Chapter 1

This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler.

SONGS OF THE ARMY OF THE NIGHT.

* * * * *

BY FRANCIS ADAMS.

* * * * *

"_For the cause of Labour all over the Earth_."

* * * * *

SECOND EDITION.

* * * * *

London: WILLIAM REEVES, 185, FLEET STREET, E.C.

TO EDITH.

"My sweet, my child, through all this night Of dark and wind and rain, Where thunder crashes, and the light Sears the bewildered brain,

"It is your face, your lips, your eyes I see rise up; I hear Your voice that sobs and calls and cries, Or shrills and mocks at fear.

"O this that's mine is yours as well, For side by side our feet Trod through these bitter brakes of hell. Take it, my child, my sweet!"

CONTENTS.

PAGE Preface 11 This Book 15 SONGS OF THE ARMY OF THE NIGHT. _Proem_:--"Outside London" 18 _PART I.--ENGLAND_. In the Camp 19 "Axiom" 20 Drill 20 Evening Hymn in the Hovels 21 In the Street: "Lord Shaftesbury" 22 "Liberty" 22 In the Edgware Road 24 To the Girls of the Unions 24 Hagar 25 "Why?" 26 A Visitor in the Camp 27 "Lord Leitrim" 28 "Anarchism" 28 Belgravia by Night: "Move on!" 29 Jesus 29 Parallels for the Pious 30 "Prayer" 30 To the Christians 31 "Defeat" 31 To John Ruskin 32 To the Emperor William 34 Song of the Dispossessed: "To Jesus" 34 Art 35 The Peasants' Revolt 35 "Analogy" 37 In Trafalgar Square 37 A Street Fight 37 To a Workman, a would-be Suicide 39 Dublin at Dawn 40 The Caged Eagle 41 To Ireland 42 To Charles Parnell 42 An "Assassin" 43 Russia 44 Pere-la-Chaise 45 Aux Ternes 46 "The Truth" 47 To the Sons of Labour 48 To the Artists 49 "One among so Many" 50 The New Locksley Hall 52 Farewell to the Market: "Susannah and Mary-Jane" 58 _PART II.--HERE AND THERE_. In the Pit: "Chant of the Firemen" 60 A Mahommadan Ship Fireman 61 To India 61 To England: I. "There was a time" 61 II. "We hate you" 62 III. "I whom you fed with shame" 62 IV. "England, the Land I loved" 63 Hong Kong Lyrics: I. "At Anchor in that Harbour" 64 II. "There is much in this Sea-way City" 65 III. "I stand and watch the Soldiers" 65 IV. "Happy Valley" 66 A Glimpse of China: I. In a Sampan 67 II. In a Chair 67 III. "Caste" 68 IV. Over the Samovar 69 To Japan 70 Dai Butsu 70 "England" 71 The Fisherman 71 A South-Sea Islander 72 New Summer Converts 72 A Death at Sea: I. "Dead in the Sheep-Pen" 73 II. "In the Warm, Cloudy Night" 74 III. "Dirge" 74 _PART III.--AUSTRALIA_. The Outcasts 75 James Moorhouse 75 In the Sea Gardens: "The Man of the Nation" 78 "Upstarts" 79 Labour--Capital--Land 79 Australia 80 Art 80 "Henry George" 81 William Wallace 83 The Australian Flag 83 To an Old Friend in England: "Esau" 84 At the Seamen's Union: "The Seamen and the Miners" 84 To His Love 85 Her Poem: "My Baby Girl that was born and died on the same 86 day" To Henry George in America 86 "Algernon Charles Swinburne" 87 To an Unionist 88 To my Friend, Sydney Jephcott 89 To E. L. Zox 89 "Father Abe": Song of the American Sons of Labour 90 "A Fool" 93 Mount Rennie: I. The Australian Press speaks 95 II. The Time-Spirit speaks 97 "Tyranny": The Delegates speak 97 From a Verandah: "Armageddon" 98 "Elsie"--A Memory 99 "Nationalism and M'Ilwraith" 99 To the Emperor William 100 A Story 101 At the India Docks 103 Dirge: "A Little Soldier of the Army of the Night" 108 To Queen Victoria in England 109 Farewell to the Children 111 Epode: On the Ranges, Queensland 113 * * * * * Australian Press Notices 116

PREFACE.

A few words of preface seem necessary in sending out this little book. It is to be looked on as the product of the life of a social worker in England, in his travels, and in Australia. The key-note of the First Part--"England"--is desperation, or, if any hope, then "desperate hope." A friend once reported to me a saying of Matthew Arnold's, that he did not believe in any man of intelligence taking a desperate view of the social problem in England. I am afraid that saying relegates me to the ranks of the fools, but I am content to remain there. I believe that never since 1381, which is the date of the Peasants' Revolt, has England presented such a spectacle of the happiness of the tens, of the misery of the millions. It is not by any means the artisan, or the general or the agricultural labourer, who is the only sufferer. All society groans under the slavery of stupendous toil and a pittance wage. The negro slavery of the Southern States of America was better than the white slavery of to-day all over the earth, but more particularly in Europe and in America. Capitalism is built on the dreadful wrong of recompensing Labour, not according to the worth of its work, but according to the worth of its members in the market of unlimited competition, and that soon comes to mean the payment of what will hold body and soul together when in the enjoyment of health and strength. Landlordism is built on the dreadful wrong of sharing with Capitalism the plunder of Labour. Why are rents high in Australia? Because here Labour is scarcer, its wages correspondingly higher, and therefore Landlordism steps in to filch from Labour its hard-won comforts, and once more reduce it to the necessities of existence. The American slavers had to spend more in housing and keeping any fixed number of their slaves in serviceable condition than Capitalism spends in wages. Capitalism and Landlordism, like good Christian Institutions, leave the living to keep alive their living, and the dead to bury their dead. This cannot continue for ever. At least all the intelligent portion of the community will grow to see the injustice and attempt to abolish it. But when will the great mass of unintelligent people who have won a large enough share of the plunder of their fellows to minister to their own comforts--when will these, also, awake and see? England will realize the desperation of her social problem when its desperation is shown her by fire and blood--then, and not till then! What shall teach her her sins to herself is what is even now teaching her her sins to Ireland.

I make no apology for several poems in the First Part which are fierce, which are even blood-thirsty. As I felt I wrote, and I will not lessen the truth of what inspired those feelings by eliminating or suppressing the record of them. Rather, let me ask you, whoever you be, to imagine what the cause was, from the effect in one who was (unhappily) born and bred into the dominant class, and whose chief care and joy in life was in the pursuit of a culture which draws back instinctively from the violent and the terrible. I will go further. I will arraign my country and my day, because their iniquity would not let me follow out the laws of my nature, which were for luminosity and quiet, for the wide and genial view, but made me "take arms against a sea of troubles," hoping only too often "by opposing to end them." No, we make no apology for bloody sweat and for tears of fire wrung out of us in the Gethsemane and on the Calvary of our country: we make no apology to those whom we have the right to curse.

In the Second Part--"Here and There," the record of a short trip in the East--the sight of the sin which England has committed not only against herself, against Ireland, against Scotland, but against India, against China, against the sweetest and gentlest people in the earth, the Japanese--the sight of this, and of the signs of England's doom, the punishment for the abuse of the greatest trust any modern nation has had given to her, inspires a hatred which only that punishment can appease. In the Third Part--"Australia"--there is neither ferocity nor blood-thirstiness. Its key-note is hope, hope that dreads but does not despair.

I may add that in this edition I have sacrificed all merely personal aspects of the poems to attempt to give the book a more complete totality. We know well enough that allowance will rarely be made for any of these things: that our plea for comprehension will too often be an idle one. None the less we make it, for the sake of those who are willing to attempt to realize the social problem and to seek within themselves what they can do for its solution. We have no care whatever as to what view they take of it. Let them be with us or against us, it matters not, if only they will make this effort, if only they will ponder it in their hearts. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of us are concerned in this problem. We are all of us true sons of Labour who have suffered the robbery of the wages of Competition. One word more. The Australian is apt to deprecate the socialism of the European or the American. The darker aspects of the European or American civilization are not striking here. They are here; they are more than incipient, very much more; but they are not striking. Let such an one pause. "We speak of that which we do know," and, for the rest, not only do we bid "him that has ears, to hear," but "him that has eyes, to see."

Brothers all over the earth, brothers and sisters, you of that silent company whose speech is only in the unknown deeds of love, the unknown devotions, the unknown heroisms, it is to you we speak! Our heart is against your heart; you can feel it beat. Soul speaks to soul through lips whose utterance is a need. In your room alone, in your lonely walks, in the still hours of day and night, we will be with you. We will speak with you, we will plead with you, for these piteous ones. In the evening trees you shall hear the sound of our weeping. Our sobs shall shake in the wind of wintry nights. We are the spirit of those piteous ones, the wronged, the oppressed, the robbed, the murdered, and we bid you open your warm heart, your light-lit soul to us! We will thrill you with the clarion of hate and defiance and despair in the tempest of land and sea. You shall listen to us there also. We will touch your eyes and lips with fire. No, we will never let you go, till you are ours and theirs! And you too, O sufferers, you too shall stay with us, and shall have comfort. Look, we have suffered, we have agonized, we have longed to hasten the hour of rest. But beyond the darkness there is light, beyond the turbulence peace. "Courage, and be true to one another." "_We bid you hope_!"

THIS BOOK.

_I give this Book_ TO YOU,--

_Man or woman_, _girl or boy_, _labourer_, _mechanic_, _clerk_, _house-servant_, _whoever you may be_, _whose wages are not the worth of your work_,--_no_, _nor a fraction of it--whose wages are the minimum which you and those like you_, _pressed by the desire for life in the dreadful struggle of_ "_Competition_," _will consent to take from your Employers who_, _thanks to it_, _are able thus to rob you_:--

_I give it to_ YOU,

_in the hope that you may see how you are being robbed_,_--how Capital that is won by paying you your competition wages is plunder_,_--how Rent that is won by the increased value of land that is owing to the industry of us all_, _is plunder_,_--how the Capitalist and Landowner who over-ride you_, _how the Master or Mistress who work you from morning to night_, _who domineer over you as servants and despise you_ (_or what is worse_, _pity you_) _as beggars_, _are the men and women whose sole title to this is_, _that they have the audacity and skill to plunder you_, _and you the simplicity and folly not to see it and to submit to it_:--

_I give this Book to_ YOU,

_in the hope that you may at last realize this_, _and in your own fashion never cease the effort to make your fellow-sufferers realize it_:--

_I give it to_ YOU,

_in the hope that you may formally enrol yourself in the ranks of the Army of the Night_, _and that you will offer up the best that has been granted you of heart and soul and mind towards the working out of that better time when_, _in victorious peace_, _we silence our drums and trumpets_, _furl our banners_, _drag our cannons to their place of rest_, _and solemnly disarming ourselves_, _become citizens once more or_, _if soldiers_, _then soldiers of the Army of the Day_!

SONGS OF THE ARMY OF THE NIGHT.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit . . . blessed are the mourners . . . _Ye are the salt of the earth_."--_The Good tidings as given_ by MATTHEW.

PROEM. "OUTSIDE LONDON."

In the black night, along the mud-deep roads, Amid the threatening boughs and ghastly streams, Hark! sounds that gird the darknesses like goads, Murmurs and rumours and reverberant dreams, Tramplings, breaths, movements, and a little light.-- _The marching of the Army of the Night_!

The stricken men, the mad brute-beasts are keeping No more their places in the ditches or holes, But rise and join us, and the women, weeping Beside the roadways, rise like demon-souls. Fill up the ranks! What shimmers there so bright? _The bayonets of the Army of the Night_!

Fill up the ranks! We march in steadfast column, In wavering lines yet forming more and more; Men, women, children, sombre, silent, solemn, Rank follows rank like billows to the shore. Dawnwards we tramp, towards the day and light. _On_, _on and up_, _the Army of the Night_!

I.

"ENGLAND." IN THE CAMP.

This is a leader's tent. "Who gathers here?" Enter and see and listen. On the ground Men sit or stand, enter or disappear, Dark faces and deep voices all around.

One answers you. "You ask who gathers here? Companions! Generals we have none, nor chief. What need is there? The plan is all so clear-- The future's hope, the present's grim relief!

"Food for us all, and clothes, and roofs come first. The means to gain them? This, our leaguered band! The hatred of the robber rich accursed Keeps foes together, makes fools understand.

"Beyond the present's faith, the future's hope Points to the dawning hour when all shall be But one. The man condemned shall fit the rope Around the hangman's neck, and both be free!

"The sun then rises on a happier land Where Wealth and Labour sound but as one word. We drill, we train, we arm our leaguered band. What is there more to tell you have not heard?"

This is a leader's tent. They gather here, Resolute, stern, menacing. On the ground They sit or stand, enter or disappear, Dark faces and deep voices all around.

"AXIOM."

Let him who toils, enjoy Fruit of his toiling. Let him whom sweats annoy, No more be spoiling.

For we would have it be That, weak or stronger, Not he who works, but he Who works _not_, hunger!

DRILL.

When day's hard task's done, Eve's scant meal partaken, Out we steal each one, Weariless, unshaken.

In small reeking squares, Garbaged plots, we gather, Little knots and pairs, Brother, sister, father.

Then the word is given. In their silent places Under lowering heaven, Range our stern-set faces.

Now we march and wheel In our clumsy line, Shouldering sticks for steel, Thoughts like bitter brine!

Drill, drill, drill, and drill! It is only thus Conquer yet we will Those who've conquered us.

Patience, sisters, mothers! We must not forget Dear dead fathers, brothers; They must teach us yet.

In that hour we see, The hour of our desire, What shall their slayers be? _As the stubble to the fire_!

EVENING HYMN IN THE HOVELS.

"We sow the fertile seed and then we reap it; We thresh the golden grain; we knead the bread. Others that eat are glad. In store they keep it, While we hunger outside with hearts like lead. _Hallelujah_!

"We hew the stone and saw it, rear the city. Others inhabit there in pleasant ease. We have no thing to ask of them save pity, No answer they to give but what they please. _Hallelujah_!

"Is it for ever, fathers, say, and mothers, That we must toil and never know the light? Is it for ever, sisters, say, and brothers, That they must grind us dead here in the night? _Hallelujah_!

"O we who sow, reap, knead, shall we not also Have strength and pleasure of the food we make? O we who hew, build, deck, shall we not also The happiness that we have given partake? _Hallelujah_!"

IN THE STREET. LORD ----.

You have done well, we say it. You are dead, And, of the man that with the right hand takes Less than the left hand gives, let it be said He has done something for our wretched sakes. For those to whom you gave their daily bread Rancid with God-loathed "charity," their drink Putrid with man-loathed "sin," we bow our head Grateful, as the great hearse goes by, and think. Yes, you have fed the flesh and starved the soul Of thousands of us; you have taught too well The rich are little gods beyond control, Save of your big God of the heaven and hell. We thank you. This was pretty once, and right. Now it wears rather thin. My lord, good night!

"LIBERTY!"

"Liberty!" Is that the cry, then? We have heard it oft of yore. Once it had, we think, a meaning; Let us hear it now no more.

We have read what history tells us Of its heroes, martyrs too. Doubtless they were very splendid, But they're not for me and you.

There were Greeks who fought and perished, Won from Persians deathless graves. Had _we_ lived then, we're aware that We'd have been those same Greeks' slaves!

Then a Roman came who loved us; Caesar gave men tongues and swords. Crying "Liberty," they fought him, Cato and his cut-throat lords.

When he'd give a broader franchise, Lift the mangled nations bowed, Crying "Liberty!" they killed him, Brutus and his pandar crowd.

We have read what history tells us, O the truthful memory clings! Tacitus, the chartered liar, Gloating over poisoned kings!

"Liberty!" The stale cry echoes Past snug homesteads, tinsel thrones, Over smoking fields and hovels, Murdered peasants' bleaching bones.

That's the cry that mocked us madly, Toiling in our living graves, When hell-mines sent up the chorus: "_Britons never shall be slaves_!"

"Liberty!" We care not for it! What we care for's food, clothes, homes, For our dear ones toiling, waiting For the time that never comes!

IN THE EDGWARE ROAD. (To LORD L----.)

Will you not buy? She asks you, my lord, you Who know the points desirable in such. She does not say that she is perfect. True, She's not too pleasant to the sight or touch. But then--neither are you!