288 E N G L I S H S A G A

Hot blood pulsing through the veins,
Youth's high hope a burning fire,
Young men needs must break the chains
That hold them from their hearts' desire."1

But by 1916 the note had changed. With the commencement
of the great slaughter on the Somme it could scarcely have
done otherwise. On the first day of the battle alone, 60,000
casualties were sustained—the very flower of England. And week
by week, as the brazen fury continued and a whole countryside was
churned into a slimy mire of death, victory was realised to be an
infinitely distant goal, far beyond the reach of most of those
striving for it. Courage grew commonplace,- strength faltered,
vision faded. The poetry of fighting England became grimmer,
often bitterly ironic, yet none the less, with the extraordinary
capacity of the English for rejecting by ignoring calamity,
soaring in moments of ecstasy above "the smoke and stir of this
dim spot which men call earth," and seeing beauty above the
horror of carnage. N-

"Music of whispering trees
Hushed by the broad-winged breeze
Where shaken water gleams;
And evening radiance falling
With reedy bird-notes calling.

0 bear me safe through dark, you low-voiced streams.

1 have no need to pray
That fear may pass away;

I scorn the growl and rumble of the fight

That summons me from cool

Silence of marsh and pool,

And ydlow lilies islanded in light.

0 river of stars and shadows, lead me through the night!"2

In the last two years of the war, as poet after poet passed into
the ghostly company of the mouthless dead, the lyrical note was
drowned in the angry, unpitying clamour of a universe gone

lThe Muse in Arms 32—Poem by R. M. Dennys.
•The War Poems of Sugfiud Sassoon, Before the Batik.