Poetry Service, Robert W.: Rhymes of a Red Cross Man. v1. 2 Feb 2008

[The Old Man]

I've tinkered at my bits of rhymes
In weary, woeful, waiting times;
In doleful hours of battle-din,
Ere yet they brought the wounded in;
Through vigils of the fateful night,
In lousy barns by candle-light;
In dug-outs, sagging and aflood,
On stretchers stiff and bleared with blood;
By ragged grove, by ruined road,
By hearths accurst where Love abode;
By broken altars, blackened shrines
I've tinkered at my bits of rhymes.
1st Stanza from Forward, Rhymes of a Red Cross Man

Robert Service, more well-known for his Yukon ballads, served as an ambulance driver in France during WWI. This volume of verse was first published in 1916.

This is the second volume of Service’s verse that I have formatted for the Sony Reader, the first being The Spell of the Yukon. I converted an HTML file using libprs500 and tried to arrange the poems and stanzas in a readable format using the M (Medium) font.

It is difficult to achieve something similar to the printed book as, with poetry, lines must end at a particular place and stanzas should be separated with a blank line or a new page.
In addition spacing of words is all important to a “smooth” reading of verse. Any suggestions are appreciated.

Robert’s poems are best read aloud. In this collection you will find humor, sadness, pathos and war commentary, and it will be a hard individual, indeed, that will read some of these poems without a tear falling from the eye.