The Music Of the Guns

When the summer is falling into twilights fading light
And the guns are booming everywhere around,
In the raucous voices shouting proud defiance to the night,
We can feel a store of comfort in their sound
In their smashing crashing rattle we are fighting freedoms battle
And we are out to win as empires loyal sons
In their belching fiery breath there is red and sudden death
To her enemies out there before our guns.
When the slopes and hills are gleaming in the flares from trench to trench
When rifles crackle like a wood alight
The clouds of fumes come rolling with burning powders stench
And the flashes show in lines across the night
Every shot that goes a- flashing through the lead-torn night a-crashing
Is an effort to an ultimate result
Every cartridge we expend is one less toward the end
Of the menace of the vile Teutonic Kult
Of the foul man-killing terrors and the ripping shot and shell
Cannot break the moral spirit of the ranks
For amid the awful chaos when they loose the bars of hell
They're as calm as if the foe were firing blanks.
All the hail of high explosive and the awful gas corrosive
Any terror that the Teuton can invent
Cannot daunt us in the fight; through the curtain of the hight
We can hear out guns, and hearing rest content.
There is a music in their booming when they're sending blow for blow
In the whistling of the shells upon the way
That will burst in flame and fury on the hidden distant foe,
and we glory in their firing night and day.
And if I must pass in battle, let it be amid their rattle,
One of Austral's humble freedom-loving sons,
Happy, thus thrice happy I, quite content if need be die
In the rhythmic music of Australia's guns.