Then the joy that spurs the warrior’s heart
  To the last thundering gallop and sheer leap
Came on the men of the Guides:  they flung apart
  The doors not all their valour could longer keep;
  They dressed their slender line; they breathed deep,
And with never a foot lagging or head bent
To the clash and clamour and dust of death they went.

The Gay Gordons

(Dargai, October 20, 1897)

Whos for the Gathering, who’s for the Fair? 
    (Gay goes the Gordon to a fight)
The bravest of the brave are at deadlock there,
    (Highlanders! march! by the right!)
There are bullets by the hundred buzzing in the air,
There are bonny lads lying on the hillside bare;
But the Gordons know what the Gordons dare
  When they hear the pipers playing!

The happiest English heart today
    (Gay goes the Gordon to a fight)
Is the heart of the Colonel, hide it as he may;
    (Steady there! steady on the right!)
He sees his work and he sees his way,
He knows his time and the word to say,
And he’s thinking of the tune that the Gordons play
  When he sets the pipers playing.

Rising, roaring, rushing like the tide,
    (Gay goes the Gordon to a fight)
They’re up through the fire-zone, not be be denied;
    (Bayonets! and charge! by the right!)
Thirty bullets straight where the rest went wide,
And thirty lads are lying on the bare hillside;
But they passed in the hour of the Gordons’ pride,
  To the skirl of the pipers’ playing.

He Fell Among Thieves

“Ye have robbed,” said he, “ye have slaughtered and made an end,
  Take your ill-got plunder, and bury the dead: 
What will ye more of your guest and sometime friend?”
  “Blood for our blood,” they said.

He laughed:  “If one may settle the score for five,
  I am ready; but let the reckoning stand til day: 
I have loved the sunlight as dearly as any alive.” 
  “You shall die at dawn,” said they.

He flung his empty revolver down the slope,
  He climbed alone to the Eastward edge of the trees;
All night long in a dream untroubled of hope
  He brooded, clasping his knees.

He did not hear the monotonous roar that fills
  The ravine where the Yassin river sullenly flows;
He did not see the starlight on the Laspur hills,
  Or the far Afghan snows.

He saw the April noon on his books aglow,
  The wistaria trailing in at the window wide;
He heard his father’s voice from the terrace below
  Calling him down to ride.

He saw the gray little church across the park,
  The mounds that hid the loved and honoured dead;
The Norman arch, the chancel softly dark,
  The brasses black and red.

He saw the School Close, sunny and green,
  The runner beside him, the stand by the parapet wall,
The distant tape, and the crowd roaring between,
  His own name over all.