This is the ballad of Langemarck
A story of glory and might
Of the vast Hun horde, and Canada’s part
In the great, grim fight.
It was April fair on the Flanders Fields
But the dreadest April then
That ever the years, in their fateful flight
Had brought to this world of men.
North and east, a monster wall
The mighty Hun ranks lay.
With fort on fort, and iron-ringed trench
Menacing, grim and gray
And south and west, like a serpent of fire
Serried the British lines.
And in between, the dying and dead
And the stench of blood, and the trampled mud
On the fair, sweet Belgian vines.
And far to the eastward, harnessed and taut
Like a scimitar, shining and keen
Gleaming out of that ominous gloom
Old France’s hosts were seen
When out of the grim Hun lines one night
There rolled a sinister smoke
A strange, weird cloud, like a pale, green shroud
And death lurked in its cloak.
On a fiend-like wind it curled along
Over the brave French ranks
Like a monster tree its vapors spread
In hideous, burning banks
Of poisonous fumes that scorched the night
With their sulphurous demon danks
And men went mad with horror
and fled From that terrible strangling death
That seemed to sear both body and soul
With its baleful, flaming breath.
Till even the little dark men of the south
Who feared neither God nor man
Those fierce, wild fighters of Afric’s steppes
Broke their battalions and ran
Ran as they never had run before
Gasping, and fainting for breath
For they knew ‚twas no human foe that slew
And that hideous smoke meant death
Then red in the reek of that evil cloud
The Hun swept over the plain
And the murderer’s dirk did its monster work
Mid the scythe-like shrapnel rain.
Till it seemed that at last the brute Hun hordes
Had broken that wall of steel
And that soon, through this breach in the freeman’s dyke
His trampling hosts would wheel
And sweep to the south in ravaging might
And Europe’s peoples again
Be trodden under the tyrant’s heel
Like herds, in the Prussian pen.
But in that line on the British right
There massed a corps amain
Of men who hailed from a far west land
Of mountain and forest and plain
Men new to war and its dreadest deeds
But noble and staunch and true
Men of the open, East and West
Brew of old Britain’s brew
These were the men out there that night
When Hell loomed close ahead
Who saw that pitiful, hideous rout
And breathed those gases dread
While some went under and some went mad
But never a man there fled
For the word was „Canada,“ theirs to fight
And keep on fighting still
Britain said, fight, and fight they would
Though the Devil himself in sulphurous mood
Came over that hideous hill
Yea, stubborn, they stood, that hero band
Where no soul hoped to live
For five, ‚gainst eighty, thousand men
Were hopeless odds to give
Yea, fought they on ! ‚Twas Friday eve
When that demon gas drove down
‚Twas Saturday eve that saw them still
Grimly holding their own;
Sunday, Monday, saw them yet
A steadily lessening band
With „no surrender“ in their hearts
But the dream of a far-off land.
Where mother and sister and love would weep
for the hushed heart lying still
But never a thought but to do their part
And work the Empire’s will.
Ringed round, hemmed in, and back to back
They fought there under the dark
And won for Empire, good and Right
At grim, red Langemarck
Wonderful battles have shaken this world
Since the Dawn-God overthrew Dis
Wonderful struggles of right against wrong
Sung in the rhymes of the world’s great song
But never a greater than this.
Bannockburn, Inkerman, Balaclava
Marathon’s god-like stand
But never a more heroic deed
And never a greater warrior breed
In any warman’s land.
This is the ballad of Langemarck
A story of glory and might
Of the vast Hun horde, and Canada’s part
In the great, grim fight.
Text: Wilfred Campbell
(26. – 29. April 1915, über den ersten Giftgas-Einsatz in der Geschichte: Belgien, 1915)