Artists reared it in courtly ages;
WATTEAU and FRAGONARD limned its walls;
Powdered lackeys and negro pages
Served the great in its shining halls;
Minstrels played, in its salons, stately
Minuets for a jewelled king,
And radiant gallants bowed sedately
To lovely Pompadours curtseying.
Pigeons cooed in its dovecots shady;
Down in the rose-walk fountains played;
Many a lovelorn lord and lady
Here in the moonlight sighed and strayed;
Here was beauty and love and laughter,
Splendour and eminence bravely won;
But now two walls and a blackened rafter
Grimly tell the tale of the Hun.
My lady's chamber is dust and ashes;
The painted salons are charred with fire;
The dovecot pitted with shrapnel splashes,
The park a tangle of trench and wire;
Shell-holes yawn in the ferns and mosses;
Stripped and torn is the avenue;
Down in the rose-walk humble crosses
Grow where my lady's roses grew.
Yet in the haunted midnight hours,
When star-shells droop through the shattered trees,
Steal they back to their ancient bowers,
Beau Brocade and his Belle Marquise?
Greatly loving and greatly daring--
Fancy, perhaps, but the fancy grips,
_For a junior subaltern woke up swearing
That a gracious lady had kissed his lips._
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