We came behind him by the wall,
My brethren drew their brands,
And they had strength to strike him down —
And I to bind his hands.Only once, to a lantern gleam,
He turned his face from the wall,
And it was as the accusing angel’s face
On the day when the stars shall fall.I grasped the axe with shaking hands,
I stared at the grass I trod;
For I feared to see the whole bare heavens
Filled with the face of God.

I struck: the serpentine slow blood
In four arms soaked the moss —
Before me, by the living Christ,
The blood ran in a cross.

Therefore I toil in forests here
And pile the wood in stacks,
And take no fee from shivering folk
Till I have cleansed the axe.

But for a curse God cleared my sight,
And where each tree doth grow
I see a life with awful eyes,
And I must lay it low.

G K Chesterton (1873 – 1936) was a large man, standing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) and weighing around 20 stone 6 pounds (130 kg; 286 lb). His girth gave rise to a famous anecdote. During the First World War a lady in London asked why he was not “out at the Front“; he replied, “If you go round to the side, you will see that I am.”  On another occasion he remarked to his friend George Bernard Shaw, “To look at you, anyone would think a famine had struck England.” Shaw retorted, “To look at you, anyone would think you have caused it.”   P. G. Wodehouse once described a very loud crash as “a sound like G. K. Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin”.

Chesterton usually wore a cape and a crumpled hat, with a swordstick in hand, and a cigar hanging out of his mouth. He had a tendency to forget where he was supposed to be going and miss the train that was supposed to take him there. It is reported that on several occasions he sent a telegram to his wife Frances from some distant (and incorrect) location, writing such things as “Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?” to which she would reply, “Home”.

However Chesterton faced accusations of anti-Semitism during his lifetime, as well as posthumously.  An early supporter of Captain Dreyfus, by 1906 he had turned into an anti-dreyfusard.   From the early 20th century, his fictional work included caricatures of Jews, stereotyping them as greedy, cowardly, disloyal and communists.