From “Peace in Austria,” by Sir W. Beveridge

Nous n’irons plus au bois: the woods are shut: Les lauriers sont coupés: the laurels cut. Thus love, when still his pitiful sweet cry For youth and spring, his play-boys, sensibly Touched at the heart. But now he does not care What woods, what trees are standing anywhere. For there’s no wood in the world to be found That does not stab his feet, and the trees wound His eyes with thorns—the eyes which did not see In joy, but find their sight in misery.

There is a wood they named the Wienerwald. There when the spring was new the throstle called Spring to her ball-room, and the Viennese Heard her light foot provoking the grave trees, Half willingly at first, young leaves to stir, That later passionately danced with her. And here the cannon-fodder used to feed The altar-fire of the older need, And sweeter than the need of death. In spring The Austrian boys saw love awakening Here, and as English boys in English wood Have given all to love, all that they could These gave—their childhood, dawn’s relentless star That is put out with kisses. These they gave And buried childhood lightly in her grave So that a man might hear her calling yet, “Primrose farewell, good-morrow violet!”— Might yet have heard her, but the woods are shut To those who would return: the laurels cut.

There are many go to-day to Wienerwald, But love does not go with them. He has failed In the Great War, who had so little skill In the Will to Murder, love who was the Will To live and make live, but the War has shewn His Will is treachery, and love’s alone In a great wilderness. For if he cries Aloud, they mock him in their Paradise— The Angels of Armageddon. “This is he Who ruled us, being blind, now let him see” They say, “a prisoner, what we have done, The priests of mankind’s last religion. Let him look deep and celebrate in Hell How we reverse the Christian miracle, Stealing their spirits from the sullen swine And consecrating them as yours and mine, So that we rush together suddenly Down a steep place, where by an empty sea Our worshippers pile on a flaming wharf The trees that were the woods at Hütteldorf.”

Ares, the god of battles, has prevailed. At Hütteldorf, deep in the Wienerwald, They go to the woods for fuel, and one sees A child that beats upon the laurel trees With starved small hands that hold an axe, and how The spring returns to find a hooded crow Waiting and waiting, as the thrush once waited For childhood’s end. But this, it seems, was fated That all should change, save only that these seem Still unsubstantial as the lover’s dream, As unsubstantial, but with blossoms set That have no traffic with the violet And primrose. Here the purple flowers of Dis Burn their young foreheads and they fade with this, Who find a different end and different haven, Where the hooded crow is waiting with the raven.

In Wienerwald the starving Viennese Have spoiled the woods and cut the laurel trees, Nous n’irons plus au bois: oh love, oh love! Will you not go the more because they prove So shattered, the poor woods? and will you shut Your heart, O love, because the trees are cut? Les lauriers sont coupés, but you can heal Even the broken laurel, and reveal Where in the valley of death the children falter That, though all else doth change, love does not alter, And, though the woods were dead, there is a tree You know of, love, planted in Calvary.

Go back to the woods; replant the laurel trees. Still love than war hath greater victories, And while the devils beat the warlike drum Into their kingdom of peace the children come.