Arthur Conan Doyle

«The Guards Came Through» (1919). 21. Comrades

You can read their names in the list of games
In the school of long ago.
Henderson A. and Wilson J.
And Marriott W. O.


They ragged and fought as schoolboys ought,
And learned to play the game.
You can act the fool at an English school,
But it builds you all the same.
Verses you plan which fail to scan
And your French is none too good,
But you learn to shape as a gentleman,
And to do as a Briton should.

For there's something there, in the sober air,
And the reek of the mellow place.
Which seems to hold the instincts old.
And the soul of an ancient race.
Where Latin and Greek are far to seek
There is home-made lore for you.
The thing that's fair, and the thing that's square,
And the thing no chap can do.

Gothic and grim, in the transept dim
Of the chapel grey and old
There's a marbled shrine where line on line
The dead boys' names are scrolled.
They gave their dreams of what might be
For the sake of the things that are,
When the joyous strife of their glad young life
Had changed to the strife of war.

But there they be, the comrades three,
As in the long ago,
Henderson A. and Wilson J.
And Marriott W. O.