Trains
LIEUT. JOHN PIERRE ROCHE
From Lieutenant Roche s book of poems, "Rimes in Olive Drab."Robert M. McBride & Company, Publishers, New York. Copyright, 1918, Special permission to insert in this book.
Lieutenant Roche has deftly caught and preserved in words the strange vision of unannounced trains that flashed now and then post towns and villages bearing American troops from unknown camps to unknown ports of embarkation--the flash of faces of men about whom it was known only that they came from the shops and fields of home and were going across the seas to fight somewhere, for those who stood and gazed as they whirled by. The mystery, the roar of wheels, the eddying dust and the silence that followed infuse these lines with picture and sound that will stay in the minds of any who saw such trains go hurrying away.
OVER thousands of miles
Of shining steel rails,
Past green and red semaphores
And unheeding flagmen,
Trains are running,
Trains, trains, trains.
Rattling through tunnels
And clicking by way stations,
Curving through hills, past timber,
Out into the open places,
Flashing past silos and barns
And whole villages,
Until finally they echo
Against the squat factories
That line the approach to the cities.
Trains, trains, trains
With the fire boxes wide open,
Giant Moguls and old-time Baldwins
And oil--burners on the Southern Pacific,
Fire boxes wide open
Flaring against the night,
Like a tremendous watch fire
Where the sentries cluster at their post.
Trains, trains, trains
Serpentine strings of cars
Loaded with boys and men--
The legion of the ten-year span
To whom has been given the task
Of seeking the Great Adventure.
Swaying through the North and South,
And East and West,
Freighted with the Willing
And the Unwilling;
Packed with the Thinking
And the Unthinking,
Pushing on to the Unknown
Away from the shelter and security
Of the accustomed into the Great Adventure.
Trains, trains, trains
With their coach sides scrawled
With chalked bravado and, sometimes,
With their windows black
With yelling boys,
In open-mouthed exultation
That they do not feel,
Rushing farther and farther
From the known into the unseeable.
Trains, trains, trains
With sky--larking boys in khaki,
Munching sandwiches and drinking pop;
Or, tired and without their depot swagger,
Curled up on the red-plush seats;
Or asleep, with a stranger, in the Pullmans.
They rush past our camp,
Which lies against the railroad
With the crossing alarm jangling
And fade into the dust or night.
Leaving us to conjecture where,
As they have left others to wonder--
As they must wonder themselves
When they are done
With the shouting and hand-shaking
And kissing and hat-waving and singing.
Trains, trains, trains
Clicking on into unforecast days--
Away from the shelter and security
Of the accustomed into the Great Adventure.
