Make slow-booming psalms up to the boom of the big guns.

Make a marching song of swinging arms and swinging legs,

Going along,

Going along,

On the roads from San Antonio to Athens, from Seattle to Bagdad—

The boys and men in winding lines of khaki, the circling squares of bayonet points.

Cowpunchers, cornhuskers, shopmen, ready in khaki;

Ballplayers, lumberjacks, ironworkers, ready in khaki;

A million, ten million, singing, “I am ready.”

This the sun looks on between two seaboards,

In the land of Lincoln, in the land of Grant and Lee.

I heard one say, “I am ready to be killed.”

I heard another say, “I am ready to be killed.”

O sunburned clear-eyed boys!

I stand on sidewalks and you go by with drums and guns and bugles,

You—and the flag!

And my heart tightens, a fist of something feels my throat

When you go by,

You on the kaiser hunt, you and your faces saying, “I am ready to be killed.”

They are hunting death,

Death for the one-armed mastoid kaiser.

They are after a Hohenzollern head:

There is no man-hunt of men remembered like this.

The four big brothers are out to kill.

France, Russia, Britain, America—

The four republics are sworn brothers to kill the kaiser.

Yes, this is the great man-hunt;

And the sun has never seen till now

Such a line of toothed and tusked man-killers,

In the blue of the upper sky,

In the green of the undersea,

In the red of winter dawns.

Eating to kill,

Sleeping to kill,

Asked by their mothers to kill,

Wished by four-fifths of the world to kill—

To cut the kaiser’s throat,

To hack the kaiser’s head,

To hang the kaiser on a high-horizon gibbet.

And is it nothing else than this?

Three times ten million men thirsting the blood

Of a half-cracked one-armed child of the German kings?

Three times ten million men asking the blood

Of a child born with his head wrong-shaped,

The blood of rotted kings in his veins?

If this were all, O God,

I would go to the far timbers

And look on the gray wolves

Tearing the throats of moose:

I would ask a wilder drunk of blood.

Look! It is four brothers in joined hands together.

The people of bleeding France,

The people of bleeding Russia,

The people of Britain, the people of America—

These are the four brothers, these are the four republics.

At first I said it in anger as one who clenches his fist in wrath to fling his knuckles into the face of some one taunting;

Now I say it calmly as one who has thought it over and over again at night, among the mountains, by the sea-combers in storm.

I say now, by God, only fighters today will save the world, nothing but fighters will keep alive the names of those who left red prints of bleeding feet at Valley Forge in Christmas snow.

On the cross of Jesus, the sword of Napoleon, the skull of Shakespeare, the pen of Tom Jefferson, the ashes of Abraham Lincoln, or any sign of the red and running life poured out by the mothers of the world,