ about him as a
soldier,” is the testimony of the chaplain of the 165th Infantry,
Father Duffy. “He was absolutely the coolest and most indifferent man
in the face of danger I have ever seen. It was not for lack of love of
life, for he enjoyed his life as a soldier--his only cross was distance
from home. It was partly from his inborn courage and devotion--he would
not stint his sacrifice--partly his deep and real belief that what God
wills is best.”
Once Marshal Foch’s advance began, Kilmer seems to have been constantly
in the thick of the fighting. In the _New York Evening Sun_ of August
8 a correspondent told how a party composed of Major Donovan, Joyce
Kilmer and John Kayes advanced to the edge of a wood and captured a
German dressed in an American uniform.
“Joyce was one of those soldiers who had a romantic love of death in
battle,” Father Duffy has added, “and it could not have missed him
in time.” No, the stars move in their appointed courses; and there
are certain things written aforetime. While he had life there was a
defiant hope among us who knew his great gift for triumph that somehow
this would see him through, that even over the inevitable he would
prevail. But Destiny would not have been her immemorial self had she
stayed her tragic hand from this shining figure, type and symbol in his
taking of her unscrutable ways with man. And, somehow, in his death his
life was all of a piece, and one cannot but admire the poetic justice
of his end.
Never fear but in the skies
Saints and angels stand
Smiling with their holy eyes
On this new-come band
* * * * *
Your souls shall be where the heroes are
And your memory shine like the morning-star.
Sergeant Kilmer was killed in action near the Ourcq, July 30, 1918.
“He had,” runs the report in _The Stars and Stripes_, the newspaper
of the American Expeditionary Force, “volunteered his services to the
major of the foremost battalion because his own battalion would not be
in the lead that day.” From the report of Sergeant Esler and a letter
(printed in the _New York Times_) to a friend in New York by Alexander
Woollcott, dramatic critic of the _Times_ before his service abroad,
the facts are established.
At the dawn of a misty Sunday, July 28, the 165th had made a gallant
and irresistible charge across the river and up the hill. In the height
of the great five days battle for the mastery of the heights which
followed Kilmer was killed. It so happened that he was close to the
Major when the battalion adjutant fell and, in the emergency of the
battle, without commission or appointment, he was serving as a sort
of aid to the battalion commander. Discovering that the woods ahead
harboured some machine guns, he had reported this fact, and was sent in
the lead of a patrol to establish their exact location. When a couple
of hours later the battalion advanced into the woods to clear the spot
of the enemy, several of Kilmer’s comrades caught sight of him lying,
as if still scouting, with his eyes bent over a little ridge. So like
his living self he was, they called to him, then ran up--to find him
dead with a bullet through his brain. He lies buried, we read, beside
Lieutenant Oliver Ames at the edge of a little copse that is known as
the Wood of the Burned Bridge, so close to the purling Ourcq that,
standing by the graveside, one could throw a pebble into its waters.
Perhaps ten minutes walk to the north lies the half obliterated
village Seringes, captured by American troops the night before Kilmer
was killed. Eloquent of affection in the making of it, the grave is of
course, marked by a wooden cross, on which is written, “Sergeant Joyce
Kilmer.” Then, after the inscription of his company and regiment, is
the line: “Killed in Action--July 30, 1918.”
It is not a rule to bury enlisted men with officers, but Kilmer had won
so much admiration and respect not only from the enlisted men in his
company but also from the officers, that the commander of the regiment
authorised that his grave be dug on the spot and that he be buried next
to the grave of the heroic Lieutenant who had just lost his life.
Sergeant Woollcott was with the regiment in the woods the day they
came out of the line to catch their breaths, and the news of Kilmer’s
death, he says, “greeted me on every turn. The Captain under whom he
had been serving for several months, the Major at whose side he fell,
stray cooks, doughboys, runners--all shook their heads sorrowfully and
talked among themselves of what a good soldier he had been and what an
infinite pity it was that the bullet had had to single him out. And
in such days as these, there are no platitudes of polite regret. When
men, good men and close pals, are falling about you by hundreds, when
every man in the regiment has come out of the fight the poorer for the
loss of not one but many friends, there is no time to say pretty things
about a man just because he exists no longer. Death is too common to
distinguish anyone. So the glowing praise and admiration I heard for
Joyce was real--every word of it.”
It is, I think, fitting to preserve in a form more durable than its
newspaper publication more of this letter. It continues:
I gathered that his stock among men of all ranks had been
climbing steadily from the first days when many of them,
including myself, felt that he was out of his own element in a
rip-roaring regiment. As the regiment’s laureate, they all knew
him and they knew, too, that he was at work on a history of the
regiment. He had become quite an institution, with his arms
full of maps as they used to be full of minor poetry, and his
mouth full of that imperishable pipe.
They all knew his verse. I found any number of men who had
only to fish around in their tattered blouses to bring out the
copy of a poem Kilmer wrote in memory of some of their number
who were killed by a shell in March. You see that there is a
refrain which calls for bugle notes, and I am told that at
the funeral services, where the lines were first read, the
desperately sad notes of “Taps” sounded faintly from a distant
grave when the refrain invoked them. The lines were read by
Joyce’s own beloved Father Duffy, and those who were there
told me the tears streamed down the face of every boy in the
regiment. They just blubbered.
VIII
Indeed, such was the power of his spirit over other men that even now
he has become a legend, his excellence a popular heritage, benefiting
and enriching human life. Writing with the pen of all those who knew
him in his overcoat of glory and debonair hat, his friend Charles
Willis Thompson says: “I had a great affection and a deep admiration
and respect for him, different from that which I had for anybody else I
knew.” And expressing, I think, the heart of innumerable ones who did
not chance his way, Booth Tarkington says: “But I had a sense of him
as of something fine and of fine promise. I haven’t read much that he
wrote; but it was like knowing that there was a good picture somewhere
in a gallery that I hadn’t visited, but might, some day.”
The full beauty of his life is known only to God. As religion was the
first thing in his life let it be the last thing said of him. In one
of his last letters, he wrote to Sister M. Emerentia of St. Joseph’s
College, Toronto, Ontario: “Pray that I may love God more. It seems to
me that if I can learn to love God more passionately, more constantly,
without distractions, that absolutely nothing else can matter. Except
while we are in the trenches I receive Holy Communion every morning,
so it ought to be all the easier for me to attain this object of my
prayers. I got Faith, you know, by praying for it. I hope to get Love
the same way.”
POEMS FROM FRANCE
ROUGE BOUQUET
In a wood they call the Rouge Bouquet
There is a new-made grave to-day,
Built by never a spade nor pick
Yet covered with earth ten metres thick.
There lie many fighting men,
Dead in their youthful prime,
Never to laugh nor love again
Nor taste the Summertime.
For Death came flying through the air
And stopped his flight at the dugout stair,
Touched his prey and left them there,
Clay to clay.
He hid their bodies stealthily
In the soil of the land they fought to free
And fled away.
Now over the grave abrupt and clear
Three volleys ring;
And perhaps their brave young spirits hear
The bugle sing:
“Go to sleep!
Go to sleep!
Slumber well where the shell screamed and fell.
Let your rifles rest on the muddy floor,
You will not need them any more.
Danger’s past;
Now at last,
Go to sleep!”
There is on earth no worthier grave
To hold the bodies of the brave
Than this place of pain and pride
Where they nobly fought and nobly died.
Never fear but in the skies
Saints and angels stand
Smiling with their holy eyes
On this new-come band.
St. Michael’s sword darts through the air
And touches the aureole on his hair
As he sees them stand saluting there,
His stalwart sons;
And Patrick, Brigid, Columkill
Rejoice that in veins of warriors still
The Gael’s blood runs.
And up to Heaven’s doorway floats,
From the wood called Rouge Bouquet,
A delicate cloud of buglenotes
That softly say:
“Farewell!
Farewell!
Comrades true, born anew, peace to you!
Your souls shall be where the heroes are
And your memory shine like the morning-star.
Brave and dear,
Shield us here.
Farewell!”
THE PEACEMAKER
Upon his will he binds a radiant chain,
For Freedom’s sake he is no longer free.
It is his task, the slave of Liberty,
With his own blood to wipe away a stain.
That pain may cease, he yields his flesh to pain.
To banish war, he must a warrior be.
He dwells in Night, eternal Dawn to see,
And gladly dies, abundant life to gain.
What matters Death, if Freedom be not dead?
No flags are fair, if Freedom’s flag be furled.
Who fights for Freedom, goes with joyful tread
To meet the fires of Hell against him hurled,
And has for captain Him whose thorn-wreathed head
Smiles from the Cross upon a conquered world.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE REPRODUCTION OF AN AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT OF THE
LAST POEM WRITTEN BY JOYCE KILMER]
PRAYER OF A SOLDIER IN FRANCE
My shoulders ache beneath my pack
(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back).
I march with feet that burn and smart
(Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart).
Men shout at me who may not speak
(They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek).
I may not lift a hand to clear
My eyes of salty drops that sear.
(Then shall my fickle soul forget
Thy Agony of Bloody Sweat?)
My rifle hand is stiff and numb
(From Thy pierced palm red rivers come).
Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me
Than all the hosts of land and sea.
So let me render back again
This millionth of Thy gift. Amen.
WHEN THE SIXTY-NINTH COMES BACK
The Sixty-ninth is on its way--France heard it long ago,
And the Germans know we’re coming, to give them blow for blow.
We’ve taken on the contract, and when the job is through
We’ll let them hear a Yankee cheer and an Irish ballad too.
The Harp that once through Tara’s Halls shall fill the air with song,
And the Shamrock be cheered as the port is neared by our triumphant
throng.
With the Potsdam Palace on a truck and the Kaiser in a sack,
New York will be seen one Irish green when the Sixty-ninth comes back.
We brought back from the Border our Flag--’twas never lost;
We left behind the land we love, the stormy sea we crossed.
We heard the cry of Belgium, and France the free and fair,
For where there’s work for fighting-men, the Sixty-ninth is there.
The Harp that once through Tara’s Halls shall fill the air with song,
And the Shamrock be cheered as the port is neared by our triumphant
throng.
With the Potsdam Palace on a truck and the Kaiser in a sack,
New York will be seen one Irish green when the Sixty-ninth comes back.
The men who fought at Marye’s Heights will aid us from the sky,
They showed the world at Fredericksburg how Irish soldiers die.
At Blackburn Ford they think of us, Atlanta and Bull Run;
There are many silver rings on the old flagstaff but there’s room for
another one.
The Harp that once through Tara’s Halls shall fill the air with song,
And the Shamrock be cheered as the port is neared by our triumphant
throng.
With the Potsdam Palace on a truck and the Kaiser in a sack,
New York will be seen one Irish green when the Sixty-ninth comes back.
God rest our valiant leaders dead, whom we cannot forget;
They’ll see the Fighting Irish are the Fighting Irish yet.
While Ryan, Roe, and Corcoran on History’s pages shine,
A wreath of laurel and shamrock waits the head of Colonel Hine.
The Harp that once through Tara’s Halls shall fill the air with song,
And the Shamrock be cheered as the port is neared by our triumphant
throng.
With the Potsdam Palace on a truck and the Kaiser in a sack,
New York will be seen one Irish green when the Sixty-ninth comes back.
MIRAGE DU CANTONMENT
Many laughing ladies, leisurely and wise,
Low rich voice, delicate gay cries,
Tea in fragile china cups, ices, macaroons,
Sheraton and Heppelwhite and old thin spoons,
Rather dim paintings on very high walls,
Windows showing lawns whereon the sunlight falls,
Pink and silver gardens and broad kind trees,
And fountains scattering rainbows at the whim of a breeze,
Fragrance, mirth and gentleness, a Summer day
In a world that has forgotten everything but play.
POEMS AT HOME
WARTIME CHRISTMAS
Led by a star, a golden star,
The youngest star, an olden star,
Here the kings and the shepherds are,
Akneeling on the ground.
What did they come to the inn to see?
God in the Highest, and this is He,
A baby asleep on His mother’s knee
And with her kisses crowned.
Now is the earth a dreary place,
A troubled place, a weary place.
Peace has hidden her lovely face
And turned in tears away.
Yet the sun, through the war-cloud, sees
Babies asleep on their mother’s knees.
While there are love and home--and these--
There shall be Christmas Day.
MAIN STREET
(For S. M. L.)
I like to look at the blossomy track of the moon upon the sea,
But it isn’t half so fine a sight as Main Street used to be
When it all was covered over with a couple of feet of snow,
And over the crisp and radiant road the ringing sleighs would go.
Now, Main Street bordered with autumn leaves, it was a pleasant thing,
And its gutters were gay with dandelions early in the Spring;
I like to think of it white with frost or dusty in the heat,
Because I think it is humaner than any other street.
A city street that is busy and wide is ground by a thousand wheels,
And a burden of traffic on its breast is all it ever feels:
It is dully conscious of weight and speed and of work that never ends,
But it cannot be human like Main Street, and recognise its friends.
There were only about a hundred teams on Main Street in a day,
And twenty or thirty people, I guess, and some children out to play.
And there wasn’t a wagon or buggy, or a man or a girl or a boy
That Main Street didn’t remember, and somehow seem to enjoy.
The truck and the motor and trolley car and the elevated train
They make the weary city street reverberate with pain:
But there is yet an echo left deep down within my heart
Of the music the Main Street cobblestones made beneath a butcher’s cart.
God be thanked for the Milky Way that runs across the sky,
That’s the path that my feet would tread whenever I have to die.
Some folks call it a Silver Sword, and some a Pearly Crown,
But the only thing I think it is, is Main Street, Heaventown.
ROOFS
(For Amelia Josephine Burr)
The road is wide and the stars are out and the breath of the night is
sweet,
And this is the time when wanderlust should seize upon my feet.
But I’m glad to turn from the open road and the starlight on my face,
And to leave the splendour of out-of-doors for a human dwelling place.
I never have seen a vagabond who really liked to roam
All up and down the streets of the world and not to have a home:
The tramp who slept in your barn last night and left at break of day
Will wander only until he finds another place to stay.
A gypsy-man will sleep in his cart with canvas overhead;
Or else he’ll go into his tent when it is time for bed.
He’ll sit on the grass and take his ease so long as the sun is high,
But when it is dark he wants a roof to keep away the sky.
If you call a gypsy a vagabond, I think you do him wrong,
For he never goes a-travelling but he takes his home along.
And the only reason a road is good, as every wanderer knows,
Is just because of the homes, the homes, the homes to which it goes.
They say that life is a highway and its milestones are the years,
And now and then there’s a toll-gate where you buy your way with tears.
It’s a rough road and a steep road and it stretches broad and far,
But at last it leads to a golden Town where golden Houses are.
THE SNOWMAN IN THE YARD
(For Thomas Augustine Daly)
The Judge’s house has a splendid porch, with pillars and steps of stone,
And the Judge has a lovely flowering hedge that came from across the
seas;
In the Hales’ garage you could put my house and everything I own,
And the Hales have a lawn like an emerald and a row of poplar trees.
Now I have only a little house, and only a little lot,
And only a few square yards of lawn, with dandelions starred;
But when Winter comes, I have something there that the Judge and the
Hales have not,
And it’s better worth having than all their wealth--it’s a snowman in
the yard.
The Judge’s money brings architects to make his mansion fair;
The Hales have seven gardeners to make their roses grow;
The Judge can get his trees from Spain and France and everywhere,
And raise his orchids under glass in the midst of all the snow.
But I have something no architect or gardener ever made,
A thing that is shaped by the busy touch of little mittened hands:
And the Judge would give up his lonely estate, where the level snow is
laid
For the tiny house with the trampled yard, the yard where the snowman
stands.
They say that after Adam and Eve were driven away in tears
To toil and suffer their life-time through, because of the sin they
sinned,
The Lord made Winter to punish them for half their exiled years,
To chill their blood with the snow, and pierce their flesh with the icy
wind.
But we who inherit the primal curse, and labour for our bread,
Have yet, thank God, the gift of Home, though Eden’s gate is barred:
And through the Winter’s crystal veil, Love’s roses blossom red,
For him who lives in a house that has a snowman in the yard.
A BLUE VALENTINE
(For Aline)
Monsignore,
Right Reverend Bishop Valentinus,
Sometime of Interamna, which is called Ferni,
Now of the delightful Court of Heaven,
I respectfully salute you,
I genuflect
And I kiss your episcopal ring.
It is not, Monsignore,
The fragrant memory of your holy life,
Nor that of your shining and joyous martyrdom,
Which causes me now to address you.
But since this is your august festival, Monsignore,
It seems appropriate to me to state
According to a venerable and agreeable custom,
That I love a beautiful lady.
Her eyes, Monsignore,
Are so blue that they put lovely little blue reflections
On everything that she looks at,
Such as a wall
Or the moon
Or my heart.
It is like the light coming through blue stained glass,
Yet not quite like it,
For the blueness is not transparent,
Only translucent.
Her soul’s light shines through,
But her soul cannot be seen.
It is something elusive, whimsical, tender, wanton, infantile, wise
And noble.
She wears, Monsignore, a blue garment,
Made in the manner of the Japanese.
It is very blue--
I think that her eyes have made it more blue,
Sweetly staining it
As the pressure of her body has graciously given it form.
Loving her, Monsignore,
I love all her attributes;
But I believe
That even if I did not love her
I would love the blueness of her eyes,
And her blue garment, made in the manner of the Japanese.
Monsignore,
I have never before troubled you with a request.
The saints whose ears I chiefly worry with my pleas are the most
exquisite and maternal Brigid,
Gallant Saint Stephen, who puts fire in my blood,
And your brother bishop, my patron,
The generous and jovial Saint Nicholas of Bari.
But, of your courtesy, Monsignore,
Do me this favour:
When you this morning make your way
To the Ivory Throne that bursts into bloom with roses because of her who
sits upon it,
When you come to pay your devoir to Our Lady,
I beg you, say to her:
“Madame, a poor poet, one of your singing servants yet on earth,
Has asked me to say that at this moment he is especially grateful to you
For wearing a blue gown.”
HOUSES
(For Aline)
When you shall die and to the sky
Serenely, delicately go,
Saint Peter, when he sees you there,
Will clash his keys and say:
“Now talk to her, Sir Christopher!
And hurry, Michelangelo!
She wants to play at building,
And you’ve got to help her play!”
Every architect will help erect
A palace on a lawn of cloud,
With rainbow beams and a sunset roof,
And a level star-tiled floor;
And at your will you may use the skill
Of this gay angelic crowd,
When a house is made you will throw it down,
And they’ll build you twenty more.
For Christopher Wren and these other men
Who used to build on earth
Will love to go to work again
If they may work for you.
“This porch,” you’ll say, “should go this way!”
And they’ll work for all they’re worth,
And they’ll come to your palace every morning,
And ask you what to do.
And when night comes down on Heaven-town
(If there should be night up there)
You will choose the house you like the best
Of all that you can see:
And its walls will glow as you drowsily go
To the bed up the golden stair,
And I hope you’ll be gentle enough to keep
A room in your house for me.