text: Green miles of leafy peace are spread
  Over these ranks, unseen and serried;
  Screening the trenches with their dead
  And living men already buried.
  The rains beat down, the torrents flow
  Into each cold and huddling cave;
  And over them the beet-fields grow,
  A fortress gentle as a grave.
  
  Morose, impatient, sick at heart,
  With rasping nerves and twitching muscles,
  We cannot even sleep; we start
  With every twig that snaps or rustles.
  Sought always by an unseen foe
  Over our heads the bullets fly;
  But more than these, we fear the snow,
  The silent shrapnel of the sky.
  
  Yonder our colonel stalks and grieves,
  Meeting the storm with thoughts more stormy;
  But we, we sit and watch the leaves
  Fall down, a torn and crumpled army.
  We mourn for every leaf that lies,
  As though it were a comrade slain;
  Each was a shelter from the eyes
  Of every prying aeroplane. . .
  
  And in its cloudy uniform,
  Stilling the cannons earthly thunder,
  The huge artillery of the storm
  Plows through the land and pulls it under.
  The rain beats down, until the slow
  And slipping earth resists no more. . .
  And over them the beets will grow
  Ranker and redder than before.