Left - New Years Greeting Card from MHAHS collection
This Service Selection comes from one of Service's later volumes of verse, Rhymes of A Rebel, published in 1952. Interesting, but obviously not a particularly optimistic outlook on the future. Written after a lifetime that had seen the horrors of World War I, ("The war to end all wars") only to become a refugee from his home wrought by the Nazi invasion of France in World War II, one must ponder how different Robert would of approached this poem if it was written today?
Nineteen Ninety-Nine
by Robert W. Service
Dire New Year's Eve - a Century is near
Its agonizing, unlamented death;
A hundred years of fortitude and fear,
Of devastation and distressful breath,
Racked by world wars, the last four-fold the worst;
Tis passing now - a Century accurst.
And sitting by my dying fire tonight
I think: O what a woeful world this is!
I've seen the rise and fall of Russian might,
The crash of dictatures and dynasties:
When each new moon was maligning the dead
I've borne the Teuton terror and the Red.
Yet no salvation for mankind I see;
The devil-men have swayed this world too long;
Mankind will ever struggle to be free,
And right will never triumph over wrong.
(How I recall with nauseating shock
The horror of the Nazi midnight knock!)
Nature is beautiful and mostly kind,
And yet with war a curt decade away
I see a rancid race, embittered blind,
In lands of desolation and decay:
I see a Century that dies in pain
From languishing of anarchy's red reign.
Life is a mystery and will always be;
The destiny of man is dawnless death.
No hope of human brotherhood I see,
One world, one race, one rule - waste not your breath!
We have unleashed dark demons of untruth:
We die of too much knowledge, too much truth.
In ignorance is happiness, a cot
Is richer than the palace of a king;
The brutish peasant in his lowly lot
Should be the object of our envying:
Back to the soil - our pride shall end in this:
The path of progress leads to the abyss.
The span from fruitfulness to frightfulness
Is just the echo of a tyrant's word.
Tonight a siécle of dark distress
Is dying - O have mercy on us, Lord!
Be peace Thy very name, if God Thou be,
And in our hearts, this new-born Century
May there reign Justice, Love, Humility!
