In Silence Evermore

" Ghosts of War"

Ewart Alan Mackintosh (1893-1917)

When you and I are buried
With grass above our head,
The memory of our fights will stand
Above this bare and tortured land,
We knew ere we were dead.

Though grasses grow on Vimy,
And poppies at Messines,
And in High Wood the children play,
The craters and the graves will stay
To show what things have been.

Though all be quiet in day-time,
The night shall bring a change,
And peasants walking home will see
Shell-torn meadow and riven tree,
And their own fields grown strange.

They shall hear live men crying,
They shall see dead men lie,
Shall hear the rattling Maxims fire,
And see by broken twists of wire
Gold flares light up the sky.

And in their new-built houses
The frightened folk will see
Pale bombers coming down the street, 
And hear the flurry of charging feet,
And the crash of Victory.

This is our Earth baptized
With the red wine of War.
Horror and courage hand in hand
Shall brood upon the stricken land
In silence evermore.

Officer in the Seaforth Highlanders from December 1914. Killed in action on the second day of the Battle of Cambria, November 21st 1917, aged 24.

"if it be life that Waits, I shall live forever unconquered. If death, I shall die at last, strong in my pride and free"

These lines from his poem "A Creed" are used on the Scottish American War Memorial in Princess Street Gardens, Edinburgh.