Robert W. Service
The same old sprint in the morning, boys, to the same old din and smut;
Chained all day to the same old desk, down in the same old rut;
Posting the same old greasy books, catching the same old train:
Oh, how will I manage to stick it all, if I ever get back again?
We’ve bidden good-bye to life in a cage, we’re finished with pushing a pen;
They’re pumping us full of bellicose rage, they’re showing us how to be men.
We’re only beginning to find ourselves; we’re wonders of brawn and thew;
But when we go back to our Sissy jobs,—oh, what are we going to do?
For shoulders curved with the counter stoop will be carried erect and square;
And faces white from the office light will be bronzed by the open air;
And we’ll walk with the stride of a new-born pride,
with a new-found joy in our eyes,
Scornful men who have diced with death under the naked skies.
And when we get back to the dreary grind, and the bald-headed boss’s call,
Don’t you think that the dingy window-blind, and the dingier office wall,
Will suddenly melt to a vision of space, of violent, flame-scarred night?
Then . . . oh, the joy of the danger-thrill, and oh, the roar of the fight!
Don’t you think as we peddle a card of pins the counter will fade away,
And again we’ll be seeing the sand-bag rims, and the barb-wire’s misty grey?
As a flat voice asks for a pound of tea, don’t you fancy we’ll hear instead
The night-wind moan and the soothing drone of the packet that’s overhead?
Don’t you guess that the things we’re seeing now
will haunt us through all the years;
Heaven and hell rolled into one, glory and blood and tears;
Life’s pattern picked with a scarlet thread, where once we wove with a grey
To remind us all how we played our part in the shock of an epic day?
Oh, we’re booked for the Great Adventure now,
we’re pledged to the Real Romance;
We’ll find ourselves or we’ll lose ourselves somewhere in giddy old France;
We’ll know the zest of the fighter’s life; the best that we have we’ll give;
We’ll hunger and thirst; we’ll die . . . but first—
we’ll live; by the gods, we’ll live!
We’ll breathe free air and we’ll bivouac under the starry sky;
We’ll march with men and we’ll fight with men,
and we’ll see men laugh and die;
We’ll know such joy as we never dreamed; we’ll fathom the deeps of pain:
But the hardest bit of it all will be—when we come back home again.
For some of us smirk in a chiffon shop,
and some of us teach in a school;
Some of us help with the seat of our pants to polish an office stool;
The merits of somebody’s soap or jam some of us seek to explain,
But all of us wonder what we’ll do when we have to go back again.
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Analysis (AI Assisted)
This poem dives into the complex emotions of men thrust from mundane civilian lives into the chaos and thrill of war. It’s a bittersweet reflection, capturing both the exhilaration of newfound purpose and the dread of returning to a life that now feels shallow and confining. Beneath the bravado and dark humor, there’s a deep unease about how war reshapes a person, leaving them forever changed in ways that don’t fit into their old routines.
The poem starts with a scornful tone for the monotony of pre-war existence. The “same old sprint” and “same old greasy books” paint a picture of drudgery, where men were trapped in small, uninspiring lives. War, with all its horrors, is ironically presented as an escape. There’s a strange gratitude for the transformation it offers, teaching them to live in ways their office-bound pasts never could. Words like “brawn,” “bronzed,” and “stride” evoke a physical and emotional awakening, as though war, despite its brutality, reveals the essence of what it means to be alive.
But this isn’t a simple glorification of war. The tone shifts, becoming tinged with anxiety as the poem anticipates the aftermath. The soldiers may gain a new pride and resilience, but they know these qualities will be out of place in the “dingy” world they left behind. The absurdity of returning to sell pins or polish stools after dodging death is stark. Even the most mundane tasks are imagined as haunted by war: the counter melts into sandbags, the customer’s voice is drowned out by memories of gunfire. It’s a poignant reminder that the battlefield lingers long after the fight is over, embedded in those who survive.
The final stanzas wrestle with the inevitability of going back to their old lives. The sarcasm toward jobs like teaching or selling soap highlights the gulf between their current experiences and the banalities of civilian life. Yet the poem avoids outright despair. There’s pride in “the shock of an epic day,” a sense that war, for all its horrors, has given them something profound—a kind of meaning or identity they’ll carry, even if it doesn’t fit neatly into the world they left behind.
What lingers most is the tension between living fully and enduring normalcy. War is presented as both a liberation and a burden, forcing men to confront extremes of joy and pain, life and death. The poem doesn’t celebrate war so much as it mourns the loss of simplicity—of lives that can no longer be small, grey, or contained. It’s a complicated, human reflection on how extraordinary experiences can make the ordinary unbearable.