All night they marched, the infantrymen under pack, <br />But the hands gripping the rifles were naked bone <br />And the hollow pits of the eyes stared, vacant and black, <br />When the moonlight shone. <br /> <br />The gas mask lay like a blot on the empty chest, <br />The slanting helmets were spattered with rust and mold, <br />But they burrowed the hill for the machine-gun nest <br />As they had of old. <br /> <br />And the guns rolled, and the tanks, but there was no sound, <br />Never the gasp or rustle of living men <br />Where the skeletons strung their wire on disputed ground ... <br />I knew them, then. <br /> <br />'It's eighteen years,' I cried. 'You must come no more.' <br />'We know your names. We know that you are the dead. <br />Must you march forever from France and the last, blind war?' <br /> <br />'Fool! From the next!' <br />they said.<br /><br />Stephen Vincent Benet<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/1936/
