Cross Roads

INDEPENDENCE DAY—1919

     Over the mists of a century they come, and their
        tramping feet
     Are light as the dust on the broad highway, or the
        wind that sways in the wheat;
     Out of the haze of the years between their shadowy
        hands stretch wide
     To welcome the heroes home again who have fought
        for their cause and died.

     They went to battle at Concord Bridge, and they fell
        on Bunker Hill;
     The odds were great, but they struggled on with a
        stubborn Yankee will;
     They lay in the fields at Lexington when the sun in
        the west was red,
     And the next year's violets grew on the spot where
        their valiant blood was shed.

     But they won in the end—with their broken guns
        and without much food to spare,
     Won at the end of a bitter war, by means that they
        knew were fair;
     And some of them wandered back to their plows, and
        some lay wrapped in the loam,
     And slept the sleep of the fearless heart that has
        fought at home—for home!

     Fought for their homes, at home, they did—but these
        other boys today
     Fought for the homes of stranger folk three thousand
        miles away;
     FOUGHT FOR THE HONOR OF THE WORLD, and were not
        afraid to die
     In a muddy trench, in a foreign land, and under a
        foreign sky!

     They fought on the Marne, at Belleau Wood; they
        swept through the mad Argonne;
     Chateau-Thierry was theirs to take; they took it and
        then surged on;
     And now that the fight they fought is won, though
        they lie in a far-off grave,
     Their souls come back to the land they loved—the
        land that they LEFT to save.

     And so, through the damp of the sorry sea, through
        the wreck of the shell-torn plain,
     They are coming back to homes they loved—they
        are coming back again!
     And light as the wind that sways in the wheat, or
        the dust on the broad highway,
     They march to their rendezvous with the ones who
        died in the yesterday.