Poems by Banjo

[Ozzie]

The Old Tin Hat

In the good old days when the Army's ways were simple and unrefined,

With a stock to keep their chins in front, and a pigtail down behind,

When the only light in the barracks at night was a candle of grease or fat,

When they put the extinguisher on the light, they called it the Old Tin Hat.

Now, a very great man is the C. in C., for he is the whole of the show --

The reins and the whip and the driver's hand that maketh the team to go --

But the road he goes is a lonely road, with ever a choice to make,

When he comes to a place where the roads divide, which one is the road to take.

For there's one road right, and there's one road wrong, uphill, or over the flat,

And one road leads to the Temple of Fame, and one to the Old Tin Hat.

And a very great man is the man who holds an Army Corps command,

For he hurries his regiments here and there as the C. in C. has planned.

By day he travels about in state and stirreth them up to rights,

He toileth early and toileth late, and sitteth up half the nights;

But the evening comes when the candle throws twin shadows upon the mat,

And one of the shadows is like a wreath, and one like an Old Tin Hat.

And a very proud man is the Brigadier at the sound of the stately tread

Of his big battalions marching on, as he rides with his staff ahead.

There's never a band to play them out, and the bugle's note is still,

But he hears two tunes in the gentle breeze that blows from over the hill.

And one is a tune in a stirring key, and the other is faint and flat,

For one is the tune of "My new C.B." and the other, "My Old Tin Hat."

And the Colonel heading his regiment is life and soul of the show,

It's "Column of route", "Form troops", "Extend", and into the fight they go;

He does not duck when the air is full of the "wail of the whimpering lead",

He does not scout for the deep dugout when the 'planes are overhead;

He fears not hog, nor devil, nor dog, and he'd scrap with a mountain cat,

But he goeth in fear of the Brigadier, and in fear of the Old Tin Hat.

The Last Parade

With never a sound of trumpet,

With never a flag displayed,

The last of the old campaigners

Lined up for the last parade.

Weary they were and battered,

Shoeless, and knocked about;

From under their ragged forelocks

Their hungry eyes looked out.

And they watched as the old commander

Read out, to the cheering men,

The Nation's thanks and the orders

To carry them home again.

And the last of the old campaigners,

Sinewy, lean, and spare --

He spoke for his hungry comrades:

`Have we not done our share?

`Starving and tired and thirsty

We limped on the blazing plain;

And after a long night's picket

You saddled us up again.

`We froze on the wind-swept kopjes

When the frost lay snowy-white.

Never a halt in the daytime,

Never a rest at night!

`We knew when the rifles rattled

From the hillside bare and brown,

And over our weary shoulders

We felt warm blood run down,

`As we turned for the stretching gallop,

Crushed to the earth with weight;

But we carried our riders through it --

Carried them p'raps too late.

`Steel! We were steel to stand it --

We that have lasted through,

We that are old campaigners

Pitiful, poor, and few.

`Over the sea you brought us,

Over the leagues of foam:

Now we have served you fairly

Will you not take us home?

`Home to the Hunter River,

To the flats where the lucerne grows;

Home where the Murrumbidgee

Runs white with the melted snows.

`This is a small thing surely!

Will not you give command

That the last of the old campaigners

Go back to their native land?'

Unforgotten

Oh Captain Cook he was a sailor

Sail, oh , sail away,

He sailed until he found Australia

Sail to Sydney Bay,

For the wind blows fair, and the wind blows free

And Sydney town’s the town for me

The brave old town by the Southern Sea

Sail, oh sail away.

Oh Kingsford Smith, the aviator

Fly, oh, fly away

He was the air’s great navigator

Fly to Sydney Bay,

And he steered his course by the stars and skies

And no man knows where now he lies

Till trumpets sound and the dead arise

Fly, oh, fly away.

Sir John Monash, he fought in Flanders

Fight to keep us free

The wisest man of our commanders

Fight by land and sea

And we’d scorn to flinch from a foe’s attack

Had we the soul of Monash back

To fly his flag on the well-worn track

Fight for victory.

"We're All Australians Now"

Australia takes her pen in hand

To write a line to you,

To let you fellows understand

How proud we are of you.

From shearing shed and cattle run,

From Broome to Hobson's Bay,

Each native-born Australian son

Stands straighter up today.

The man who used to "hump his drum",

On far-out Queensland runs

Is fighting side by side with some

Tasmanian farmer's sons.

The fisher-boys dropped sail and oar

To grimly stand the test,

Along that storm-swept Turkish shore,

With miners from the west.

The old state jealousies of yore

Are dead as Pharaoh's sow,

We're not State children any more --

We're all Australians now!

Our six-starred flag that used to fly

Half-shyly to the breeze,

Unknown where older nations ply

Their trade on foreign seas,

Flies out to meet the morning blue

With Vict'ry at the prow;

For that's the flag the Sydney flew,

The wide seas know it now!

The mettle that a race can show

Is proved with shot and steel,

And now we know what nations know

And feel what nations feel.

The honoured graves beneath the crest

Of Gaba Tepe hill

May hold our bravest and our best,

But we have brave men still.

With all our petty quarrels done,

Dissensions overthrown,

We have, through what you boys have done,

A history of our own.

Our old world diff'rences are dead,

Like weeds beneath the plough,

For English, Scotch, and Irish-bred,

They're all Australians now!

So now we'll toast the Third Brigade

That led Australia's van,

For never shall their glory fade

In minds Australian.

Fight on, fight on, unflinchingly,

Till right and justice reign.

Fight on, fight on, till Victory

Shall send you home again.

And with Australia's flag shall fly

A spray of wattle-bough

To symbolise our unity --

We're all Australians now.

- An open letter to the troops, 1915

Our Own Flag

They mustered us with a royal din

In wearisome weeks of drought

Ere ever the half of the crops were in

Or the half of the sheds cut out

'Twas down with saddle and spurs and whip

The swagman dropped his swag

And we hurried us off to an outbound ship

To fight for the English flag

The English flag.. it is ours in sooth

We stand by it wrong or right

But deep in our hearts is the honest truth

We fought for the sake of a fight

And the English flag may flutter and wave

Where the World-wide Oceans toss

But the flag the Australian dies to save

Is the flag of the Southern Cross

[Ozzie]

Song of the Federation

As the nations sat together, grimly waiting --

The fierce old nations battle-scarred --

Grown grey in their lusting and their hating,

Ever armed and ever ready keeping guard,

Through the tumult of their warlike preparation

And the half-stilled clamour of the drums

Came a voice crying, "Lo, a new-made Nation,

To her place in the sisterhood she comes!"

And she came. She was beautiful as morning,

With the bloom of the roses in her mouth,

Like a young queen lavishly adorning

Her charms with the splendours of the South.

And the fierce old nations, looking on her,

Said, "Nay, surely she were quickly overthrown;

Hath she strength for the burden laid upon her,

Hath she power to protect and guard her own?"

Then she spoke,and her voice was clear and ringing

In the ears of the nations old and grey,

Saying "Hark, and ye shall hear my children singing

Their war-song in countries far away.

They are strangers to the tumult of the battle,

They are few, but their hearts are very strong,

'Twas but yesterday they called unto the cattle,

But they now sing Australia's marching song."

SONG OF THE AUSTRALIANS IN ACTION

For the honour of Australia, our Mother,

Side by side with our kin from over sea,

We have fought and we have tested one another,

And enrolled among the brotherhood are we.

There was never post of danger but we sought it

In the fighting through the fire, and through the flood

There was never prize so costly but we bought it,

Though we paid for its purchase with our blood.

Was there any road too rough for us to travel?

Was there any path too far for us to tread?

You can track us by the blood drops on the gravel

On the roads that we milestoned with our dead!

And for you. O our young and anxious mother,

O'er your great gains keeping watch and ward,

Neither fearing nor despising any other,

We will hold your possessions with the sword.

Then they passed to the place of world-long sleeping,

The grey-clad figures with their dead,

To the sound of their women softly weeping

And the Dead March moaning at their head:

And the Nations, as the grim procession ended,

Whispered, "Child, thou has seen the price we pay;

From War may we ever be defended,

Kneel thee down, new-made Sister --Let us Pray!"

[Ozzie]

http://www.wallisandmatilda.com.au/banjo-p...biography.shtml

[Pretswell]

Ozzie

My G.F. was in the ASC so I'm slightly biased towards this one !

The Army Mules

Oh the airman's game is a showman's game, for we all of us watch him go

With his roaring soaring aeroplane and his bombs for the blokes below,

Over the railways and over the dumps, over the Hun and the Turk,

You'll hear him mutter, "What ho, she bumps," when the Archies get to work.

But not of him is the song I sing, though he follow the eagle's flight,

And with shrapnel holes in his splintered wing comes home to his roost at night.

He may silver his wings on the shining stars, he may look from the throne on high,

He may follow the flight of the wheeling kite in the blue Egyptian sky,

But he's only a hero built to plan, turned out by the Army schools,

And I sing of the rankless, thankless man who hustles the Army mules.

Now where he comes from and where he lives is a mystery dark and dim,

And it's rarely indeed that the General gives a D.S.O. to him.

The stolid infantry digs its way like a mole in a ruined wall;

The cavalry lends a tone, they say, to what were else but a brawl;

The Brigadier of the Mounted Fut like a cavalry Colonel swanks

When he goeth abroad like a gilded nut to receive the General's thanks;

The Ordnance man is a son of a gun and his lists are a standing joke;

You order, "Choke arti Jerusalem one" for Jerusalem artichoke.

The Medicals shine with a number nine, and the men of the great R.E.,

Their Colonels are Methodist, married or mad, and some of them all the three;

In all these units the road to fame is taught by the Army schools,

But a man has got to be born to the game when he tackles the Army mules.

For if you go where the depots are as the dawn is breaking grey,

By the waning light of the morning star as the dust cloud clears away,

You'll see a vision among the dust like a man and a mule combined --

It's the kind of thing you must take on trust for its outlines aren't defined,

A thing that whirls like a spinning top and props like a three legged stool,

And you find its a long-legged Queensland boy convincing an Army mule.

And the rider sticks to the hybrid's hide like paper sticks to a wall,

For a "magnoon" Waler is next to ride with every chance of a fall,

It's a rough-house game and a thankless game, and it isn't a game for a fool,

For an army's fate and a nation's fame may turn on an Army mule.

And if you go to the front-line camp where the sleepless outposts lie,

At the dead of night you can hear the tramp of the mule train toiling by.

The rattle and clink of a leading-chain, the creak of the lurching load,

As the patient, plodding creatures strain at their task in the shell-torn road,

Through the dark and the dust you may watch them go till the dawn is grey in the sky,

And only the watchful pickets know when the "All-night Corps" goes by.

And far away as the silence falls when the last of the train has gone,

A weary voice through the darkness: "Get on there, men, get on!"

It isn't a hero, built to plan, turned out by the modern schools,

It's only the Army Service man a-driving his Army mules.

A B Paterson

[Ozzie]

That is a wonderful peom. I haven't seen that one before. Banjo wrote with different voices, didn't he?

Thankyou.

There is also the story of the mules in the desert that were so hungry, they ate their lead ropes, then came into the tents looking for more to chew on. The men learnt to picket them with chains.

Cheers

Kim

[Pretswell]

Kim

AB Patersons time as a Major in the Remounts in Egypt must have given him a wealth of experiences to write about , which he did beautifully.

"The Army Mules" was published as part of a collection " The Animals That Noah Forgot".

Best Regards

Dave

[herakles]

That is a wonderful peom. I haven't seen that one before. Banjo wrote with different voices, didn't he?

Thankyou.

There is also the story of the mules in the desert that were so hungry, they ate their lead ropes, then came into the tents looking for more to chew on. The men learnt to picket them with chains.

Cheers

Kim

The trouble is that AB is now talking to an Australia that doesn't exist any more. More's the pity.

[squirrel]

Excellent poems and thanks for sharing them.