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EYES IN THE AIR

Our guns are a league behind us, our target a mile below,

And there's never a cloud to blind us from the haunts of

our lurking foe--

Sunk pit whence his shrapnel tore us, support-trench crest-concealed,

As clear as the charts before us, his ramparts lie revealed.

His panicked watchers spy us, a droning threat in the void;

Their whistling shells outfly us--puff upon puff, deployed

Across the green beneath us, across the flanking grey,

In fume and fire to sheathe us and balk us of our prey.

Below, beyond, above her,

Their iron web is spun!

Flicked but unsnared we hover,

Edged planes against the sun:

Eyes in the air above his lair,

The hawks that guide the gun!

No word from earth may reach us save, white against the ground,

The strips outspread to teach us whose ears are deaf to sound:

But down the winds that sear us, athwart our engine's shriek,

We send--and know they hear us, the ranging guns we speak.

Our visored eyeballs show us their answering pennant, broke

Eight thousand feet below us, a whirl of flame-stabbed smoke--

The burst that hangs to guide us, while numbed gloved fingers tap

From wireless key beside us the circles of the map.

Line--target--short or over--

Comes, plain as clock-hands run,

Word from the birds that hover,

Unblinded, tail to sun--

Word out of air to range them fair,

From hawks that guide the gun!

Your flying shells have failed you, your landward guns are dumb:

Since earth hath naught availed you, these skies be open! Come,

Where, wild to meet and mate you, flame in their beaks for breath,

Black doves! the white hawks wait you on the wind-tossed

boughs of death.

These boughs be cold without you, our hearts are hot for this,

Our wings shall beat about you, our scorching breath shall kiss:

Till, fraught with that we gave you, fulfilled of our desire,

You bank,--too late to save you from biting beaks of fire,--

Turn sideways from your lover,

Shudder and swerve and run,

Tilt; stagger; and plunge over

Ablaze against the sun,--

Doves dead in air, who clomb to dare

The hawks that guide the gun!

SIGNALS

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