# Cornhuskers/The Four Brothers

THE FOUR BROTHERS
Notes for War Songs (November, 1917)
Make chants that repeat and weave.
Make rhythms up to the ragtime chatter of the machine guns;
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—
Ballplayers, lumberjacks, ironworkers, ready in khaki;
A million, ten million, singing, "I am ready."
This the sun looks on between two seaboards,
I heard another say, "I am ready to be killed."
O sunburned clear-eyed boys!
       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."
Death for the one-armed mastoid kaiser.
They are after a Hohenzollern head:
France, Russia, Britain, America—
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,
Three times ten million men thirsting the blood
Of a half-cracked one-armed child of the German kings?
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:
       The people of bleeding France,
       The people of bleeding Russia,
       The people of Britain, the people of America—
Now I say it calmly as one who has thought it over and over again at night, among the mountains, by the seacombers in storm.
I say now, by God, only fighters to-day 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,
       Good-night to the kaiser.
The breakdown and the fade-away begins.
The ghost who beckoned men who come no more—
The czar gone to the winds on God's great dustpan,
The czar a pinch of nothing,
The ghosts of the summer palaces
And the ghosts of the winter palaces!
And the kaiser, the ghost who gestures a hundred million sleeping-waking ghosts,
The kaiser will go onto God's great dustpan—
It is spoken on the walls;
It clicks in the fire-white zigzag of the Atlantic wireless;
It mutters in the bastions of thousand-mile continents;
It sings in a whistle on the midnight winds from Walla Walla to Mesopotamia:
The millions learning Turkey in the Straw and John Brown's Body,
The millions remembering windrows of dead at Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and Spottsylvania Court House,
The millions dreaming of the morning star of Appomattox,
The millions easy and calm with guns and steel, planes and prows:
       There is a hammering, drumming hell to come.
       The killing gangs are on the way.
God takes ten years or a million.
God knows when a doom is written.
God knows this job will be done and the words spoken:
Out and good-night.
       The red tubes will run,
       And the great price be paid,
       And the homes empty,
       And the wives wishing,
       And the mothers wishing.
       Well...
Maybe the morning sun is a five-cent yellow balloon,
And the evening stars the joke of a God gone crazy.
Maybe the mothers of the world,
And the life that pours from their torsal folds—
Maybe it's all a lie sworn by liars,
And a God with a cackling laughter says:
"I, the Almighty God,
I have made all this,
I have made it for kaisers, czars, and kings."
Three times ten million men say:
       God is a God of the People.
And the God who made the world
       And fixed the morning sun,
       And flung the evening stars,
       And shaped the baby hands of life,
This is the God of the Four Brothers;
This is the God of bleeding France and bleeding Russia;
The stubs and stumps of arms and legs, the eyesockets empty, the cripples, ten times a million.
The crimson thumb-print of this anathema is on the door panels of a hundred million homes.
And hurl their big shoulders
Out of it all a God who knows is sweeping clean,
Out of it all a God who sees and pierces through, is breaking and cleaning out an old thousand years, is making ready for a new thousand years.