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FOR REMEMBRANCE
SOLDIER POETS WHO HAVE FALLEN
IN THE WAR
Photo by Sherril Schell
RUPERT BROOKE.
SUB-LIEUT. R.N.V.R.
FOR REMEMBR ANCE
SOLDIER POETS WHO HAVE
FALLEN IN THE WAR
BY
A. St. JOHN ADCOCK
Revised and Enlarged Edition
If his dust is one day lying in an unfamiliar land
(England, he went for you),
O England, sometimes think of him, of thousands only one,
In the dawning, or the noonday, or the setting of the sun,
As once he thought of you.'
Lieut. H. Reginald Freston, The Gift.
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LIMITED LONDON
• * * t . •
• * • • • •
( ' * •
Note
The Author's thanks are due to the relatives,
friends and publishers of the Soldier Poets
referred to in this volume for kindly lending him
portraits, supplying biographical information,
and giving permission for the use of extracts ;
to Viscount Wolmer for a copy of the lines by
his brother, Captain the Hon. Robert Palmer ;
and to Mrs. William Sharp, Mrs. S. Masefield,
Miss Littlejohn, Mrs. Stables, Mr. Ben R. Streets,
Mrs. M. Crombie, and Mrs. Upton Robins for
copies of unpublished poems by Lieut. Walter
! Lightowler Wilkinson, Acting-Captain Charles
i J. B. Masefield, Company - Sergeant - Major
^ W. H. Littlejohn, Lieut. J. Howard Stables,
Sergeant J. W. Streets, Captain Eugene Crom-
bie, and Captain George Upton Robins. He is
indebted to Mr. John Lane for permission to
use some extracts from the letters in Soldier
and Dramatist, by Harold Chapin, and to Messrs.
I Hodder and Stoughton for permission to use the
o extract from Men of Letters, by Dixon Scott.
The list on pages 1-8 contains the titles of books
of verse from which poetical extracts in this
volume are taken, with names of their publishers.
A. St. J. A.
192, !
List of Portraits
Sub-Lieut. Rupert Brooke, R.N.V.R. Frontispiece
PAGE
Captain Brian Brooke, 2nd Gordon High-
landers ...... 16
Captain the Hon. Julian Grenfell, D.S.O.,
Royal Dragoons ..... 32
Lieut. W. Noel Hodgson, M.C., 9th Devon
Regt. ....... 40
Lance-Corporal Francis Ledwidge, Innis-
killing Fusiliers ..... 48
Captain the Hon. Colwyn Erasmus Arnold
Philipps, Royal Horse Guards . . 60
Lieut, the Hon. E. Wyndham Tennant,
Grenadier Guards .... 64
Lieut. Robert Sterling, Royal Scots
Fusiliers ...... 72
2nd Lieut. Harold Parry, 17th King's
Royal Rifles ..... 80
Captain George Upton Robins, East Yorks
Regt. ...... 88
Lieut. Edward Thomas, Royal Garrison
Artillery ...... 96
Lieut. Bernard Pitt, Border Regt. . .112
viii For Remembrance
2nd Lieut. Hugh Reginald Freston, 3rd
Royal Berks Regt.
Acting-Captain Charles J. B. Masefield
M.C., 5th North Staffs Regt.
Lieut. Ewart Alan Mackintosh, M.C
Seaforth Highlanders .
Sergt. Leslie Coulson, London Batt. Royal
Fusiliers . . . .
Sergt. J. W. Streets, 13th Yorks and Lan
caster Regt. ....
Captain Eric Fitzwater Wilkinson, M.C.
West Yorks Regt.
Captain Charles Hamilton Sorley, Suffolk
Regt. .....
Corporal Alexander Robertson, 12th Yorks
and Lancaster Regt.
Lieut. Arthur Lewis Jenkins, R.F.C.
Captain Richard Dennys, Loyal North
Lanes. Regt. ....
Captain Eugene Crombie, 4th Gordon
Highlanders ....
2nd Lieut. Francis St. Vincent Morris
Sherwood Foresters
Lieut. T. M. Kettle, Dublin Fusiliers
Lieut. R. E. Vernede, Rifle Brigade
PAGE
144
152
160
176
192
200
208
216
224
240
256
272
280
288
Soldier Poets who have fallen in
the War
To Odin's challenge we cried, Amen !
We stayed the plough and laid by the pen
And shouldered our guns like gentlemen,
That the wiser weak should hold. . . .
Then lift the flag of the Last Crusade,
And fill the ranks of the Last Brigade !
March on to the fields where the world 's remade
And the Ancient Dreams come true !
Lieut. T. M. Kettle, Poems and Parodies.
Brian Brooke. Captain, 2nd Gordon High-
landers. (Fell in action, 1st July 1916.
Died of wounds, 25th July.) Poems. With
a Foreword by M. P. Willcocks (John Lane).
Rupert Brooke. Sub-Lieut. R.N.V.R. (Died
on active service, 23rd April 1915.) 1914.
and Other Poems; Collected Poems. With
Memoir (Sidgwick and Jackson).
Frank S. Brown. Sergt. Princess Pat's Cana-
dian Light Infantry. (Killed in France, 3rd
February 1915.) Contingent Ditties, and
Other Soldier Songs of the Great War (Samp-
son Low).
James D. Burns. Corporal, 21st Batt., 6th
Brigade, A.I.F. (Killed in action, Sep-
tember 1915.) The Story of the Anzacs
(Melbourne : Ingram).
A
For Remembrance
Ivar Campbell. Lieut. Argyll and Sutherland
Highlanders. (Died of wounds, 8th January
1916.) Poems. With Memoir by Guy Rid-
ley (A. L. Humphreys).
Leonard Niell Cook, M.C. 2nd Lieut. Royal
Lanes. Regt. (Killed in action, 7th July
1917.) More Songs by the Fighting Men
(Erskine Macdonald).
Leslie Coulson. Sergt. London Batt. Royal
Fusiliers. (Killed in action, 7th October
1916.) From an Outpost and Other Poems.
With Introduction by F. Raymond Coulson
(Erskine Macdonald).
Arthur Scott Craven (A. K. Harvey James).
Captain, Buffs. (Killed in action, April
1917.) Joe Skinner ; Alarums and Excur-
sions ; The Last of the English (Elkin
Mathews) ; A FooVs Tragedy. A Novel
(Martin Seeker).
Eugene Crombie. Captain, 4th Gordon High-
landers. (Killed in action, 23rd April 1917.)
More Songs by the Fighting Men (Erskine
Macdonald).
Jeffery Day. Flight - Commander, R.N.A.S.
(Shot down in air - fight, 27th February
1918.) Poems and Rhymes. With Memoir
by E. H. V. (Sidgwick and Jackson).
Richard Dennys. Captain, Loyal North Lanes.
Regt. (Wounded in Somme advance, 12th
July 1916. Died, 24th July.) There is No
Death. With Foreword by Captain Desmond
Coke (John Lane).
Henry Lionel Field. Lieut. Royal Warwick-
Soldier Poets
shire Regt. (Killed in action, 1st July 1916.)
Poems and Drawings (Birmingham : Cornish
Bros.).
Clifford Flower. Driver, Royal Field Ar-
tillery. (Killed in action, 20th April 1917.)
Memoir and Poems (Privately printed).
Hugh Reginald (Rex) Freston. 2nd Lieut.
3rd Royal Berkshire Regt. (Killed in action,
24th January 1916.) The Quest of Truth
and Other Poems (Oxford : Blackwell). The
Poetry of H. Rex Freston, by Russell Mark-
land (Ling).
The Hon. Gerald William Grenfell. Lieut.
Rifle Brigade. (Killed in action, 30th July
1915.) The Muse in Arms. Edited by
E. B. Osborn (John Murray).
The Hon. Julian Grenfell, D.S.O. Captain,
Royal Dragoons. (Wounded, 12th May
1915. Died, 26th May.) Soldier Poets
(Erskine Macdonald). Julian Grenfell, by
Viola Meynell (Burns and Oates).
William Hamilton. Lieut. Machine Gun
Guards. (Killed in action, 1917.) Modern
Poems (Oxford : Blackwell).
William Noel Hodgson, M.C. Lieut. 9th
Devon Regt. (Killed in action, 1st July
1916.) Verse and Prose in Peace and War
(John Murray); Soldier Poets (Erskine
Macdonald).
A. L. Jenkins. Lieut. R.F.C. (Killed in
aeroplane accident, 31st December 1917.)
Forlorn Adventurers. With Introduction by
Frank Fletcher (Sidgwick and Jackson).
For Remembrance
Thomas M. Kettle. Lieut. Dublin Fusiliers.
(Killed in action, September 1916.) Poems
and Parodies. With Preface by William
Dawson (London : Duckworth. Dublin :
Talbot Press). Prose : The Ways of War
(Constable) ; The Day's Burden (Maunsel).
Joyce Kilmer.
Poems (Hodder and Stoughton).
Francis Ledwidge. Lance-Corpl. Inniskilling
Fusiliers. (Killed in action, 1917.) Songs
of the Fields ; Songs of Peace ; Last Songs.
With Introductions by Lord Dunsany
(Herbert Jenkins).
Frank Lewis. Flight Sub-Lieut. R.N.A.S.
(Killed in air battle, 21st August 1917.)
More Songs by the Fighting Men (Erskine
Macdonald).
W. H. Littlejohn. Company-Sergt. -Major,
Middlesex Regt. (Killed in action, 10th
April 1917.) The Muse in Arms. Edited
by E. B. Osborn (John Murray).
John McCrae. Lieut.-Col. C.E.F. (Died in
France, 28th January 1918.) In Flanders
Fields (Hodder and Stoughton).
Ewart Alan Mackintosh, M.C. Lieut. Seaforth
Highlanders. (Killed in action, 21st Novem-
ber 1917.) A Highland Regiment and Other
Poems ; War the Liberator and Other Pieces.
With Memoir by John Murray (John Lane).
Hamish Mann. 2nd Lieut. Black Watch.
(Wounded, 9th April 1917. Died, 10th April.)
A Subaltern's Musings (John Long).
Charles John Beech Masefield, M.C. Acting
Captain, 5th North Staffs Regt. (Fatally
Soldier Poets
wounded in action, 1st July 1917. Died, a
prisoner, 2nd July.) The Seasons' Difference
and Other Poems; Dislikes: Some Modern
Satires (Fifield) ; More Songs by the Fighting
Men (Erskine Macdonald) ; Gilbert Hermer.
A Novel (Blackwood).
Colin Mitchell. Sergt. Rifle Brigade.
(Killed in action, 22nd March 1918.)
Trampled Clay (Erskine Macdonald).
Francis St. Vincent Morris. 2nd Lieut.
3rd Batt. Sherwood Foresters. Transferred
R.F.C. (Died of wounds, 29th April 1917.)
Poems. With a Memoir by L. A. G. S.
(Oxford: Blackwell).
The Hon. Robert Palmer. Captain, Hants
Regt. (Wounded on Tigris, 21st January
1916. Died, a prisoner in Turkish camp.)
The Muse in Arms. Edited by E. B. Osborn
(John Murray).
Harold Parry. 2nd Lieut. 17th King's Royal
Rifles. (Killed by shell, 6th May 1917.)
Letters and Poems. With Memoir by G. P. D.
(Walsall : W. H. Smith and Son).
The Hon. Colwyn Erasmus Arnold Philipps.
Captain, Royal Horse Guards. (Killed in
action, 13th May 1915.) Poems and Letters
(John Murray).
Bernard Pitt. Lieut. Border Regt. (Killed
in action, 30th April 1916.) Essays, Poems,
Letters. With Introduction by Alfred J.
Wyatt (Francis Edwards).
A. Victor Ratcliffe. Lieut. 10/13th West
Yorks Regt. (Killed in action, 1st July
1916.) Soldier Poets (Erskine Macdonald).
For Remembrance
Alexander Robertson. Corpl. 12th Yorks
and Lancaster Regt. (Killed in action,
1st July 1916.) Comrades ; Last Poems
(Elkin Mathews).
George Upton Robins. Captain, East Yorks
Regt. (Killed in action, 5th May 1915.)
Lays of the Hertfordshire Hunt. With Pre-
face by Major-Gen. Earl Cavan, and Memoir
(A. L. Humphreys).
Edward Stanley Russell, M.C. Captain,
1st Herefordshire Regt. (Killed in action,
6th November 1917.) Memoir by Rev.
Arnold H. Lewis, and selection of poems in
preparation.
Alan Seeger. Private, Foreign Legion of
France. (Killed in action, 29th June 1916.)
Poems. With Introduction by William
Archer ; Letters and Diary (Constable).
William Ambrose Short, C.M.G. Lieut. -Col.
R.F.A. (Killed in action, 21st June 1917.)
Poems (A. L. Humphreys).
Henry Lamont Simpson. Lieut. 1st Lanes.
Fusiliers. (Killed in action, 29th August
1918.) Moods and Tenses. With Introduc-
tion by H. C. Dufhn (Erskine Macdonald).
Geoffrey Bache Smith. Lieut. Lancashire
Fusiliers. (Killed in action, 3rd December
1916.) A Spring Harvest (Erskine Mac-
donald).
Charles Hamilton Sorley. Captain, Suffolk
Regt. (Killed in action, 13th October 1915.)
Marlborough and Other Poems. With Preface
by W. R. S. (Cambridge University Press).
Soldier Poets
J. Howard Stables. Lieut. Gurkha Rifles.
(Wounded in action in Mesopotamia and
missing, 17th February 1917. Since re-
ported killed.) The Sorrow that Whistled
(Elkin Mathews).
Robert W. Sterling. Lieut. Royal Scots
Fusiliers. (Killed in action, 23rd April
1915.) Poems. With Memoir (Oxford
University Press).
John E. Stewart, M.C. Major, Staffordshire
Regt. (Killed in action, 26th April 1918.)
More Songs by the Fighting Men (Erskine
Macdonald).
John William Streets. Sergt. 13th Yorks and
Lancaster Regt. (Wounded in action and
missing, 1st July 1916. Since reported killed.)
The Undying Splendour (Erskine Macdonald).
The Hon. E. Wyndham Tennant. Lieut.
Grenadier Guards. (Killed in action,
September 1915.) Worple Flit and Other
Poems (Oxford : Blackwell).
Edward Thomas. Lieut. R.G.A. (Killed in
action, April 1917.) Poems (Selwyn and
Blount). Prose: The Tenth Muse. With
Memoir by John Freeman (Martin Seeker) ;
A Literary Pilgrim in England (Methuen) ;
The Heart of England (Dent) ; Rest and
Unrest ''Duckworth), etc.
Herbert Nicholas Todd. Private, Queen's
Westminsters. (Killed in action, 7th October
1916.) Poems and Plays (Sedbergh : Jackson
and Son).
R. E. Vernede. Lieut. Rifle Brigade. (Killed
in action, 9th April 1917.) War Poems.
8 For Remembrance
With Introduction by Edmund Gosse, C.B.
(Heinemann). Prose : Letters to His Wife.
With Introduction by C. H. Vernede
(Collins) ; The Pursuit of Mr. Faviel. A
Novel (Nelson), etc.
Geoffrey Wall. Lieut. R.F.C. (Killed in
aeroplane accident, August 1917.) Songs of
an Airman. With Memoir by L. A. Adam-
son. Letters of an Airman (Melbourne :
Australian Authors Agency).
Bernard Charles de Boismaison White.
Lieut. 1st Tyneside Scottish Regt. (Killed
in action, 1st July 1916.) Remembrance and
Other Verses. With Memoir by de V. Payen-
Payne (Selwyn and Blount).
Eric Fitzwater Wilkinson, M.C. Captain,
West Yorkshire Regt. (Killed in action, 9th
October 1917.) Sunrise Dreams (Erskine
Macdonald); Poet and Soldier, by Fitzvater
Wray ; Poetry Review (Erskine Macdorald).
Walter Lightowler Wilkinson. Lieut. 8th
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. (Killed
in action, 9th April 1917.) More Songs by
the Fighting Men (Erskine Macdonaid).
T. P. Cameron Wilson. Captain, Sherwood
Foresters. (Killed in action, 23rd March
1918.) Magpies in Picardy. With Memoir
by H. M. (The Poetry Bookshop).
Cyril W. Winterbotham. Lieut. Gloucester-
shire Regt. (Killed in action, 27th August
1916.) Poems. Published for private cir-
culation. (Cheltenham : Banks and Son.)
The Muse in Arms. Edited by E. B.
Osborn (John Murray).
Compare this England of to-day
With England as she once has been.
Capt. C. H. Sorley, A Call to Action.
Here and there, in or near towns and
villages all about these Islands, in the
summer of 1918, when I am writing this,
you will come upon public gardens and
recreation grounds that, nowadays, are
looking strangely desolate. One such gar-
den, an old pleasaunce from which the
noise of the City is walled out, lies near
the centre of London, and I cannot pass it
now without an impulse to bare my head.
There is no grass on the wide lawn that
in other years was trim and green. It
has been worn away by the feet of the
young recruits I have seen training there
in successive companies, some in khaki,
some still in civilian dress, since the first
days of the war ; and the quiet, flower-
bordered space is as black and bare to-day
as if no grass had ever grown over it. The
feet that have trodden it so have toiled
since through the mud of France and
io For Remembrance
Flanders, through the sands of Palestine
or Mesopotamia, or up the rugged steeps
of Gallipoli, and too many of them shall
never take the way homeward any more.
Our hearts know what these barren patches
mean, for the shadow of their barrenness
falls far across the lives we live. Some
day the grass will grow again and happiness
return to some of us, but too much is gone
that can never return.
Yet in our hearts, too, we know on an
afterthought, that
Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast — nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.
These men, these boys, who died that
Freedom might live and that the higher
hopes of mankind should not be trampled
under by the lower, knew why they made
the great sacrifice, and made it willingly
in such a cause. And it is part of our
pride in them that in this they have done
nothing new, have taken no new way, but
have trodden instinctively and worthily
in a beaten track ; their courage, chivalry,
love of justice, are theirs by inheritance,
Soldier Poets n
the ideals that led them are the common
ideals that have led the best of our race
through the past. So much you may
learn by reading in the books that have
been written by many soldier authors
who have fought in this war and revealed
in their verse or prose the faith and spirit
that prompted them and their comrades-
in-arms ; and, since it is still true that the
soul of a nation lives in its literature, we
shall understand them better, perhaps, and
see how indissolubly they are linked up
with the old traditions of our people, if we
look back a little before we go farther.
It is curious to note that some contem-
porary enthusiasts speak and write of the
democratic feeling which has broadened
and deepened among us in these days as
if it were a quite modern, rather sudden
growth — a brand new spirit of common
brotherhood that had been called into
existence by the exigencies of the war.
For most of us know it is merely the
coming to full tide of the mighty under-
current that has been slowly gathering
force in our life, as in our literature, all
12 For Remembrance
down the centuries. You may catch
sounds of it in Chaucer, a fuller music of
it in Langland ; and thenceforward, to
Morris, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne,
and our soldier authors of to-day, there
is scarcely a poet of any significance who
does not more or less preach that simple
gospel of humanity. Nor are these apostles
of democracy to be set aside as discontented
plebeians. The courtly Gascoigne, passion-
ately denouncing social wrongs and in-
equalities and urging the duty of man to
his fellows —
O Knights, O Squires, O Gentle bloods yborn,
You were not born all only for yourselves —
was as fine a democrat in the sixteenth
century as Shelley was in the nineteenth.
There are as true and trenchant things
said for democracy in Sir Thomas More's
Utopia as in the books of such moderns
as Ruskin, Dickens, Carlyle, Wells, Shaw ;
and it is no stranger that our people
should have risen spontaneously now for
the democratic ideal of freedom that is so
literally in their blood, than that they
Soldier Poets 13
should have put off the mild habits of
civilian life and become instantly as
hardy, fearless, and chivalrous soldiers as
any in the world's history, for these
qualities also are in their birthright.
We are accustomed to being patronised
as an unimaginative race, in spite of the
fact that no country has produced a
greater imaginative literature. We are
accustomed to being classed as a nation
of shopkeepers, and have accepted the
description indifferently, for it is not as
if we had been accused of limiting our
business activities to a single trade and
(emulating the peculiar Prussian aspiration)
of transforming ourselves into a nation of
butchers. W T hen you think of it, we
actually are shopkeepers, in the large,
sane meaning of the term, nor is it any way
to our discredit, so long as we make it
clear, as we are doing again, that our
honour is not of the things we sell.
Even Shakespeare was a shopkeeper,
an unusually capable one ; and his partner-
ship in a successful theatrical business did
not prevent him from being a greater poet
14 For Remembrance
than any who never soiled his hands in a
shop. A peaceful, useful occupation, shop-
keeping in general is easily compatible
with the pursuit of culture, with the living
of that finer life of the spirit which
differentiates the civilised man from the
crude savage whose staple industry is war.
It is a barbaric folk who, though there is
no battle toward, delight in being soldiers
all the time and accentuating the symbols
of their profession. Those who have
emerged from barbarism do not cease to
be fighting men because they have ceased
to be fighting men only. America and
France are demonstrating that, and for
ourselves — there is not more than an
infinitesimal part of our army that knew
how to handle a gun before this war was
declared, and it was significant of our small
professional army that, so far from loving
to clothe itself in extravagant terrors, its
officers made it almost a point of etiquette
to get out of uniform into mufti whenever
they were off duty.
I think the native common sense of the
shopkeeping Britisher brought him long
Soldier Poets 15
since to see the absurdity of the cult of
militarism, the childishness of cultivating
ferocious moustaches and wearing spiked
helmets in order to look dangerous. That
sort of thing, which passes in Germany as
impressive and up-to-date, is ridiculously
behind the times. They know better even
in China than to cling any longer to a
hope of being able to terrify their oppo-
nents by wearing ugly masks. Another
point in our favour, as a civilised race, is
that we do not and never did devote our
energies to acquiring the goose-step. Like
sensible people we are contented to leave
that style of locomotion to the bird that
is naturally afflicted with it.
Anyhow, those manifestations of raw
barbarism are obsolete ; they are signs,
in a modern community, of moral and
mental degeneracy. German professors
have confidently written us down as
degenerates because the passion for
militarism, the lust for conquest, has
departed from us, and we are no longer
moved to spend our lives in swaggering
about in battle array, rattling sharp swords
16 For Remembrance
and truculently menacing the goods and
lives of our neighbours. But I prefer to
believe that since we became a lettered,
cultured community we have lost the taste
for blood, and that the arrogant exhibition
of courage has never entered into our con-
ception of the competent, heroic warrior.
In the last seven centuries, which of
our poets who have themselves been
soldiers have blustered of their brute
strength or eulogised the glory of war ?
Though Chaucer fought against France
under Edward in. and tells in gallant
fashion of tilt and tourney and the high
doings of chivalry, there is little that is
martial in his poetry. You remember
the Knight in his Canterbury Tales — how he
had proved himself 4 full worthy ' in war ;
had for his puissance been placed at table
above the knights of every other country ;
yet as his crowning praise Chaucer chronicles
it that, though brave, he was wise,
And of his port as meek as is a maid.
He never yet no villainy ne said
In all his life unto no manner wight :
He was a very perfect gentle knight.
BRIAN BROOKE.
CAPTAIN, 2ND GORDON HIGHLANDERS.
Soldier Poets 17
Moreover, into his conception of the
Temple of Mars the father of English
poetry puts nothing of that pride and
splendour of war which might be supposed
to appeal to a soldier poet of his earlier
day : it is a ' sory place,' he says, and
the paintings on its walls are all of murder,
assassinations, ' open warres,' with bleeding
wretches in agony, and in the midst
sits Mischance,
With sory comfort and evil countenance.
True, there is a figure of Conquest painted
up in a tower, but as he sits with a sword
suspended above him by a single thread,
it is not to be presumed that his position
is worth occupying.
There is nothing whatever in the verse
of the Earl of Surrey to remind you that
he went fighting in France. Sir Walter
Raleigh, that daring, dashing hero, never
fought with his pen : all his poems are
of an amatory, philosophical, or pleasantly
pastoral order. And Sir Philip Sidney,
our ideal soldier, made no song that boasts
of his prowess or triumphs over his
enemies, but wrote the loveliest sonnets
18 For Remembrance
to the moon, to sleep, to love, and verses
that sigh over the vanity of human things.
These, and other of our soldier poets like
them, dead and living, seem to be a vastly
different type of fighting man from the
4 blond i beast,' the professional slaughterer
adored of the German intellectuals, and
this war is showing and will show which
of the two types is fittest to survive in a
reasonable world, and which belongs to the
jungle and is doomed to extinction.
Two hundred years after Chaucer was
dead, you find his ideal of the British
soldier persisting (for it was the national
ideal) in Ben Jonson's epistle c to a friend,
Master Colby, to persuade him to the
wars ' — an appeal that might well have
been written yesterday, so applicable is it
to what has happened in our generation : —
Wake, friend, from forth thy lethargy : the drum
Beats brave and loud in Europe, and bids come
All that dare rouse, or are not loath to quit
Their vicious ease and be o'erwhelmed with it.
It is a call to keep the spirits alive
That gasp for action and would yet revive
Man's buried honour in his sleepy life,
Quickening dead nature to her noblest strife. . . .
Soldier Poets 19
Go, quit them all, and take along with thee
Thy true friend's wishes, Colby, which shall be
That thine be just and honest, that thy deeds
Not wound thy conscience when thy body bleeds ;
That thou dost all things more for truth than glory,
And never but for doing wrong be sorry ;
That by commanding first thyself thou mak'st
Thy person fit for any charge thou tak'st ;
That fortune never make thee to complain,
But what she gives thou dare give her again ;
That whatsoever face thy fate puts on
Thou shrink nor start not, but be always one ;
That thou think nothing great but what is good,
And from that thought strive to be understood.
So, 'live or dead, thou wilt preserve a fame
Still precious with the odour of thy name ;
And last, blaspheme not ; we did never hear
Man thought the valianter 'cause he durst swear.
These take, and now go seek thy peace in war :
Who falls for love of God shall rise a star.
Ben was no milk-and-water poet either.
In his youth he fought with our armies in
Flanders ; he was not without experience
of war, and you may take it he was address-
ing, in Master Colby, the type of English-
man who shattered the pride of the Spanish
Armada, who wrought on the same field
as Sidney — men who went into battle not
as ravening brutes lusting to befoul any
victory they won by a savage slaughter
20 For Remembrance
of children and women and defenceless
civilians, but as free, clean human crea-
tures, prepared to take arms and slay
or be slain, in fair fight with armed men,
for a cause they felt to be just, and yet
in the hour of triumph
By objects which might force the soul to abate
Her feeling, rendered more compassionate.
Pass over another two centuries, and
the same national ideal of the British
soldier survives still inviolate in Tenny-
son's 4 Ode on the Death of the Duke of
Wellington ' : —
Yet remember all
He spoke among you, and the Man who spoke ;
Who never sold the truth to serve the hour,
Nor paltered with eternal God for power ;
Who never spoke against a foe ;
Whose eighty winters freeze with one rebuke
All great self-seekers trampling on the right ;
Truth-teller was our English Alfred named ;
Truth-lover was our English Duke ;
Whatever record leap to light,
He never shall be shamed.
The same ideal of the great soldier
recurs again and again to-day in the songs
of our soldier poets, for it is the racial
tradition in which they and their comrades
Soldier Poets 21
grew up while they were men of peace, and
inevitably it fashioned them in its likeness
when they became soldiers themselves.
Certainly, some little has been written
in praise of war by some of our last
century authors who had only seen it
from a distance — they were reconciled
to it because they imagined it had re-
generating influences on mankind, that it
gave fresh impetus to commercial enter-
prise and fostered the arts. There may
be a sediment of truth in this ; but with
equal truth you might say as much of re-
ligion. Ruskin considered it a subtle testi-
mony to this influence that spears, shields,
helmets, implements of warfare, were
lovingly and richly enchased with artistic
decorations, whilst no man was moved to
carve images of beauty on his spade or on
the handles of his plough. But whatever
significance lay in these facts belongs to
the past ; it is in the same sense significant
that nothing could be more severely un-
adorned than the modern cannon, rifle,
or machine-gun. In sober earnest, we
have arrived at a recognition of war as
22 For Remembrance
nothing but a necessary and degrading
evil in the human community, and as not
the less evil for being still necessary.
Men of reason face it now precisely as
they face the need of forming a rescue
party to descend into a burning mine or
to launch a lifeboat into the blind fury of
a storm — unafraid, but not glorying. There
are, of course, exceptions among us, but
as a nation we have arrived at years of
discretion ; we have outgrown that pride
in the exhibition of muscular superiority
over our neighbours which is pardonable,
though silly enough, in youth, but a sign
of madness in maturity ; and it would not
have been possible to rouse any enthusiasm
in this country to-day for an aggressi/e
or unjustified war. Our friends and fell* >w-
workers have armed in their millions, not
because they love 'the sport of kings,' or
because they thirst for glory, or domina-
tion, or booty ; but because they realise
that there is no other way of saving their
own souls and the soul of the world from
being cast into a primitive hell upon
earth with an All-Highest War Lord on
Soldier Poets 23
the throne of it and his two-headed Kultur
at the gate ; and because, at the outset,
their manhood and their honour would
not let them turn a deaf ear to the agony
of outraged Belgium. The cry of that
agony came to all of us with the compelling
force that is in Cromwell's poignant appeal
to the French king, when the Piedmontese,
whom France was pledged to protect, were
ruthlessly massacred by their oppressors : —
4 There are reasons of State which might
give thee inducement not to reject these
People of the Valleys flying for shelter
to thee : but I would not have thee, so
great a king as thou art, be moved to the
defence of the unfortunate by other reasons
than the promise of thy Ancestors and
thy own piety and royal benignity and
greatness of mind. So shall the praise and
fame of this most worthy action be un-
mixed and clear, and thyself shalt find the
Father of Mercy and his Son Christ, whose
name and doctrine thou shalt have vindi-
cated, the more favourable to thee and
propitious through the course of thy life.'
It is some such high cause as this, such
24 For Remembrance
principles and emotions as these that
give war nearly all the poetry and the
glory that can ever be found in it. There
is nothing of either in the mere exhibition
of military might, the boast of conquest,
the raw carnage, the hecatombs of slain.
Something magnificent there is, apart from
every ethical consideration, in all heroic
fighting against odds, in any act of supreme
courage on the field, in so desperate a
charge as that of the Light Brigade at
Balaclava, in the deathless story of the
great retreat from Mons, even if you
forget the cause for which those heroes
fell. But probably the incidents that
uplift us most in the telling are incidents
in which the kindly, self-sacrificing in-
stincts of men are seen to survive amidst
the barbarity and indescribable inferno of
a battlefield. The dying Sidney's ready
compassion for the soldier who lay wounded
beside him at Zutphen, his simple self-
renunciatory ' His need is greater than
mine,' are worth nearly all his poetry.
The right touch, too, is in each of those
innumerable tales of how on a stricken
Soldier Poets 25
Held a soldier will turn aside under a hail
of bullets to carry a wounded comrade into
safety. It is in countless records of the
present war : in the narrative of how the
men of a British battery were shattered
and decimated till only three remained, and
these three, wounded as they were, worked
the last gun unflinchingly until relief could
be sent to them ; in that of how a retiring
troop of war-worn Britishers handed their
rations over to starving refugees ; in that
of how, whenever our seamen sink the
enemy's ships they promptly lower their
boats to save the drowning Huns. And
see how finely a stray act of German
chivalry can shine out against the black
record her hordes have elsewhere made
for themselves. Somewhere along the
Marne, a French sergeant and two hundred
men were cut off from their regiment and
surrounded. They held their ground till
every man of them was killed or wounded ;
then when the victors swept in upon them
the German commander saluted the French
sergeant and was so keen to honour his
bravery that he had him carried from the
26 For Remembrance
place with his rifle lying beside him on the
stretcher. A trifle, no doubt ; but there
is a very different light about it from that
which haloes the ruins of Louvain and
the murder of Captain Fryatt.
I have known many who voluntarily
abandoned a pleasant life and golden
prospects for the future, as soon as the war
came upon us, to fight for freedom and
human rights, from nothing but an irre-
sistible sense of duty and honour. I have
stood at railway stations and seen our
soldiers — who had been clerks and artisans
a few months before — set out for the front
stoically or cheerily, and have noted how
their womenfolk, gathered to see them off,
have heartened them with smiling good-
byes, and only broken into tears when the
train had carried their men beyond sight
of their weakness. I have stood at railway
stations and seen tired and muddied
soldiers from the trenches coming home
on leave, and here and there from the vast
crowd outside a mother, a father, a wife,
a child, a sister, a brother, a sweetheart,
run forward with sudden outcries to get
Soldier Poets 27
a hold on this or that one of them, and the
two go off crying and laughing together.
I have seen the wounded coming out from
those stations and men among the patient
crowd without standing bareheaded or
stirred to sudden cheering as they passed,
and women who stepped into the road to
fling flowers upon the bandaged, recumbent
figures inside the ambulances. And I
have a vivid memory of seeing a regiment
of Scots Guards tramping along Cannon
Street from the Tower to Waterloo
Station, in the days when the war was
still new and strange to us. A sturdy,
martial body of men, they marched with
their band playing, rank after rank, four
deep, and in such numbers that the band
had gone on beyond hearing in the traffic
before the last of them went by me ; and
most vividly of all it comes back to me
of how at intervals a wife, a sweetheart,
a mother, or a friend marched with certain
of the soldiers. Particularly I remember
one bronzed guardsman, a handsome, well-
set-up fellow, who went a little out of the
line to make room betwixt himself and
28 For Remembrance
his khakied neighbour for a fatherly,
grey-bearded civilian who had shouldered
the guardsman's rifle so as to leave him
free to carry his little girl, a child of two,
whilst his wife, with a tremulous smile
about her lips, kept pace with him, linked
to his arm. The homeliness of that group
in so warlike a setting helped to illustrate
in its way, as those other memories do in
theirs, all that I have been labouring here
to express : that all the good and gracious
human qualities in men are formed and
nurtured in peace, amidst the decencies of
common, everyday life ; that war may
on occasion evoke them, but it no more
creates them than the night creates the
stars.
II
War is declared in Britain, such is the news and true :
Now that the mother's smitten, what will her litters do?
Volunteers, all come forward, stand to your arms like men,
Let the Germans know that where'er they go,
If at home or here, they will meet their foe
When they come to the Mother's den.
Capt. Brian Brooke, Only a Volunteer.
Before Armageddon was upon us, then,
and the old world came to an end, we used
to say that all our war songs were written
by soft-handed civilians who were never
under fire ; and this was true enough
when we said it, but is true no longer.
In the past, the poets seldom became
soldiers. When they did they saw too
much of what lay behind the glory of
war to make any songs about it. No
soldier, but the scholarly poet-antiquary,
Michael Drayton, enriched our literature
with the vigorous, triumphant ' Ballad
of Agincourt ' ; it was the snug civilian
Campbell who sang the most bellicose and
immortal lyrics on our naval victories ;
the recluse dreamer, Tennyson, who thrilled
29
30 For Remembrance
us with 4 The Charge of the Light Brigade '
— indeed, he and the even less soldierly
Swinburne gave militant patriotism the
noblest utterance it has achieved since
Shakespeare, another man of peace, voiced
it in proud phrases that stir the old Adam
in us still like the sound of a trumpet.
Since August 1914, however, a new
world and a new order of things have been
rising out of a new chaos. Civilian poets
have been writing memorable songs of this
war, but not often in the old mood. What
was a minor strain in the war verse of
Napoleonic and Crimean years (it is in
some of Byron's and Coleridge's poems
and, later and more poignantly, in Sydney
Dobell's 4 England in Time of War ') has
persisted until it is the major theme of the
civilian and soldier war poetry of to-day.
The fighting men are no longer contented
to be dumb pawns in a game ; they no
longer remain silent of their own experi-
ences and ideals ; no longer leave inexperi-
enced civilian singers to paint fancy
pictures of battle and interpret their
thoughts and emotions for them. They
Soldier Poets 31
have stripped the thing of its gaudy trap-
pings, they have bared their own hearts
to us, and we know that they are speaking
now not for themselves only, but for our
armies and our nation as a whole. For
when the Hun, mad for power, started to
run amok through human rights and the
sanities of civilisation, and the young
manhood of our race spontaneously rose
to answer that challenge, they were of all
sorts and conditions who swarmed to the
recruiting stations — aristocrats and navvies,
artisans and university professors, trades-
men, farmers, lawyers, stockbrokers, actors,
artists, and poets — and these last, drawn
also from every grade of society, have
coalesced into a representative group which
is of itself a sort of microcosm of our
army, as our army is of our nation.
Before the war, Rupert Brooke had won
the Rugby school prize for his poem,
' The Bastille,' gained a Fellowship at
King's, Cambridge, and was devoting him-
self to scholarship and literature ; Francis
Ledwidge had been a scavenger on the
roads of Ireland ; Edward Thomas was
32 For Remembrance
already a distinguished critic and essayist ;
Hugh Reginald Freston was at Oxford
reading for his B.A. degree ; John William
Streets was a Derbyshire miner, striving
for self-culture and writing verse in his
leisure ; while the Hon. Julian Grenfell
and his brother, the Hon. Gerald, the Hon.
E. Wvndham Tennant, the Hon. Robert
Palmer (brother of Viscount Wolmer), Ivar
Campbell, grandson of the eighth Duke of
Argyll, and the Hon. Colwyn Philipps,
born and bred in far other circumstances,
were as ready to sacrifice all that was
theirs in the common cause. Leslie
Coulson was a brilliant young London
journalist; Charles Hamilton Sorley was
fresh from Marlborough; R. E. Vernede
was a successful novelist; Nicholas Todd
and Bernard Pitt were schoolmasters;
Clifford Flower a clerk to an iron and
steel manufacturer; Alexander Robertson
a lecturer on history at Sheffield Univer-
sity; Arthur Scott Craven had made a
reputation as an actor in London and
America, had published a play, two vol-
umes of verse, and a novel of considerable
Photo by Maull & Fox.
The Hon. JULIAN GRENFELL, D.S.O.
CAPTAIN, ROYAL DRAGOONS.
Soldier Poets 33
power; Henry Field was an art student;
John E. Stewart, the son of working-
class parents, was a school teacher ; Charles
Masefield, a cousin of John Masefield, was
a lawyer; Francis St. Vincent Morris had
entered his name on the books of Wad-
ham, Oxford, but went from Brighton
College, when the war came, to take a
commission in the Sherwood Foresters;
Bernard de Boismaison White had been
on the staff of a London publishing house
and in the publicity department of the
Marconi Company ; Thomas Kettle was
an Irish barrister and a professor at
Dublin University; Richard Dennys had
taken his M.R.C.S. and L.R.C.P. degrees,
but never practised — he was in Florence
when war was declared, * working with
Gordon Craig at his school for the improve-
ment of the Art of the Theatre,' and at
once returned to England, and was gazetted
to a regiment of the line.
One might go on, and having completed
this list of the homeland's soldier poets
who have been killed in action, add to it /
an even longer list of such poets who came
c
34 For Remembrance
back from the fighting line (I am saying
nothing, for the moment, of the many,
their peers in song as in arms, from the
Britains overseas), and you would discover
that, till the German onslaught left them
no honourable choice, they were, with one
or two exceptions, essentially men of peace
— they belonged to or were preparing for
almost any trade or profession but that
of the soldier. They were the true pacifists,
so sincere in their devotion to Peace that
they did not hesitate to fight and die for
her sake ; they were the authentic con-
scientious objectors, loathing bloodshed,
yet ready to shed their own in safeguarding
others who were dear to them, not afraid
to put aside private scruples and, in a
spirit of self-abnegation, to risk losing
their personal souls that the freedom of the
world and the general soul of the race
might be saved.
In saying this I am not trying my hand
at rhetorical flourishes ; I am merely
summarising, as best I may, the gospel,
the ideals, the aspirations that are enshrined
in their war poetry. There is a wide
Soldier Poets 35
world of difference between those romantic
old war lyrics that our patriotic civilians
used to write and the grim realism or
high spiritual significances of those that
were written in the mud and squalor of
the trenches, in dug-out or billet, just
before going into action, just after coming
out of it, in the quiet of a rest-camp or
while their writers were lying wounded in
hospital. No Hymn of Hate is among
them, no glorification of slaughter, no
note of boastfulness or blatancy, but a
deep love of country, a clear, rational
sense of the tragedy and dire necessity of
what must be done, in such an hour as
this, by all who value liberty and honour
more than peace at the price of both, an
unwavering vision of the end to be fought
for, faith in God and in each other, with
those qualities of self-sacrifice and heroic
resolve that you would look for in men
who had rallied to what they were deter-
mined should be a last crusade against the
folly and crime of war, and had gone forth
together on that knightly quest, following
the Holy Grail of a great ideal.
36 For Remembrance
There are inevitable contrasts in the
appeal of war to the man who became a
soldier from natural inclination, and the
man who never would have adopted that
profession from choice and did so only in a
crisis and from a deliberate realisation of
patriotic or altruistic duty. Both live
and die by the same code of chivalry,
honour, indomitable courage, for our New
Army has grown up in the proud traditions
of the Old. Given a cause worth defend-
ing, the one goes eagerly into battle, ber-
serker-like, for the sheer joy of it. The
other goes with equal readiness, pluck and
grim purpose, feels the same fierce joy of
it in the heat of conflict, but in his before
and after thoughts cannot so stoically
away with doubts and compunctions.
The two types have their spokesmen
among the poets who have fallen in this
war. The Old Army speaks through
Captain Brian Brooke and Captain Julian
Grenfell ; the soul of the New Army
reveals itself in the songs of a multitude
of singers.
Brian Brooke was a born soldier. He
Brian Brooke 37
came of a notable fighting stock ; his
father and two brothers were in the Army,
and two other brothers had entered the
Navy. From his childhood he revelled
in tales of military prowess ; ' his greatest
longing had always been to be a soldier,'
we are told ; but his sight was defective
and he could not pass the medical
examination. Making the best of his
disappointment, he went to British East
Africa, won the adoration of the natives
by his good comradeship and boundless
daring, and grew famous there as a big
game hunter. The outbreak of war gave
him his opportunity, and he fought as a
trooper in the British East African Force.
But news that his brother had been killed
in action in Flanders brought him home,
and he succeeded in getting gazetted
captain in his brother's regiment, the
Gordon Highlanders. ' He refused a good
appointment on the staff of the force then
advancing into German East Africa,' says
M. P. Willcocks, ' went to France early in
1916, and within three weeks was com-
manding in the Great Push at Mametz, on
1 *-?.- / .. <._^»
38 For Remembrance
1st July. Twice wounded, he still led
his men over two lines of German trenches,
but at the third fell, torn with terrible
wounds, and died after three weeks of
agony, his sole regret being that he could
not go back to his troops.'
This is the man as he discloses himself
in his book — an ardent, downright man of
action, full-blooded, intensely alive, simple,
honourable, likeable, not troubled over-
much with brooding introspection and the
pale cast of thought, but rich in a rugged,
common-sense philosophy and a breezy
humanity that find outlets in his stirring
ballads of hunting, fighting, and adventure.
Danger and hardship exhilarated him ; he
would risk his life in a gamble as keenly as
others risk their money. When we were
struggling desperately against the first
gigantic onrush of the enemy, and volun-
tary recruiting here was in full swing, he
was scathingly contemptuous of
The courage of the dauntless few who dared to
stay behind ;
and into one verse of ' A Father's Advice '
he has condensed his soldierly creed—
Julian Grenfell 39
which is the creed, after all, of our Armies
both New and Old :
Never look for Strife, he 's an ugly brute,
But meet him whenever and where he likes ;
Only draw your gun when you mean to shoot,
And strike as long as your enemy strikes.
Never force a fight on a smaller man,
Nor turn your back on a stronger clown.
Keep standing as long as you darned well can,
And fight like the devil when once you 're down !
The dogged heart of the Old Contemptibles
is in that : it was so they quitted them on
the Great Retreat, and made defeat as
glorious as a victory.
In Julian Grenfell, eldest son of Lord
Desborough, the characteristic qualities
of the old and new soldier met and were
reconciled. He passed from Eton and
Oxford, four years before the war, to take
a commission in the Dragoons. Delighting
in the profession of arms, he was also
something of a visionary, a mystic, and
when he came to write of battle and death
transfigured them to shapes of spiritual
loveliness. 'He had,' says Miss Viola
Meynell, c such shining qualities of youth,
such strength and courage and love, that
40 For Remembrance
to others who are young he seems like the
perfection of themselves. They know so
well day by day just what their own
youth can fall to and rise to ; and it is
when their youth rises most, to its utmost
fierceness and tenderness, that they come
near to him, who was made of those
things.' He and Charles Lister were
friends ; and not long before he also fell
in battle, Lister wrote to his friend's
mother, Lady Desborough, of the grief
that unmanned him when he thought of
Julian's death. ' I suppose everybody
noted dear Julian's vitality,' he adds,
4 but I don't think they were so conscious
of that great tenderness of heart that
underlay it. He always showed it most
with you ; and with women generally it
was his special charm. ... I remember
a time when he was under the impression
that I 'd chucked Socialism for the " loaves
and fishes," etc. etc. ; and of course that
sort of thing he couldn't abide, and he
thought this for a longish while ; then
found out that it wasn't that after all, and
took my hand in his in the most loving
,
Photo by Langfier.
W. N. HODGSON, M.C.
LIEUT., DEVON REGIMENT.
Julian Grenfell 41
way.' He goes on to recall Julian Gren-
fell's moral courage, his physical bravery,
his passionate search for truth, and ' what
an ardent love he had for honesty of
purpose, and intellectual honesty, and
what sacrifices he made for them ; and
sacrifices of peace of mind abhorrent to
most Englishmen.'
All which squares with the casual self-
revelations in letters he wrote home while
he was on service in India and Africa :
4 1 hate material books centred on whether
people are successful. I like books about
artists and philosophers and dreamers,
and anybody who is a little off his dot.'
' I agree with what you say about success,
but I like the people best who take it as
it comes, or doesn't come, and are busy
about unpractical and ideal things in their
heart of hearts all the time.' ' I am so
happy here. I love the Profession of
Arms, and I love my fellow officers, and
all my dogs and all my horses.' Later,
from Flanders, he wrote that he longed to
be able to say he liked what he was going
through there : ' But it 's beastly. I
42 For Remembrance
pretended to myself for a bit that I liked
it, but it was no good, it only made me
careless and unwatchful and self-absorbed ;
but when one acknowledged to oneself
that it was beastly, one became all right
again, and cool.' Again, writing from the
front of the hard times he was enduring,
8 It is all the best of fun,' he said. c I have
never, never felt so well, or so happy, or
enjoyed anything so much. The fighting
excitement vitalises everything, every sight
and word and action.'
There are unforgettable stories of his
gallantry on the day when he was mortally
wounded. He volunteered to carry a
message through to the front line, and got
there and back under heavy fire. As he
rejoined his General on a hill, he was
struck in the head by a shell splinter, and
said as he lay bleeding, ' Go down, sir,
don't bother about me. I 'm done.' The
General helped to carry him down, and
Grenfell told a brother officer, ' Do you
know, I think I shall die,' and being
contradicted said quietly, ' Well, you see
if I don't ! ' At the dressing- station he
Julian Orenfell 43
asked for the truth, saying, ' I only want
to know. I 'm not in the least afraid.'
A fortnight after, on the 26th May 1915,
he died of his wound — only two months
before his younger brother, Lieutenant
Gerald William Grenfell, a gracious spirit
loving ' whatsoever things are fair ' (to
apply to himself a phrase from his lines on
the death of a friend), was killed in action.
Early in May 1915 Julian Grenfell had
sent home to his friends his one great
poem, 4 Into Battle,' which in character
and temperament chimes perfectly with
what Charles Lister wrote of him, and
with what we learn of him from his letters :
The naked earth is warm with Spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun's gaze glorying,
And quivers in the sunny breeze.
And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light,
And a striving evermore for these ;
And he is dead who will not fight,
And who dies fighting has increase.
The fighting man shall from the sun
Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth,
Speed with the light-foot winds to run,
And with the trees to newer birth,
And find, when fighting shall be done,
Great rest, and fullness after dearth. . . .
44 For Remembrance
In dreary, doubtful, waiting hours,
Before the brazen frenzy starts,
The horses show him nobler powers :
O patient eyes, courageous hearts !
And when the burning moment breaks,
And all things else are out of mind,
And only joy of battle takes
Him by the throat and makes him blind —
Through joy and blindness he shall know,
Not caring much to know, that still
Nor lead nor steel can reach him, so
That it be not the destined Will.
The thundering line of battle stands,
And in the air death moans and sings,
But day shall clasp him with strong hands,
And night shall fold him in soft wings.
The difference of attitude and feeling
in the new soldier, who became a soldier
not from predilection, but against it and
from a sheer sense of duty, is manifest
at once, I think, in the ' Before Battle '
of W. N. Hodgson, the third and youngest
son of the Bishop of St. Edmundsbury and
Ipswich. In March 1913 he took a First
Class in Classical Moderations at Oxford ;
next year, in the first days of the war, he
obtained a commission in the 9th Devon
W. N. Hodgson 45
Regiment. He was mentioned in de-
spatches, and in October 1915 the Military-
Cross was conferred upon him ; on the
1st July 1916 he fell in the battle of the
Somme. There is strength and spiritual
and emotional beauty in his verse and that
air of plain sincerity which distinguishes
all these poets who were soldiers. At
least two or three of his poems will have
an abiding place in all war anthologies,
and one of such must assuredly be his
4 Before Battle ' :
By all the glories of the day
And the cool evening's benison ;
By the last sunset touch that lay
Upon the hills when day was done ;
By beauty lavishly outpoured,
And blessings carelessly received,
By all the days that I have lived,
Make me a soldier, Lord.
By all of all men's hopes and fears,
And all the wonders poets sing,
The laughter of unclouded years,
And every sad and lovely thing :
By the romantic ages stored
With high endeavour that was his,
By all his sad catastrophes,
Make me a man, O Lord.
46 For Remembrance
I, that on my familiar hill
Saw with uncomprehending eyes
A hundred of Thy sunsets spill
Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice,
Ere the sun swings his noonday sword
Must say good-bye to all of this :
By all delights that I shall miss,
Help me to die, O Lord.
The sturdy, sober courage of this matches
Grenfell's brave ecstasy. The difference
between them is only of tone and tempera-
ment—the same fighting blood is in each,
as it was in the long-ago Cavalier and
Roundhead. Maybe it is that our race
is compact of these two elements ; the
Cavalier and Roundhead have intermarried
and are inextricably mixed in us all, but
in very varying proportions. They came
near, perhaps, to striking a balance in
Rupert Brooke. He responded so instantly
to 4 the call ' that he was a sub-b'eutenant
in the Royal Navy in September 1914,
and in October took part in the Antwerp
expedition. His greeting of the war shouts
in that first of his sonnets, ' Peace,' with
all the exultation that is in Grenfell's lines,
but not because he foretasted the joy of
Rupert Brooke 47
battle. He was supremely satisfied because
he felt that in the years of peace our souls
had put on too much flesh ; we had be-
come gross and sordid, had forgotten our
ideals, and now the war had suddenly
uplifted us from the slough, restored our
manhood to us and touched us to noble
issues :
Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with
His hour
And caught our youth and wakened us from
sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened
power
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary.
And all the little emptiness of love. . . .
And again there is this rush of joyance in
his rapturous requiem :
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead !
There 's none of these so lonely and poor of old
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. . . .
Blow, bugles, blow ! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage ;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again ;
And we have come into our heritage.
48 For Remembrance
Rupert Brooke was almost the first of
these soldier poets to give up his life in
his country's service. He had been no
more than two months on dutv with the
Mediterranean Force when he died of
blood-poisoning, on the 23rd April 1915,
and was buried at Skvros.
FRANCIS LEDWIDGE.
I.ANCE-CORPL., INNISKILLING FUSILIERS.
Ill
It is too late now to retrieve
A fallen dream, too late to grieve
A name unmade, but not too late
To thank the gods for what is great :
A keen-edged sword, a soldier's heart,
Is greater than a poet's art,
And greater than a poet's fame
A little grave that has no name.
Lance-Corpl. Francis Lehwidgk, Last Songs.
None of the poets of the New Armies has
written finer poetry than Francis Ledwidge,
and few have found less inspiration in the
war itself. The first of his books, Songs
of the Fields, made its appearance when the
war was young and he was still a civilian ;
the second, which he named Songs of
Peace, after he had put on khaki and was
gone on active service. He fought on the
Serbian Retreat, and in Gallipoli ; then
was sent to Flanders, where he fell in
action in July 1917. ' I have taken up
arms,' he wrote to Lord Dunsany, 4 for
the fields along the Boyne, and the birds
and the blue sky over them ' ; and in that
50 For Remembrance
second book of his you see him moving
through scenes of conflict in strange lands,
but still dreaming and singing of home
and the peace of home. Though his poems
are divided into those written in barracks,
in camp, at sea, in Serbia, in Greece, in
hospital in Egypt, and again in barracks,
there is not a war song among them. In
barracks he sings of love, of May, of a place
he knew in Ireland where the birds used
to sing :
And when the war is over I shall take
My lute adown to it and sing again
Songs of the whispering things among the brake,
And those I love shall know them by their
strain.
Their airs shall be the blackbird's twilight song,
Their words shall be all flowers with fresh dews
hoar —
But it is lonely now in winter long,
And, God, to hear the blackbird sing once more !
In camp and on the sea his verse is all
of clouds, flowers, the sky and the trees
and hills of Ireland ; the hints of darker
things are few and faint and elusive.
In hospital his thoughts turn wistfully to
Ireland, 4 My Mother ' :
Francis Ledwidge 51
God made my mother on an April day
From sorrow and the mist along the sea,
Lost birds' and wanderers' songs and ocean
spray,
And the moon loved her, wandering jealously. . . .
Kind heart she has for all on hill or wave
Whose hopes grew wings, like ants, to fly away.
I bless the God Who such a mother gave
This poor bird-hearted singer of a day.
The war makes only a pensive under-
tone even in 'Evening Clouds,' with its
vision of Rupert Brooke's grave :
A little flock of clouds go down to rest
In some blue corner of the moon's highway,
With shepherd winds that shook them in the
west
To borrowed shapes of earth in bright array,
Perhaps to weave a rainbow's gay festoons
Around the lonesome isle which Brooke has made
A little England full of lovely noons,
Or dot it with his country's mountain shade.
Ledwidge proved himself a doughty
soldier ; his heart was in the war, though
the war was not in his heart— there was
no room in that for anything but his love
of home and the treasures of peace for
which he was fighting. His Helicon, like
the Kingdom of Heaven, was within him ;
52 For Remembrance
he drew most of his inspiration from his
memories of Ireland, and there is no lyric
in his Songs of Peace more exquisite in
feeling and utterance than ' A Little Boy
in the Morning ' —
He will not come, and still I wait.
He whistles at another gate
Where angels listen. Ah, I know
He will not come, yet if I go,
How shall I know he did not pass
Barefooted in the flowery grass ? . . .
The war breaks in upon the music of his
Last Songs now and then, but more often
these poems written in France or Belgium
are of nothing but flowers and fairies,
birds and children and the sights and
sounds of his own land, for, as his little
song ' In France ' has it —
Whatever way I turn I find
The path is old unto me still ;
The hills of home are in my mind,
And there I wander as I will.
There is enough, and more than enough,
in his three volumes to indicate what our
literature has lost by his early death and
to justify Lord Dunsany, who discovered
Wyndham Tennant 53
and fostered his genius and introduced his
work to the world at large, in saying, ' I
give my opinion that if Ledwidge had
lived, this lover of all the seasons in which
the blackbird sings would have surpassed
even Burns, and Ireland would have
lawfully claimed, as she may even yet, the
greatest of peasant singers.'
The mental detachment that character-
ised Ledwidge, the readiness to escape in
hours of leisure from his grim, abnormal
surroundings into an atmosphere that was
native to him, characterises the verse in
Wyndham Tennant's one small volume,
W or pie Flit and Other Poems. A lieutenant
of the Grenadiers, he fell in battle on the
Somme at the age of nineteen — one year
older than Chatterton. He passed the
proofs of his book on the eve of the attack
in which he was to die, and finished a last
letter that night to his mother, Lady
Glenconner, with the quotation that he
uses on his title page :
High heart, high speech, high deeds, 'mid honour-
ing eyes.
He had so literally lisped in numbers that
54 Por Remembrance
he used to dictate quaint little poems even
before he could write. One that he ad-
dressed to his mother when he was eight
years old puts his love and admiration
of her into most childishly simple terms,
with here and there a touch that flashes
into sudden beauty :
. . . She is full of love and grace,
A kind of flower in all the place. . . .
Even the trees give her salutes,
They seem to know who 's near their
roots. . . .
She is something quite divine,
And joy, oh joy, this mother 's mine.
Two of the poems in his volume were
written whilst he was at Winchester
College, but the rest are dated from shell-
shattered towns, whose names have become
almost household words to us, and the war
but rarely and intermittently intrudes
into them. The longest, ' The Nightingale,'
a glamorous love story adapted from
Boccaccio, was written at Ypres and
Poperinghe during June and July 1916.
At Ypres, Poperinghe, Ecques, and Hullach
Road he wrote the fanciful, bizarre old-
world ballads of ' Worple Flit ' and * The
Wyndham Tennant 55
Knight and the Russet Palmer ' ; some
thoughtful lines on reincarnation, and a
song or two in lighter moods. When the
war does enter into his verse, as in ' Home
Thoughts in Laventie,' it comes somewhat
as a wonderful dream-pedlar, bringing
dreams that are not of itself :
Green gardens in Laventie !
Soldiers only know the street
Where the mud is churned and splashed about
By battle- wending feet ;
And yet beside one stricken house there is a glimpse
of grass,
Look for it when you pass.
Beyond the church whose pitted spire
Seems balanced on a strand
Of swaying stone and tottering brick
Two roofless ruins stand.
And here behind the wreckage where the back wall
should have been
We found a garden green. . . .
So all among the vivid blades
Of soft and tender grass
We lay, nor heard the limber wheels
That pass and ever pass
In noisy continuity, until their stony rattle
Seems in itself a battle.
At length we rose up from this ease
Of tranquil, happy mind,
56 For Remembrance
And searched the garden's little length
A fresh pleasaunce to find ;
And there some yellow daffodils and jasmine hang-
ing high
Did rest the tired eye.
The fairest and most fragrant
Of the many sweets we found
Was a little bush of Daphne flower
Upon a grassy mound,
And so thick were the blossoms set and so divine
the scent
That we were well content.
Hungry for Spring I bent my head,
The perfume fanned my face,
And all my soul was dancing
In that little lovely place,
Dancing with a measured step from wrecked and
shattered towns
Away . . . upon the Downs.
I saw green banks of daffodil,
Slim poplars in the breeze,
Great tan-brown hares in gusty March
A -courting on the leas,
And meadows with their glittering streams and
silver scurrying dace :
Home — what a perfect place !
Not a hint of the war enters into the
poems of Ivar Campbell, who, as Guy
Ridley says in a Memoir of him, was
Ivar Campbell 57
known to his friends not merely as a
beloved companion, ' but also in the several
roles of the poet, the artist, the reader,
the talker, the tramp, and last, of course,
the soldier.' Born in 1890, he was the son
of Lord George Campbell, brother of the
late Duke of Argyll. From Eton he went
to Oxford ; about the end of 1912, until
March 1914, he was honorary attache to
the British Embassy at Washington, and
Lord Eustace Percy, who was with him
there, tells of the keen interest he took in
America's democratic institutions and ' the
political and economic life of the whole
country.' Himself an idealist, ' it was
simple " humanness " that he looked for,
and he naturally found it on all sides.'
The whole picture his friends give of Ivar
Campbell is the picture of a very alive,
kindly, attractive personality. ' He had
his intolerances,' says Lord Eustace, ' but
never where there was a call on his essential
chivalry. His real qualities were a sym-
pathy and affection ever waiting for a
demand upon them, and never failing to
meet such a demand.'
58 For Remembrance
There are delightful stories of his love
for children and his exquisite understand-
ing of them. ' Children, as a matter of
fact,' writes Mr. Ridley, ' affected him a
great deal. His love of them was noticed
by many people. Nothing was more
astonishing than to see the way a child
would intuitively know him as a friend
and treat him as one of its own age.'
After he came home from America he
had a curious wish to open a book-shop in
Chelsea, under an assumed name ; but
the war came to prevent a realisation of
that pleasant ambition. He applied, then,
at once for a commission, but was rejected
owing to a weakness in his sight, and
eagerly accepted an opportunity to serve
with the American Red Cross Society in
France as driver of a motor ambulance.
This was better to him than remaining
' one of the useless ones,' but he was not
satisfied and presently returned to England,
and, after another rejection, was in Feb-
ruary 1915 i given a commission in the
regiment of his clan, the Argyll and
Sutherland Highlanders.'
Ivar Campbell 59
In the following May he went to France,
and after sharing in ' the long and terrible
experience of trench warfare ' there, was
sent with his regiment to Mesopotamia,
and whilst gallantly leading his men
against the Turkish position at Sheikh
Saad on the 7th January 1916, was shot
down, and died of his wound next day.
4 Months before,' as you read in Guy
Ridley's Memoir, 6 he had mused on the
grim prank played by war upon the ideal-
ist. The poet who sings of peace must
himself take up the sword to win it.' He
is forced to fight wrong with the weapons
of the wrong-doer, to add to the destruc-
tion and horror in order ' to prove his
hatred of war and murder.' Even without
such testimony, one might have guessed
at the charm of his character, his broad
human sympathies, his love of beauty, his
feeling for the quieter arts of happiness
from the poems he has left us — from such
a snatch of song as that beginning —
Peace, God's own peace,
This it is I bring you ;
The quiet song of sleep,
Dear tired heart, I sing you . . .
60 For Remembrance
from the beautifully imaginative c Marriage
of Earth and Spring ' ; from the plea of
Calypso, that opens with the lines —
Tenderly I, too, loved thee and have given
All my heart into thy keeping . . .
in the unfinished ' Odysseus and Calypso ' ;
from c Venice ' ; c London Pride ' ; or
from this, one of the most delicately
fanciful of his songs :
If at day's dawn
My dear love dies,
Tell not the day,
Lest the laughing eyes
Of the day grow dim
And the bird-song cease.
Until eventide
Let her lie in peace.
If at day's death
My dear love dies,
My own hands
Will close her eyes,
And the rising moon
And the stars shall shed
Their silver tears
Round her white death-bed.
If there is little or no shadow of the war
over the pages of these three poets, it is
either because their poems were written
«2L
x.
Photo by Elliott & Fr
The Hon. COLWYN ERASMUS ARNOLD PHILIPPS
CAPTAIN, ROYAL HORSE GUARDS.
Colwyn Philipps 61
before the war darkened over us or, as
with Colwyn Philipps, like the soldier
poets of old, they preferred to forget it
awhile in their verses and remember,
instead, the happier things they had known
before it and hoped to know again after.
Colwyn Philipps was the eldest son of
Lord St. Davids. He had resolved to
make the Army his profession while he
was still at Eton ; the war found him a
captain in the Horse Guards ; and you
have only to read the poems and letters
in his book to see how completely he
realised Chaucer's ideal of the soldier and
was ' a very perfect gentle knight.' To
stoop to any creed of military * frightful-
ness ' would have been utterly impossible
for the brotherly, high-minded man who
carelessly unlocked his heart in the verses
which were published after he had been
killed in action near Ypres, on 13th May
1915. You may know from his poems
that he, too, loved children and dogs and
horses ; was a keen sportsman, fond of the
open-air life ; was scornful of social and
religious humbug and hypocrisy ; was
62 For Remembrance
quick to sympathise with the underdog
and indignant with those who oppressed
the poor. Withal, he had a delightful
sense of humour, and it plays freely
through the letters from the front in
which he makes light of discomforts
and danger and is charmed by the
kindness of his French hosts and the
affection that springs up betwixt him
and their children ; and a letter from
a Horse Guards trooper tells you
with what ardour and heroism he
went at last to his death at the head of
his men.
Here is what you learn of his person-
ality from his poems. Not only in 'Half
Time ' does he pull up to look into the
heart of things and give them their real
value :
Warrior, cease your fight awhile,
Look upon the heap of spoil.
Are these things so greatly blessed
That you ever upward pile ?
Always onward you have pressed,
But you soon must seek your rest.
Are these things worth while ?
As for what he feels to be worth while —
Colwyn Philipps 63
I love thee as I love the holiest things,
Like perfect poetry and angels' wings,
And cleanliness and sacred motherhood,
And all things simple, sweetly pure, and good.
I love thee as I love a little child. . . .
Or again, from ' Attainment ' :
When you have grasped the highest rung,
When the last hymn of praise is sung,
When all around you thousands bow,
When Fame with laurel binds your brow,
When you have reached the utmost goal
That you have set your hurrying soul. . . .
Then you shall see the whole thing small
Beside the one gift worth it all :
The one good thing from pole to pole
Is called Simplicity of Soul.
All which is of a piece with the poem
to his mother :
Can I make my feeble art
Show the burning of my heart ? . . .
Every day and every hour
I have battened on your power,
While you taught of life the whole ;
You my best beloved and nighest,
You who ever claimed the highest
Was the one and only goal. . . .
When the sands of life seemed sliding
You were helping, you were guiding —
Claimed for me the glorious role :
You my loved one and no other,
You my only lovely Mother,
You the pilot of my soul ;
64 For Remembrance
and it is of a piece with that last letter
he wrote to his mother before her death
in March 1915 : c This is not a letter, it 's
a testimonial. I give you a character
of twenty- six years. You have never
advised me to do anything because it
seemed wise unless it was the highest
right. Single-minded you have chosen
love and honour as the " things that are
more excellent," and you have not failed.
. . . You are to me the dearest friend, the
perfect companion, the shining example,
and the proof that honour and love are
above all things and are possible of
attainment.' Pessimists and the few self-
righteous who made a virtue of shirking
their duty in the crisis that threatened to
overwhelm us as a nation have sneered
and cast superior doubts upon the sincerity
of the ideals for which the best sons of
Britain have unselfishly sacrificed all that
was theirs to offer, but their fussy com-
placency and narrow love of self shrink
to their true proportions beside the moral
and spiritual stature of such a man as
Colwyn Philipps. And he was no excep-
The Hon. E. WYNDHAM TENNANT.
I.IEl'T., GRENADIER GUARDS.
{From a Portrait by SARGEXT )
Nicholas Todd 65
tion, but stood, as you shall see, for the
same human ideals that made fighting-
men of all these soldier poets, and of the
many thousands like then, in heart and
mind who have had no gift of song.
Nicholas Todd was another lover of
children. Born at Occold, Suffolk, in
1878, he was educated at Felsted and
Keble College, then became in succession
assistant master at Balham, and from
1906 to 1916, at Sedbergh School. He
wrote charmingly whimsical plays, with
the liveliest songs scattered through them,
for his boys to act* and two of these,
' The Sacred Lobster ' and * The Bridge
of Rainbows,' are printed at the end of a
memorial volume. One who knew him
says he seemed to bear ' a mysterious
passport to the intimacy of children ' ;
and that 4 it was scarcely conceivable that
he could ever have done other than teach
boys to call the wild flowers by their
names, to write painful Latin elegies, to
love the becks and the fells, bird and beast,
the satire of Gilbert and Sullivan, the
human sympathy of Dickens. For all
E
66 For Remembrance
this was something more to him than a
profession, a thing to be laid aside in
leisure hours ' — and in his leisure he wrote
those plays and songs for his boys' amuse-
ment. His humour and love of nature and
of children and of all life overflows his
poems, and only once or twice does any
hint of the war get into them. In August
1915 he recalls two friends who used to
walk the heather with him, and now :
One is far away where the heroes stand
For the right of God and the motherland.
Another waits where the spire looks down
On the level plains round the Saxon town.
They have the gleam of the light divine,
The loss and the loneliness are mine.
In a different vein, just after he had
joined the Queen's Westminsters as a
private, he wrote a rhyming epistle from
Hazely Down Camp, Winchester, on Easter
Eve, 1916 :
Dear Meg, now I 'm a simple Tommy
I thought you would like a letter from me,
Living a silent celibut
With twenty others in a hut,
My bed of wooden boards and tressels
And blankets thick with which one wrestles,
Nicholas Todd 67
While the cold night wind through the door
Keeps time to rats that scour the floor ;
A sergeant stern with language rude
Who tells me that my drilling 's crude,
And boots two inches thick which they
Make me to clean three times a day. . . .
Who would have thought that I should go
To fight against a foreign foe ?
If I return with half a leg
You '11 run much faster than me, Meg,
And in a race around the yard
You '11 beat me hollow, which is hard.
I shall forget in forming fours,
And other motions used by corps,
That ever I took interest
In dulce et decorum est.
And so — farewell ! if when May comes,
And snow-white gleam the garden plums,
You run across the yard to school,
Hair-braided, with your reticule,
Then think of me, my little maid,
Forming for nine o'clock parade,
And making an egregious hash
Of drill, and growing a moustache !
This thought, that the same evening star
Shines on us both, though severed far,
And guides us on our unknown way,
Should cheer us all from day to day.
This ' gentle and vivacious little figure,'
after six months of soldiering, was killed
68 For Remembrance
in France in October 1916, and when you
have grown intimate with him in his
verse you will feel it is the veriest truth of
him that shines in the lines written on his
death by an anonymous friend who fancies
him arriving earth-dusty in Paradise with
quick, impulsive stride and a deprecating,
rather derisive smile for any acclamations
that greet him when the word is passed :
. . . ' This man knew joy and grief ; was wise
Where others stumbled, loved the fragrant earth
And flowers and winds and quiet autumnal skies ;
He gave men laughter, nursed the frailest birth
Of fancy — joyed in comradeship ; his mind
Was quick in mystery, pondered in the shade,
Loathed war and cruelty — was unafraid.'
And as the whisper passed, the dreaming ways,
Perchance, awoke as magic ; all your days
Came hurrying with phantom feet to bind
A wreath of flowers on your reluctant head.
I like to think how you, who loved not praise,
Endured the welcome of the clear-eyed dead.
He loved Sedbergh, and Sedbergh loved
him, and you may be sure there will not
be lacking some who will henceforth see
him return to it as he saw other shadows
return in such nights as he commemorates
in ' The Old Schoolroom ' :
Robert Sterling 69
In the silence of the school-room, among the desks
deserted,
Ink-stained and marred by marks of many
hands,
Through the windows in the moonlight by driving
rain-clouds skirted,
Come the visions of Old Boys from many
lands.
And quietly and mournfully they take their well-
known places,
And their books lie open by them on the form,
And they see, as in a mist-wraith, the old forgotten
faces
With the scar-marks of the world's eternal
storm.
Whilst Nicholas Todd was teaching at
Sedbergh School, Robert Sterling was one
of the students there. In 1912, Sterling
went from Sedbergh to Pembroke College,
Oxford. He was a brilliant classical
scholar, fond enough of boating and foot-
ball, but his love of literature, especially
of poetry, dwarfed most of his other in-
terests. ' He was something of a visionary, '
says the friend who writes the memoir in
his book ; ' he used to wish that he could
draw, feeling that so only — by artistic as
well as literary expression, as in Blake —
could he give adequate expression to his
70 For Remembrance
ideas. A serenity, and at times a certain
dreamy wistfulness were peculiarly typical
of him, and the quiet strength that comes
of a firm hold upon a principle of life.'
He had a genius for friendship, but ' never
courted friendships ; his friends grew
around him, and they learnt that the force
which had drawn them to him became
stronger with closer contact. . . . His
friendship ennobled, because his nature
was less mundane, more spiritual than
that of the ordinary mortal. He went
about life in the same manner as did the
knight-errant of old, who would give his
purse to the first wandering beggar he met
and forget all about it in a moment.
Material things were taken as they came ;
if they did not come he wasted little time
in trying to get them.'
The spirit and fascination of Oxford
took a wonderful hold upon his heart and
imagination, as you may gather from the
six poems he has dedicated to her praise.
See with what magic he pictures her in
1 Oxford — First Vision,' and the aspirations
that vision wakens in him :
Robert Sterling 7 1
I saw her bowed by Time's relentless hand,
Calm as cut marble, cold and beautiful,
As if old sighs through the dim night of years,
Like frosted snowflakes on the silent land,
Had fallen : and old laughter and old tears,
Old tenderness, old passion, spent and dead,
Had moulded her their stony monument :
While ghostly memory lent
Treasure of form and harmony to drape her head. . . .
Oh, could I pluck (methought) from out yon breast
A share of her rich mystery, and feel,
Flushing my soul with new adventurous zeal
The fiery perfume of that flame-born flower,
Which grows in man to God : then I might wrest
Glad secrets from the past — the golden dower
Of the world's sunrise and young glimmering East.
And the same feeling stirring the same
longings is in the sonnet to Oxford :
. . . Trees draw their sacrifice of greenery
From the old charnels that repose beneath ;
So let me feel the impulse of thy breath,
Like an enchanter's spell, awakening me
To thy new treasures of Eternity
Bursting from out the pregnant soils of Death. . . .
But two years saw the end of these dreams,
when the war brought his Oxford career
to a close. He won the Newdigate Prize
of 1914 with his poem, ' The Burial of
Sophocles ' ; and in the August of that
72 For Remembrance
year, just after war was declared, he
obtained a commission in the Royal Scots
Fusiliers. By the following February he
was out in France, and was killed on the
evening of St. George's Day, 1916, after
holding his trench all day against the
enemy's onslaughts.
All the war verse in his book consists
of two quatrains — one in memory of a
friend, and one which may be taken as a
response to Germany's famous or infamous
Hymn:
Ah, hate like this would freeze our human tears,
And stab the morning star :
Not it, not it commands and mourns and bears
The storm and bitter glory of red war.
Few of our soldier poets who have gone
wrote verse so mature in thought a:^
finished in style as Robert Sterling's.
It might not seem a youth's imaginings,
But to an Attic age might well belong,
says Roger Quin, in his beautiful memorial
sonnet ; and there is one stanza of
Sterling's i Burial of Sophocles ' that
lingers with me as his own fitting epitaph :
Photo by G. A. Btozvn, Greenock.
ROBERT W. STERLING.
LIEUTENANT, ROYAL SCOTS FUSILIERS.
Scott Craven 73
Ah, surely there is wonder and strange stir
Amid Earth's guardian gods, when the last goal
Hath gained the crown, and to Earth's sepulchre
We bear the way-worn chariot of the soul !
And surely here a memory shall last,
In hill and grove and torrent, of this day,
For bards to glean who can : and they shall sing
How the sweet singer passed
Forth to his rest with war about his way
And a dread mask of Ares menacing !
So far as I can learn, Scott Craven wrote
nothing — at all events he printed nothing
— after he doffed his civilian habit and
became a captain in the Buffs. His ' Joe
Skinner,' which was published over eleven
years ago, before he had made a reputation
as an actor, is the tale of a man,
So good and kind-hearted, so meek and so mild,
With the face of a satyr, the heart of a child,
who died broken and in poverty, a pariah,
and misjudged by reason of the sinister
sneer, belying his character, that was
stamped on his face from birth — a tale
in the Ingoldsby manner, told with much
of Barham's irresponsible humour and
rhyming and metrical cleverness, with
74 For Remembrance
passages of tenderness and odd pathos
such as Barham seldom attempted. The
ideas, sentiments, aspirations that run
through the miscellaneous poems he wrote
in the years before the war are in complete
harmony with the spirit in which he
promptly took up arms when the war came.
' The Cross in the Rock,' with its insistence
that ' Love and Right shall rule for aye,'
might almost have been written in
anticipation of the ordeal through which
the world has passed, and is passing :
Though Justice for a while delay
When the oppressed to her hath cried,
No righteous tear is shed in vain,
And Time no wrong hath justified.
For every jot unjustly ta'en
A tyrant nation yet shall pay,
And deep the cup of penance drain.
He unfolds his faith in ' Life's Prologue,'
that whatever poor part may be given to
us, and however cramped and sorry the
setting, we should scorn to have any doubt
or fear but ' hold the stage like men ' ;
and reiterates it in ' The Song of the
Stars ' :
Harold Parry 75
. . . Then like grim warriors of old
Let 's glory in our scars,
And read aright, my doubting wight,
God's emblem of the stars :
Our highest, best achieved — behold,
A higher niche and sphere !
Nor deem the battle lost or won,
There 's something yet beyond the sun
When our brief thread of life is spun
And sorrows disappear :
A myriad suns beyond the sun,
Serene, resplendent, clear !
He wrote a play of Hereward the Wake,
The Last of the English, that has real
poetic and dramatic qualities ; and a
little before the war he was telling me,
in his eager, sanguine fashion, of another
play he meant to write, a romance of
modern life that should get away from the
squalor of the realists and preach a more
idealistic philosophy — but all that ended
when he fell gallantly in April 1917
heading his men in an attack on the
German lines.
Nothing of the war enters into the poems
of Harold Parry, though many of them
were written whilst he was on active
service and sent home on odd scraps of
76 For Remembrance
paper. He was just turned twenty when
he was killed by a shell in Flanders on
6th May 1917. The romance of war had
no lure for him, but it is easy to under-
stand how impossible it was for one who
held, as he so obviously did, by the old
sanctities and ideals of progress and
human right to stand apart and see them
desecrated and destroyed under the iron
heel of the Hun. There is the true gold
of poetry and promise that can never be
fulfilled in the best of his work — in ' A
Song of Youth,' the ' Ode to Death,' some
of the love songs, and in the ' Ode to
Dusk,' with its exquisite close —
Listen. I hear the trumpets of the angels wind
Their call across the bordered infinite ;
And Dusk, with all her panoply of falling light,
Is gone to kneel, adoring, at the feet
Which Mary Magdalen anointed, meet,
With richest spikenard
And fragrant costliest nard.
His sympathies went out to the weak
and the wronged ; for all his youth, he
had probed much into the world's unhappi-
ness and was passionate to help to bring
in the reign of justice and righteousness,
Harold Parry 77
and ' with a practical, old-fashioned piety
sought to obey the commandment, Thou /
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' He,
too, had a great love for children and
felt that
The simplest things in life are loveliest :
The smile of little children whose sweet eyes
Have not yet ceased from wistful wondering,
And innocent, as though the melodies
Of Life were all they knew — and cleanly things
Were all they saw and all they cared to see.
He had made history and political science
his special studies, and won the Queen's
Prize for History at his school and an
Open History Scholarship at Oxford.
Swinburne, Wordsworth, Keats, and
Francis Thompson were his favourite poets,
and a copy of A. E. Housman's ' A
Shropshire Lad ' was found on his dead
body.
4 1 am going to try to get into the Army
at the end of this term, I think,' he wrote
to his mother from Oxford, three weeks
before his nineteenth birthday. ' I have
no wish to remain a civilian any longer ;
and, though the whole idea of war is
against my conscience, I feel that in a
For Remembrance
time of national crisis like the present
the individual has no right whatever to
urge his views if they are contrary to
the best and immediate interest of the
State.'
Less than a year later, a lieutenant in
the King's Royal Rifles, he is writing to
his sister from France : " In general, the
whole of the war zone is so un-Christian in
its aspect and so horrible in its antithesis
to all that is beautiful and good that I
would rather not write about it. I do my
best to forget and, in a measure, to forgive
it by reading Keats, Blake, Swinburne or
Housman, and even by attempts to write
poems on the things of life, not the sins of
it.' He goes on to say that he believes
man is now being made to pay for the sins
of his body with his body ; that for centuries
civilisation has been on the wrong track;
4 man has developed his physical mind
almost to the utter exclusion of his spiritual
self ' ; that all manner of new inventions
have been designed to increase his bodily
comfort ; he has given himself up to the
worship of gold, values it for its own sake
Harold Parry 79
and the luxury it can give him. He would
have little hope of raising the world out
of this slough, ' but there are the children,'
he says, ' and if only we can develop
them along the new or, rather, the old
right lines we shall have done something.
The mind of a child is a most beautiful
thing. I have told you — have I not,
Kiddie ?— that I am passionately fond of
children, though I think that no one at
home realises how strong that passion is,
and I have never told any one yet what I
had determined long ago to do after I left
Oxford. To-day, when there is a possi-
bility of death to be faced, I can tell you
all. I had decided, no matter how success-
ful I was at Oxford, to go and teach at an
ordinary secondary school — best of all
at the old, old school itself— for there I
should meet the material upon which I
could work. I want to teach children
what love and beauty are, and how infinitely
better goodness is than mere satisfaction —
is it satisfaction ? — of physical desires.'
A high and wonderful ambition in one so
young, and wonderfully significant that
80 For Remembrance
this boy could cherish it hopefully still amid
scenes of savage slaughter and devastation
where, as he was presently writing to his
mother, everything was i absolutely in-
human and unlovely : all that relieves the
sordidness of the business is the pluck and
cheeriness of the boys, and that is amazing
to a degree.' He is so possessed by that
ambition of his that it comes into several
of his letters. To his friend Mundy,
touching on his love of children and his
longing to be of service to them, he writes,
4 1 have never attempted to analyse why
exactly this love is so strong, though
probably it is because children are so pure
and innocent and unstained as much as
may be by the sins of civilisation. This is
the material upon which we must begin our
gigantic task. Let us show to the child
that there are greater and more wonderful
things in the world than self and money ;
let us see that the instinctive love of
beauty and the right things, which is such
a wonderful prerogative of children, is
fostered and developed by every means
in our power, and when these children
Photo by W. Bullock, Walsall.
HAROLD PARRY.
2nd lieutenant, 17th king's royal rifles
Harold Parry 81
grow up they, much more than we, will
be able to further this great revolution
of the state of man. . . . Mundy, I feel
sure that this is no idle dream — it is too
beautiful for that ; beautiful because
its prospect satisfies as no dream ever
can.'
As for the pacifists who protested that our
one aim should have been to make peace as
quickly as possible on the best terms we
could get, he saw too clearly to wish for
that and wrote, under the hourly menace
of death, ' Though war is so inhuman,
especially in its utter severance of man
from everything for which he cares, it is
infinitely preferable to peace while yet the
devil has not been cast out of Germany.'
And again, 4 One thing is certain — we must
never, never lay up for our children a
heritage such as has been bequeathed to
us. It is not right, it is not fair, it is vastly
inhuman and too devilish to be anything
but evil to the core. . . . Peace now means
many things. It means first and foremost
and very personally the saving of many,
many lives. It means that the boys who
£
82 For Remembrance
have gone to war with laughter in their
eyes and God in their heart can return to
the ways they knew and loved so well. It
means that perhaps many of them —
perhaps even I — may one day make my
way back to home and security and com-
fort. But, on the other hand, it means
this — that the great sacrifice we have
already made, the sacrifice of a million
young lives is wasted. If we made peace
now — peace on the basis our enemies
suggest — we should find our hands, our
hearts and, yea, our very souls touched
with blood-guiltiness. We should have
saved our own lives at the expense of all
those who have died and all those dear and
beautiful and lovely children as yet hidden
deep in the vales of the future. For
these we should have left a heritage like
unto which our sorrow of to-day would be
as joy. Let us put aside our personal
feeling in this matter— though God knows
it is deep and bitter enough— and by
making our sacrifice perfect ensure the
future happiness of the world. It is our
happiness, or the happiness of countless
Henry Lionel Field 83
thousands in the years when we, in any
case, shall be no more. 5
Some of the best of Henry Lionel Field's
poems, such as the charming lyric ' Plough-
man, Dig the Coulter Deep,' were written
in his Oxford days. He was the favourite
grandson of Mr. Jesse Collings and traced
his descent, on the distaff side, from
Cromwell. From Marlborough he went
to Oxford, and matriculated for Lincoln
College, but instead of going there preferred
to start at once on what he meant to be
the real work of his life, and became a
student at the Birmingham School of
Art. In July 1914, he was taking holiday
at a sketching school at Coniston, when the
sudden outbreak of war brought him
hurrying home to enlist. He was per-
suaded to wait for a commission, and in
due course was gazetted to the Royal
Warwickshire Regiment, and in February
1916 was sent to France with his men.
For five months he was in the trenches,
and wrote home saying he was enjoying
himself. * I am much happier than I
ever thought I should be in the Army.
84 For Remembrance
After all, I am in my destined place, and
doing or about to do what I should be
doing or about to do. In some way or
another, home seems nearer, and thank
God I don't flinch from the sound of the
guns.' On another occasion, he wrote
about himself and his brother, who was
also in the firing line, ' It is our birthright
to do something of this sort once in our
lives. I honestly don't wish things other-
wise, neither does Guy. I don't mean to
talk about Spartan mothers, and that sort
of thing. . . . But remember we are all
part of each other, and think of it like
this — when we leave you, it is not so much
you losing us as you fighting through the
medium of your sons.' He was killed
in the Great Push of 1st July 1916 ; he
had led his men forward and they had
swept after him triumphantly over the
first and second German trenches ; he
had called a laughing remark to a brother
officer and was raising his hand as the
signal for a further advance when a bullet
struck him down. The trail of the war
is over the drawings reproduced from his
Henry Lionel Field 85
pocket sketch-book and over half a dozen
of his twenty-six poems. He put his
love of home into the lines addressed to
4 J. C. F.' less than two months before he
fought his last fight :
Sweet are the plains of France where the Lent
lilies blow,
Yet sweeter far the woods and fields I know.
Fair is the land where the lark sings at dawn,
Yet fairer far the land where I was born.
No nightingale can sing a lovelier lay
Than that the sparrows chirp in my roof tree,
French suns can never paint a brighter day
Than that my fog-bound coasts can offer me.
But it is a sense of the tragedy and waste
of it all that moves him in the rest of his
war verse, as in the unfinished ' Carol for
Christmas, 1914 ' :
On a dark midnight such as this
Nearly two thousand years ago,
Three kings looked out towards the East
Where a single star shone low. . . .
Be with them, Lord, in camp and field
Who guard our ancient name to-night.
Hark to the cry that rises now,
Lord, Lord, maintain us in our right.
86 For Remembrance
Be with the dying, be with the dead,
Sore stricken far on alien ground,
Be with the ships on clashing seas
That gird our island kingdom round.
Through barren nights and fruitless days
Of wasting, when our faith grows dim,
Mary, be with the stricken heart,
Thou hast a Son, remember Him. . . .
and in a broken verse at the end he prays that
the purpose of all the welter of death into
which he is going may be made clear to him.
Racing, polo, the joys of the chase were
the main themes of the ringing, virile songs
that Captain George Upton Robins wrote
before he turned his back on sport and
went on the great adventure into France,
where he died in action on 5th May
1915. All the company he commanded
on Hill 60 were killed, except his orderly,
when, fatally gassed, he contrived to
crawl down and make his report with
his dying breath. Educated at Haileybury
and at Magdalen, Captain Robins left
Oxford to obtain a commission in the East
Yorkshire Regiment during the Roer War,
and in 1901 went on service to South
George Upton Robins 87
Africa, attached to the Mounted Infantry.
He resigned from his regiment a year after
it returned to England, and became
partner in a firm of London and China
merchants. Marrying in 1905, he and
his wife went to Shanghai, where he
remained for two years on his firm's
business. He was in Shanghai again when
Germany invaded Belgium. t As he was
in sole charge of the business out there,'
writes his sister, in a biographical note
to George Robins' Lays of the Hertford-
shire Hunt, ' it was not until December
that he was able to fulfil the one wish of
his heart and come home at once to offer
his services to his country. Between
August and December 1914 he was terribly
impatient at his enforced exile. Writing
of the battle of the Aisne he said : "I
know of one gentleman of England . . .
who thinks himself accurs'd he was not
there." I think he was never so pleased
to see any one in his life as he was to
welcome the man who came out to take
his place and so set him free to come home.
My brother was an idealist, and to him
88 For Remembrance
his King and Country were not mere
names, but a very real part of himself.
That he came from the other end of the
world to fight for them is, I think, sufficient
proof of the realness of his feelings.'
In February 1915 he rejoined his old
regiment, as captain of the 3rd Battalion,
and in France, in April, was transferred
to the 2nd Battalion of the Duke of
Wellington's Regiment, which he was com-
manding in his last fight. At home, in
happier years, he was assistant secretary
of the Hertfordshire Hunt, and the keenest
of sportsmen. He was fond of poetry,
but sport came first, and inspires most of
the best of his verse. Yet his ' Best of
All ' was not sport, and it is to her he turns
in ' L'Envoi ' :
. . . War is good when the stress is past
And the rankling scars grow old,
For its rigours fade and its glamours last
Till the sombre grey turns gold ;
And the hunger and thirst and the bitter days
No more in our thoughts find place,
But we mind that we trod life's roughest
ways,
And met death face to face ;
Photo by Turner & Dtinkwater, Unit.
GEORGE UPTON ROBINS.
CAPTAIN, EAST YORKS REGIMENT.
George Upton Robins 89
And the soul 's astir and the brain 's afire
For the good fight fought before,
But the heart knows well there is something
higher
Than the clamorous ways of war.
Faint on the ear grows the bugle call,
And we turn once more to the Best of All. . . .
And the same spirit, the same tender-
ness, the same turning of his thoughts
homewards to ' the best of all ' are in the
hitherto unpublished lines he sent to his
mother for her birthday, on the 27th
November 1903 :
Comrades in distant climes,
King's folk and homefolk too,
Many possess my rhymes,
None so fitly as you,
Mother.
Steadfast were these and brave,
Sharers in stress and strife ;
Fealty and love they gave,
You have given me life,
Mother.
The most charming of love songs are
his two called ' Roses,' one from Pretoria,
and one from Shanghai ; and the spirit of
his loyal comradeship glows in his lines,
4 To the Others ' :
go For Remembrance
. . . Rhymes are halting and verses weak,
Thoughts ring truer than words can speak.
Proudly I fill the wine-glass up
And I pledge you all in a loving cup.
Here 's to the cheery days gone by
When we marched in the ranks of the old M.I.
And still in the future, come what may,
Be it sport or war, be it work or play,
I ask no better than just to ride
Shoulder to shoulder, side by side,
With the men whose mettle I 've proved and tried,
Comrades of mine.
This was written when he was leaving
the Army after the Boer War, and ' the
others ' were five of the officers who had
been through the South African campaign
with him. Three of the five died, as
he died, in the Great War. At the end
of his book is a list of fourteen of his
friends, followers of the Hertfordshire
Hunt, who also followed him to death in
France.
With one or two exceptions Bernard
Charles de Boismaison White's poems date
from before the war. Born at Harlesden
in 1886, on his father's side, says a memoir
by de V. Payen-Payne, he was connected
with the French family of de Boismaison,
Bernard White 91
his grandmother having been the daughter
of Bernard de Boismaison (son of
Louis xvi. 's ophthalmic surgeon) who
came to England at the Revolution and
settled at Chichester, where his son taught
dancing. After a year's apprenticeship
to a London printer, Bernard White ob-
tained a post, in 1910, in the publishing
house of Messrs. Hutchinson, and thence
went, in 1912, into the publicity depart-
ment of the Marconi Company, and was
presently acting also as assistant editor of
the Wireless World. ' Nothing was further
from his thoughts than a soldier's life,' but
in September 1914, when Germany was
entrenched within a day's march of Paris
and there was dire need of men for our
Army, he joined the Officers' Training
Corps of the London University. The
following February he was gazetted to
the York and Lancaster Regiment, but
in June was persuaded to transfer to the
Tyneside Scottish (20th Northumberland
Fusiliers), and went to France with that
regiment on the 1st January 1916. ' War
is the most horrible, inconceivable, in-
92 For Remembrance
human sacrifice it is possible to imagine,'
he wrote to his brother in February. . . .
4 I am with you, and very close, too ; for
after all, am I not fighting for the little
home in peaceful England that is at present
so sad ? '
His only poems of the war are a trans-
lation into verse of the speech delivered by
M. Henri Lavisse at the Sorbonne in
December 1914 ; a quaint Struwwelpeter
parody :
Let us see if William can
Make war like a gentleman. . . .
and ' Pro Patria,' to the Empire's Service
of Wireless Operators with whom he
had been associated in his peace-time
business :
... Ye in our camps, our ships, the stations that
gird our seas,
Holding in trust the key and power of the sacred
flame
For England's greater honour, let not your service
cease
Till ye confirm your royal right to the scroll of Fame,
Till on the key
Of Victory
For the troubled ears of the world ye tap out the
signal — Peace.
Edward Thomas 93
4 One of his outstanding qualities was his
love of children,' writes the editor of
his book, and you might guess as much
from the simple and charming poem
4 To Guy ' :
Little eyes that are blue,
Here 's a welcome which you
Cannot yet understand . . .
Until he joined the Artists' Rifles in
1915, when he was thirty-seven and might
have been excused if he had not volunteered,
Edward Thomas had written all his poetry
in prose. There is a delicate play of
fancy and imagination and a lapidary
cunning in the verbal artistry of his
essays and criticisms which make it less
surprising that he should at last have
found a medium of expression in verse
than that he did not find it earlier. But
none even of his intimates can have fore-
seen that, with his gentle manners, his
diffident self-distrust and bookish pre-
occupations, he had in him the makings
of a soldier. Chivalry, the finest sense of
honour, steadiness of purpose and a quiet
courage we always knew that he had ;
94 For Remembrance
what took us by surprise was the com-
pleteness with which he threw aside his
civilian habit of pleasant bohemianism,
subdued himself to military discipline
and grew cheerfully hardened to the
rougher life of camp and training ground.
Certainly, he was no lover of war ; he
answered the call to arms solely because he
had a conscience and felt it was his duty
to do so ; then, with his usual thorough-
ness, he was not satisfied to make a pre-
tence of being what he had set out to
become. He devoted himself as keenly
and as scrupulously to his military work
as he had done to the literary work that
was more properly his. He was impatient
of the prolonged training and was not
contented till he secured a commission
in the Royal Garrison Artillery and was
sent to France.
It was this compelling impulse, since he
was a soldier, to be the real thing and
share in the worst that befell his comrades,
that took him to his death during the
British advance in April 1917. * For,' says
his friend John Freeman, c in France he
Edward Thomas 95
was detached from his battery for staff
duties, and was dissatisfied until he had
succeeded in returning to his old post of
danger. Just the same scrupulous spirit
had moved him years before when he
gave up a permanent appointment sans
duties, because there was no way in
which he could earn or was expected to
earn his pay. There were things he
could not endure ; no one who knew
him could be surprised.' He volunteered
for the dangerous work of serving on an
observation post, and was killed by a shell.
Remembering him now, one recalls the
subdued, deliberate voice, the slow, flicker-
ing smile, the intentness of his listening
face, the quiet, conversational humour
that was always at its best in small com-
panies, and recalls, too, how there was
mostly about him that air of settled
thoughtfulness, easily mistaken for melan-
choly, which comes upon men given to
solitary walks and lonely self -communings.
His solitary country walks, in sun or rain
or wind, the things he saw, people he met,
dreams he had and all his lonely self-
g6 For Remembrance
communings by the way have passed into
his verse and made it intimately character-
istic of him. Its wistfulness, its prevailing
note of sadness are as much himself as are
its delight in old English place-names, in
natural beauty, in quaint touches of rural
character. ' Melancholy ' recaptures ex-
actly the curious sense of remoteness from
everyday life that is induced by a day's
wandering uncompanioned. Now and again
the note of melancholy deepens to a dark
foreboding that he is nearing the end of his
world, as in ' Early One Morning ' —
. . . The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet,
The only sweet thing that is not also fleet.
I 'm bound away for ever,
Away somewhere, away for ever —
and in ' Lights Out ' :
I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late ;
They cannot choose . . .
Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends,
All pleasure and all trouble,
'*
Photo by E. O. Hoppe-
EDWARD THOMAS.
LIEUT., ROYAL GARRISON ARTILLERY.
Edward Thomas 97
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.
There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter and leave alone
I know not how.
The tall forest towers ;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf ;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.
And this feeling that he is looking his last
on things recurs less elusively in such lines
as —
Never again, perhaps, after to-morrow shall
I see these homely streets, these church windows
alight,
Not a man or woman or child among them all ;
But it is AU-Friends'-Night, a traveller's good-
night.
All his poems were written in the atmo-
sphere of war, during his training days or
while he was at the front, but apart from
a rousing call in ' The Trumpet '—
G
98 For Remembrance
Open your eyes to the air
That has washed the eyes of the stars
Through all the dewy night :
Up with the light,
To the old wars ;
Arise, arise ! —
the ' In Memoriam ' quatrain for Easter
1915—
The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts,
should
Have gathered them, and will do never again —
and apart from a stray line or so
glooming in some picture of country
life, like a cloud that drifts momen-
tarily across the sun, there is little of
the influence of war in them — less than
there is in the songs of Francis Led-
widge. Both were lovers of nature and
poured their love of her into verse of
an exquisite simplicity, but Thomas was
the more reticent, the more scholarly ;
he had not Ledwidge's artlessness, and
though he had the same emotional tender-
ness was not so simply unreserved in
revealing it. The war stirred both of
Edward Thomas 99
them profoundly and absorbed their
energies, but whenever they had leisure
to withdraw into themselves, for them,
as for others of their temper, old
sources of inspiration reopened, old
habits of thought closed round them
again, and in such hours of respite
they returned to the familiar inner
life from which they had been exiled,
and the war dwindled to nothing but
a weeping of rain on the window, a
wind that wailed in the darkness and
rattled at the door which shut it out.
IV
Their glorious name shall be adored,
Great was their love and great their worth ;
Their fame shall purify the earth.
And Honour be their dear reward.
Lieut. Donald F. Goold Johnson. —
Justitia VictrJ.r.
It was impossible that the altruistic en-
thusiasm which nerved and ennobled our
people in the hour of our setting forth on
the great quest, could remain burning at
white heat through the hardship and dis-
illusion, the wearing agony and inhuman
horrors of over four long years of war.
After the eager swiftness of the first onset,
our soldiers settled down to a dogged
endurance of the filth and peril and tedium
of trench warfare, to a fixed determina-
tion of ' seeing it through,' which was but
the old enthusiasm adapting itself to cir-
cumstances and manifesting itself in a
sober and more enduring form.
This change of mood which came over
the soldiers came also over the songs
100
Stanley Russell 101
which so many in their ranks were writing.
The songs of those later days no longer
or seldom reiterate the shining ideals for
which the singers were fighting, but take
these for granted, and, instead, expose
and denounce with stern outspokenness the
injustice, the madness, the tragic misery
and indescribable beastliness of war, and,
so revealing it, justify and insist upon the
realisation of that ideal of ending it for
ever, which still lived in their hearts un-
quenchable and had become the more
potent because they had done with cloth-
ing it in words and were stubbornly
putting it into action.
But the idealism that rings like a trum-
pet call through so much of the earlier
poetry is a heartening note in the scholarly
verse of Captain Stanley Russell, who died,
as he had lived, in the service of human-
ity, for the freedom and justice that are
the watchwords of the great Leader
Under whose banners he had fought so long.
Trained for the Nonconformist Ministry,
Stanley Russell was, from 1910 to 1913,
102 For Remembrance
successively Assistant Minister and co-
Pastor of Ullet Road Church, Liverpool.
After his marriage in 1913, he devoted
himself to literary work and occasional
preaching. In September 1914 he en-
listed as a private in the Liverpool ' Pals '
Battalion, and presently, having received
a commission in the 1st Herefordshires,
went with his regiment into the inferno
of Suvla Bay, whence he was invalided
home suffering with enteric. Later, as
soon as he was sufficiently recovered, he
was sent to join our army in Palestine,
where he received the Military Cross for
his gallantry in the first attack on Gaza,
in April 1917, and was killed in action on
the 6th November in that year. His
friend, the Rev. Arnold H. Lewis, who is
publishing a Memoir of Captain Russell,
describes him as ' a man of great personal
charm and variously gifted ; an accom-
plished reciter, a speaker and preacher of
originality and power, a clever writer.
He was unusually handsome and of a
most engaging address. Unfailing good
temper and a deep understanding of and
Bernard Pitt 103
love for human nature and an indomitable
spirit gave him influence and leadership
alike at the University, in the Church, and
in the Army.'
Another poet, Bernard Pitt, who went
to war in the same fine spirit, is as ideal-
istic in some of his letters and poems as
Rupert Brooke or John Streets, yet at
times he is almost as bitterly resentful as
Siegfried Sassoon of the hideous realities
of battle. Born at Strand-on-the-Green,
in June 1881, he was educated at the
Middlesex Council School, Isleworth,
trained for the teaching profession at the
Borough Road Training College, and took
his B.A. and M.A. degrees at the London
University. From his father he inherited
a love of books, and from his mother a
calm, equable temperament. His earliest
years were spent at Strand-on-the-Green,
in a small, low-ceiled, book-lined house
set in a garden behind an ivy-clad wall,
from beyond which he could hear the
traffic of the Thames and the noises of a
barge-builder's yard. This home and its
sanctity were of the things he went to
104 For Remembrance
fight for, as he tells you in his verses,
4 Strand-on-the-Green ' :
When I shall fight and hurl myself at the foe
With a heart seething with anger, leaping with
pride,
I will launch one well-aimed shot, I will drive one
blow
For a dear little nook that I know o/, down by
Thames' side.
There are the red-tiled roofs with whitened walls,
There are green willows and poplars along the bank,
And where the full tide laps and the swift ebb falls
There are the barges a-building, rank on rank.
The adzes glint on the planking, the braziers gleam
In the smoke of driftwood fires and the morning
haze,
And the grey longshoremen nod as they watch the
stream,
And the savour of tar is keen in the alley-ways.
Here have the men of my name walked at evening's
end,
Here have I loitered and dreamed through the blue
noontide,
Here are my heart-strings knit ; and if I can defend
They shall build their barges for ever down by
Thames' side.
He began his professional career as a
master at the Kew Schools ; later he was
a master at Sir J. Williamson's Mathe-
matical School, Rochester, and finally
Bernard Pitt 105
at the Coopers' Company School, Bow.
During the latter period, from 1912, he
also conducted a class in English Litera-
ture at the Working Men's College, St.
Pancras, the College that was founded in
1854 by Frederick Denison Maurice. 4 The
love of all fair things was in him from the
beginning,' says one who knew him inti-
mately, 4 and it was inevitable that when
the call came he, choosing of the duties
that lay before him that which was the
greatest, should leave wife and little
children and the profession he loved, and
go to play a man's part in the great
Crusade. The outbreak of war revealed
a new side of his character. He joined
one of the volunteer corps and worked
with the keenest enthusiasm, finally ob-
taining a commission in the Border Regi-
ment in April 1915. In his private life
he was a most devoted husband and
father, a brilliant conversationalist, with
the gift of imparting his great store of
learning without giving any idea that he
was teaching.' The men of his class at
the College, says a prefatory note to his
106 For Remembrance
Essays, Poems, and Letters, are ' still in
love with Pitt and hankering after the
return of their lost leader.' One of his
students, in a number of the College
Journal published just after Bernard
Pitt's death, bears testimony to the fine-
ness of his character, the range and depth
of his knowledge of literature, the efficacy
of his comradely, unconventional method
of teaching, and the affectionate regard
in which all his pupils held him. ' When
the War came,' writes this one of his
class, ' there was a great change. He
was restless, and we were amazed to find
that he had joined the Colours. He was
the last man, we thought, that the War
would call upon ; he was among the first.
How he bore himself as a soldier is told
elsewhere. We are proud of him — our
man, our leader. . . . His students feel
that they owe a debt to the College. By
coming there they knew Bernard Pitt.'
Before the end of 1915 he was in France
serving as a trench mortar officer, and in
February 1916 was given command of a
battery. In the following April he was
Bernard Pitt 107
killed by a shell. Lively, high-spirited
gossip alternates in his letters with wryly,
sometimes grimly, whimsical descriptions
of his surroundings. I have read no
letters from the front that picture more
graphically the everyday life behind the
lines and in the trenches. From what he
writes in jest or earnest of his brother
officers, his men, and his own tireless
activities and eager resolve to carry out
his duties and give the enemy no rest, you
are the better able to appreciate what his
Brigadier-General wrote of his dash and
pluck, and how ' whenever the Germans
appeared to be getting particularly an-
noyed, the men would say, " Oh, it 's that
little trench mortar officer at them with
his guns." ' But if he could tell of his
doings and sufferings with a delightfully
playful humour and make light of hard-
ships and miseries — ' It rains nearly all of
every day, and the mud is vile,' he writes
to his sister, ' but I am so glad to be out
here ' — at other times he sketches the dread-
ful world in which he is living in phrases
that are nakedly and startlingiy realistic.
108 For Remembrance
1 How is the College doing in these hard
times ? ' he asks in a letter to a friend
connected with it. ' It hardly seems
credible that it still exists, with so many
of its tutors and students away : and yet
I so often feel that the reality is Educa-
tion and Fraternity, while all this horror
of war is a transient appearance of the
impossible. Such a glance into the chaos
that man can make, unless love is his
guiding principle, is indeed a terrifying
experience. I am now in a hilly, wooded
region, like the skirts of the Kentish
Downs, with copses full of anemones and
delicate periwinkles, and the sapling hazels
and willows tasselled and downy with
catkins and buds. A mile away is a
village, shattered and wasted, and beyond
that a sight more shocking than the ruin
of human work, a ghastly wood where the
broken trunks and splintered branches
take on weird and diabolical forms. It is
the Bois de Souchez. The ground round
about is poisoned with human relics,
limbs and bundles of clothes filled with
rotten flesh, and even those poor remains
Bernard Pitt 109
of men which pious hands have buried are
daily disinterred by plunging shells. S
itself is merely a heap of bricks and
stones, and it reeks to heaven of mortality.
Do you wonder that, reading Wordsworth
this afternoon in a clearing of the un-
polluted woodlands, and marking the
lovely faded colours on the wings of
hibernated butterflies, and their soft
motions, I felt a disgust, even to sickness,
of the appalling wickedness of war. Some-
times one has great need of a strength
which is not in one's own power to use,
but is a grace of God.'
He has put something of those abhor-
rent sights and the feeling they stirred in
him into one of the few poems he wrote
during the war, and it contrasts sharply
with the beauty and tenderness that are
in his earlier verse — in the gracefully
fanciful ' Aphrodite in the Cloister,' in the
charming song of love, ' After Evensong ' —
Bend over me in dreams ;
Sweep with thy loosened hair
My lips, as though soft streams
Lavished cool wavelets there. . . .
no For Remembrance
Bend over me in light
As holy angels do.
For my last thought this night,
My last prayer, were for you . . .
in ' The Meaning of Love,' or ' Late
Autumn,' with its picturesque delicacy
and sense of atmosphere —
Heavy scent of orchard, stubblefield, and byre
Load the chilly twilight, load the brooding
mind. . . .
That other, darker picture comes in his
last letter home, written two days before
he fell between Souchez and Givenchy,
when, after describing near - by valleys
and crests and upland copses that are 'a
delight to the eye,' he goes on : 'But on
one's way to the line there is the ghastly
slope of , where lines of German
corpses lie unburied, naked bones, curls
of hair clinging to bleached skulls, lipless
teeth, boots which the spoiler has re-
linquished, so set are the stiffened legs
and feet within them. We harden our
hearts. The French artillery captain, who
accompanies us, speaks my mind : " I
never let myself feel sorrow over dead
Bernard Pitt in
Boches. They wanted the war." And
so to the village and wood of S , heaps
of bricks and stones and charred rafters,
smashed trees, shell-holes full of putrid
water, a stench of rotten and half-calcined
corpses. The place lies open to hostile
eyes, and nothing can be done to cleanse
it. I have looked at the wreck until my
imagination is obsessed by it, but verse
can purge the soul of much dangerous
thought.' And he copies into the letter
the last of his poems :
The Wood of Souchez
The coppices of Aylesford are beautiful in Spring ;
Anemone and primrose delay the careless breeze.
The throstles try their grace-notes while woodland
freshets sing,
The dewy catkins glisten on virgin-slender trees,
And England, my dear England, has many walks
like these.
No flowers bloom in the ruins of this accursed wood,
Through writhen, splintered branches the shrapnel
bullets hiss ;
There are no leafy nooks where a bird may rear her
brood ;
The reek of rotten flesh taints the pools where
water is —
But England, my dear England, shall know no
wood like this.
ii2 For Remembrance
They fought for honour, these soldier
poets, and for lofty principles of right and
liberty, but nearly always you may glimpse
in their verses that they fought also for
a simple, natural love of home or some
place in the homeland which they had given
their hearts to and were ready to keep in-
violate with their lives. As Kipling has it,
God gave all men all earth to love,
But, since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Beloved over all,
and the one such spot for Donald Goold
Johnson inspired his glowing stanzas to
Cambridge, ' Mother and Sons,' written a
few months before he sailed for France :
We who have loved thee in days long over,
Mistress immortal and Queen of our hearts ;
With the passionate strength of a youthful lover
Take, ere for ever the glow departs,
Ere the flaming glead of our heart's devotion
Flicker and fail as the night blows chill,
The homage that stirs no mock emotion,
'Tis thine, our Mother, to claim it still. . . .
Then whether the sharp death face us daily,
Thy youthful warriors loved of thee,
Thy towers and palaces smiling gaily,
In vision, our youthful eyes may see :
Photo by Langfier.
BERNARD PITT.
LIEUTENANT, BORDER REGIMENT.
Donald Ooold Johnson 113
For all the hours of life and pleasure,
For all the beauty by thee made known,
We pay thee in no stinted measure,
But gladly lay our young lives down.
Donald Johnson was born in 1890 and
was educated, till he was seventeen, at
Caterham. i He was a son of the Manse,'
says Mr. P. Giles, in a preface to his
Poems. ' His home was at Saffron
Walden. ... As he was the youngest of
four brothers it was necessary that he
should be a teacher for some years before
he could proceed to the University. In
1911 he came into residence at Cambridge,
having been elected to a sizarship at
Emmanuel College, and read for the His-
torical Tripos during his first two years.'
In 1914 he won the Chancellor's Medal
for English Verse with c The Southern
Pole,' a poem on Captain Scott's expedi-
tions, and was devoting himself to a
special study of the text of Chaucer when,
by the end of the year, the war called him
into the Army. A lieutenant in the
Manchester Regiment, he crossed to France
at the end of 1915, and in the following
H
ii4 For Remembrance
year fell leading his men in battle. ' A
trench had to be held at all costs and
the Germans prevented from advancing.
Johnson without hesitation undertook the
task but bade his friends good-bye, fully
certain that he should not return.' The
prophecy of his sonnet, 4 Spring, 1915,'
had so come to fulfilment, for looking then
on the blossoming of the lilac and labur-
num he had told himself—
Next year these shall renew their youth, but thou
No more may'st look upon the bursting flowers,
Nor daze thy senses with the breaths of
Spring :
Silent thou 'It lie throughout the endless hours ;
And all the pangs of earth's awakening
Shall not uncalm the stillness of thy brow.
You may learn from his poems that he
was in love with life, and finely sensitive
to the beauty of all that part of the world
that human hands have not made. Mr.
Giles hints that when in his verse on
classical themes, ' Hylas ' and ' Perse-
phone,' he is touching in descriptions of
scenes in Thessaly or Sicily, he is really
describing the woods and streams that
were round about his home at Saffron
Donald Ooold Johnson 115
Walden. Through his poems, too, is a
recurring sense of the shortness of life, the
pathos of mortality, which is the whole
burden of his ' Sunt Lacrimal Rerum '—
to think that Beauty liveth
Such a little while. . . .
O to think that Love can ever
Feel the ice of Death. . . .
O to think that Beauty dieth
Like a thing of dross,
Broken in the graveway lieth
Under leaf and moss,
All its passion and delight
Quenched amid the voiceless night.
Howbeit, the keynote of his verse is not
despair nor sadness but that deep love of
beauty and a hope of the budding morrow
at midnight. Many of his poems were
written at the front, ' some in the trenches
on the battlefield whence the author did
not return ' ; and not even Noel Hodgson's
1 Before Battle ' is inspired with a humbler,
loftier faith, a larger spirit of humanity,
than is Donald Johnson's ' Battle Hymn ' :
Lord God of battle and of pain,
Of triumph and defeat,
Our human pride, our strength's disdain
Judge from Thy mercy-seat ;
n6 For Remembrance
Turn Thou our blows of bitter death
To Thine appointed end ;
Open our eyes to see beneath
Each honest foe a friend. . . .
Father and Lord of friend and foe,
All-seeing and all-wise,
Thy balm to dying hearts bestow,
Thy sight to sightless eyes ;
To the dear dead give life, where pain
And death no more dismay,
Where, amid Love's long terrorless reign,
All tears are wiped away.
Donald Johnson had written verse be-
fore he became a soldier, but Jeffery Day
was one of the many poets who were
cradled into poetry by the war. Born at
St. Ives in 1896, educated at Sandroyd
House and at Repton, he was only eighteen
when he obtained a commission as a sub-
lieutenant in the R.N.A.S. He showed
exceptional skill as a pilot, and, says the
Memoir in his Poems and Rhymes, he ' was
chosen for work at sea that needed high
technical accomplishment.' But, keen to
take a hand in the desperate struggle on
the Western front, he was not satisfied till
he had managed to get transferred to a
Jeffery Day 117
fighting squadron in France, and before
long he won fame there as a fighter, and
was awarded the D.S.C. ' for great skill
and bravery as a fighting pilot,' but when
this award was gazetted he had already-
fallen in battle. On the 27th February
1918, says the report of his commanding
officer, ' he was shot down by six German
aircraft which he attacked single-handed
out to sea.' Wishing to break the enemy's
formation, and so make it easier for his
less-experienced followers to attack, he
had outdistanced his flight. * He hit the
enemy and they hit his machine, which
burst into flames ; but, not a bit flurried,
he nose-dived, flattened out, and landed
perfectly on the water. He climbed out
of his machine and waved his fellow-pilots
back to their base ; being in aeroplanes
(not sea-planes) they could not assist
him.' Search parties were sent out to
his rescue immediately, but he was seen
no more.
There are stories of his daring, his
wonderful courage, his chivalry, his ready
self-sacrifice, his unfailing cheerfulness and
n8 For Remembrance
high spirits. A friend who wrote of him
while he lived, speaks of his impetuous
yet delicate sympathy with all vital and
beautiful things. ' Vitality runs out of
him in a bubbling stream. He has more
enjoyment of all things worth enjoying
and he is better able to express his enjoy-
ment than anybody I ever knew. . . .
When he speaks of some wonderful flight
through clouds and sunshine I can feel the
air rushing past me and revel with him in
the miracles of light and colour he has
seen.' Yet he found him ' happiest when
he is talking about country places and
especially about his own countryside of
river, fen and mere.' It was this friend
who, seeing in Jeffery Day c a nature made
after the manner of Philip Sidney, poet
and knight in one,' and recognising the
poetic quality of his mind, more in his
conversation than in the gay, spirited
rhymes he began to write in those days
to amuse the ward-room, urged him to
put his thoughts and experiences of flying
into verse. The result was his first poem,
1 On the Wings of the Morning ' :
Jeffery Day 119
A sudden roar, a mighty rushing sound,
a jolt or two, a smoothly sliding rise,
a jumbled blur of disappearing ground,
and then all sense of motion slowly dies.
Quiet and calm, the earth slips past below,
as underneath a bridge still waters flow. . . .
a first poem as remarkable for its technical
finish as for its graphic, imaginative real-
ism. He followed this, a few months
later, with ' An Airman's Dream,' which
was, as he says in a scribbled note in his
note-book, written after he had been
reading Rupert Brooke's ' Granchester.'
From earliest childhood, he adds, ' I had
sent myself to sleep and endured dull
sermons by thinking of my house and its
surroundings,' and it is a vision of these
that comes to him again in the air :
When I am wearied through and through,
and all the things I have to do
are senseless, peevish little things,
my mind escapes on happier wings
to an old house that is mine own,
lichen-kissed and overgrown ;
with gables here and gables there
and tapered chimneys everywhere,
with millstone hearths for burning logs,
and kettles singing from the dogs,
120 For Remembrance
with faintest taint of willow smoke,
and rough-hewn beams of darkened oak,
with unexpected steps and nooks,
and cases full of leather books —
soft water-colours that I love,
and in the bedrooms up above
large four-post beds and lots of air,
where I may lie without a care
and hear the rustle of the leaves
and starlings fighting in the eaves. . . .
In his third poem, ' To My Brother,' he
strikes a deeper note and, with the same
habit of natural, apparently unpremedi-
tated thought, shows a growth in the easy
mastery of expression —
At first, when unaccustomed to death's sting,
I thought that, should you die, each sweetest thing,
each thing of any merit on this earth,
would perish also, beauty, love and mirth :
and that the world, despoiled and God-forsaken,
its glories gone, its greater treasures taken,
would sink into a slough of apathy
and there remain into eternity. . . .
And when one day the aching blow did fall,
for many days I did not live at all. . . .
I prayed that God might give me power to sever
your sad remembrance from my mind for ever.
' Never again shall I have heart to do
the things in which we took delight, we two.
I cannot bear the cross. Oh, to forget
the haunting vision of the past ! ' and yet
Henry Lamont Simpson 121
surely it were a far more noble thing
to keep your memories all fresh as Spring,
to do again the things that we held dear
and thus to feel your spirit ever near.
This I will do when peace shall come again —
peace and return, to ease my heart of pain. . . .
But those days of peace and return were
never to come for him. He was twenty-
two when he died, and there is enough in
this small sheaf of his verse to lift him to
an honoured niche in the Valhalla of those
inheritors of unfulfilled renown who have
gone down among the waste and wreckage
of the war. His lighter air songs, * The
Call of the Air,' ' Dawn,' ' The Joys of
Flying,' are alive with a buoyant gaiety
and the exhilaration of flight, and only
once, in ' North Sea,' does he brood on the
grim horrors of his perilous work.
There is no bitterness in his brooding ;
only an intense realisation of the hideous
side of warfare ; but in some of the most
striking verse of Henry Lamont Simpson
and Cameron Wilson there is the bitter-
ness, the stern or satirical resentment,
which are absent from all the earliest
war poetry, but enter more and more into
122 For Remembrance
it as the dark years pass, and are present,
more or less, in most of the soldier- poetry
that was written towards the last. The
change did not come of weariness, of any
loss of faith in the cause or slackening of
the resolute will to go through to the end
and to end in victory ; it came of the long-
drawn agony, the multitudinous slaughter,
the incalculable squandering of young
and splendid life, and was a profound
protest against the murderous insanity of
that destruction, against the blundering,
obsolete ruling systems that had plunged
the world into such a bloody chaos. It
was the revolt of the modern against the
ancient spirit, of the civilised against a re-
version to barbarism, and the young, with
all their passion for romance and trans-
figuring idealism, were swifter to join in
this rational revolt than were many of
our poets and others who are old enough
to be wiser.
Henry Lamont Simpson was a year
younger than Jeffery Day when he was
killed in action at Hazebrouck. He was
twenty, and the war had already opened
Henry Lamont Simpson 123
his eyes and wakened terrible thoughts in
him when he wrote his starkly realistic
' Casualty List,' and saw not the glory of
his friend's death on the field, but ' the
obvious murderous silliness ' of it, and
cried out in impotent anger —
How long, how long
shall there be Something
that can grind the faces of poor men
to an ultimate uniformity of dullness
and grinning trivial meanness ?
Or pitchfork them at will
(cheering and singing patriotic doggerel)
to a stinking hell,
to crash about for a little,
noisily, miserably ;
till the inevitable comes,
and crushes them
bloodily, meanly ?
And a year earlier, before he had obtained
his commission, watching a draft depart
for the front, ' silently, and with no song
at all,' though he could see some com-
pensation in death after the c clean-souled
strife ' to which they were going, he had
it in him to
' hate the gods that still can send
Men to such harvesting of bloody grain.'
124 For Remembrance
This is far from being the outlook upon
war of the ordinary boy of nineteen ; but
you cannot read Henry Simpson's poems
without knowing he was no ordinary boy.
His home was at Crosby-on-Eden, Carlisle,
where he was born in June 1897. He be-
came a scholar of Pembroke College, Cam-
bridge, in 1915. Mr. H. C. Duffin, who
was his English master during his last
four years at Carlisle School, bears testi-
mony to his fine, swift, vivacious spirit
and the firm- set ' sanity and strength ' of
his character. ' It was sheer joy,' he
writes, ' to watch his lambent mind play-
ing round his fellows in the not undis-
tinguished Sixth of which he was undis-
puted head at school ; and yet withal an
incomparable modesty. The fountain of
his laughing voice will fall for ever on our
ears. His face — clean cut as a cameo
under the black hair — was the index of
his mind ; such beauty could not but be
the complement of a life and soul of rare
perfection. And indeed he was the fairest
of his own thoughts ; his life was the love-
liest of his lyrics. And yet you are to con-
Henry Lamont Simpson 125
ceive one who, up to the very end, was every-
thing that we mean by healthy boyhood.'
He received his commission in the 1st
Lancashire Fusiliers in June 1917, and
went soon after to France. All the poems
in his book, Moods and Tenses, were
written between October 1914 and June
1918 ; one gathers that he wrote other
and some earlier verse which his own
judgment and that of his editor excluded.
Though in the first half of his book there
are fanciful little songs on the happier
things of earth, his thoughts turn again
and again to the pity and mystery of death
and the evil of war ; but in what he wrote
of these later, after he was out in the
battle line, there is a vivider sense of reality,
a growth and sudden maturity of feeling,
of knowledge, of imaginative sympathy.
4 The shock of war — though for a time it
killed in him all desire to write — sent his
power along new channels.' He found
himself, as a poet, in ' the grisly experience
of the Western front— though he hated it,
as all good men must hate such hateful
things,' and he shaped the tragedy of
126 For Remembrance
those experiences, the passion of that
hatred, into verse that is as nakedly simple
in form as it is in phrase and in sincerity.
It is the very heart of sorrow and angry
compassion that speak in the broken lines
of his c Casualty List,' and, again, in the
haunting picture, etched sharply in his ' Last
Nocturne,' of how he was hurrying at night,
with search-lights stabbing the sky and star-
flares hovering overhead, until, passing
under the darkness of trees, he stumbled
and looked down on a figure at his feet —
His face was cold,
And very white ;
There was no blood.
I grew old
That night
In the wood.
He was young,
My enemy —
But lips the same
As lips have sung
Often with me.
I whispered the name
Of the friend whose face
Was so like his ;
But never a sound
In the dimplace
Under the trees
Closing round.
Cameron Wilson 127
Then he curses all singing there, with the
mad moon searching for the gleam
Of dead faces
Under the trees
In the trampled grass. . . .
as in his ' Last Song,' written three days
before the 4 Nocturne,' he had said that
all his songs had left him — they could not
stay i among the filth and weariness of the
dead ' —
Only a madman sings
When half of his friends lie asleep for the rain and
the dew.
There are moods as dark and as bitter
in the poems of Cameron Wilson, but
there is not less of tenderness and spiritual
beauty in them, with the added charm of
a quaint humour and a serene, uplifting
philosophy. Before the war he was a
schoolmaster, as the delightfully playful-
serious little series of poems, ' The Senti-
mental Schoolmaster,' at the end of his
Magpies in Picardy, might of itself have
told you, for it could have been written
only by a real schoolmaster thinking of
real boys who had been his pupils. No
sooner was the war-drum sounding than
128 For Remembrance
he enlisted, in August 1914, in the Grena-
dier Guards ; and he had seen much
service and was a Captain of the Sherwood
Foresters when he was killed in France on
the 23rd March 1918.
If he had not been a true idealist, a
patriot whose love of country was only
part of a larger love of humanity, he would
not have been impelled to go so quickly
and voluntarily to the defence of Belgium,
to pit his strength and life against the
power of wrong when it seemed so much
mightier than right. But he was a man,
and eager to take a man's good way in
that business. He went to war because
he hated it, and saw no virtue in stand-
ing aside, leaving the outlaws who made
war free to filch what they would of the
world, and slay and ravage and triumph
unopposed. He fought not for the lust of
fighting, but for the joy of breaking, once
for all, those who did fight for the lust of
it. How deeply he was stirred by the
horror and cruelty inseparable from that
lust, and from the glory that traditionally
rewards whoso survives to go on rejoicing,
Cameron Wilson 129
you may read in those lines of his picturing
the soldier looking up at a lark in the
Spring sky and thinking of his waking
farm in England :
The deep thatch of the roof — all shadow-flecked —
The clank of pails at the pump . . . the day begun.
' After the war . . .,' he thought. . . .
And then a sound grew out of the morning,
And a shell came, moving a destined way,
Thin and swift and lustful, making its moan.
A moment his brave white body knew the Spring,
The next it lay
In a red ruin of blood and guts and bone.
Oh ! nothing was tortured there ! Nothing could
know
How death blasphemed all men and their high
birth
With his obscenities. Already moved,
Within those shattered tissues, that dim force
Which is the ancient alchemy of Earth,
Changing him to the very flowers he loved.
' Nothing was tortured there ! ' Oh, pretty thought !
When God Himself might well bow down his head
And hide his haunted eyes before the dead.
Yet this irony and anger are not more
characteristic of him than are the tender-
ness in such a snatch of song as —
Dear, if your blinded eyes could see
The path my thoughts have worn to you . . .
I
130 For Remembrance
than the flash of vision that comes to him
as he looks on ' An Old Boot in a Ditch,'
and reflects that
In your green silence there
You see the world pass like a lean old witch,
You watch the stars at night, and you may share
The small fierce love wherein the soil is rich,
And know that half the gifts of God are won
By centipedes and fairies in the ditch . . .
nor more characteristic of him than that
quaint fantasy of the sportsmen killed in
battle passing through the open gates into
Paradise, and —
They saw far off a little wood
Stand up against the sky.
Knee-deep in grass a great tree stood . . .
Some lazy cows went by. . . .
There were some rooks sailed overhead —
And once a church-bell pealed.
' God ! but it 's England,' some one said,
' And there 's a cricket-field ! '
He could lay bare the beastly and brutal
facts of war in 4 A Soldier ' and in ' France,
1917,' but the gay, sad ' Song of Amiens '
tells you that
laughter runs
The cleanest stream a man may know
To rinse him from the taint of guns.
And if ' France, 1917,' is full of the heart-
Cameron Wilson 131
break of the terrible things he had known,
it is full too of a deeper knowledge that
had come to him out of all that suffering :
On every road War spilled her hurried men,
And I saw their courage, young and eagle-strong.
They were sick for home — for far-off valley or moor,
For the little fields and lanes and the lamp-red door ;
For the lit town and the traffic's husky song.
Great love I saw, though these men feared the
name
And hid their greatness as a kind of shame. . . .
I found honour here at last on the earth, where
man faced man ;
It reached up like a lily from the filth and flies,
It grew from war as a lily from manure.
Out of the dark it burst, undaunted, sure,
As the crocus, insolent under slaty skies,
Strikes a green sword-blade through the stubborn
mould,
And throws in the teeth of winter its challenge of
gold.
What these men, what he himself, in
due time, died for he tells in the most
poignant, most beautiful of his verses, ' On
Leave.' When he landed at Folkestone,
he says, neither the first bit of England
nor the fields of Kent as he travelled
through them had anything to say to him ;
but when he came at length into his own
familiar county it was otherwise —
132 For Remembrance
It was the red earth of Devon that called to me,
' So you 'm back, you li'l boy that us used to know ! '
It was the deep, dim lanes that wind to the sea,
And the Devon streams that turn and twist and run,
And the Devon hills that stretch themselves in the
sun
Like drowsy green cats watching the world
below . . .
and remembering those of his friends who
would not see these scenes again, he feels
It was for this you died : this, through the earth,
Peace and the great men peace shall make,
And dogs and children and careless mirth. . . .
He threw his challenge of gold in the teeth
of Winter for the sake of peace and home,
and that all that made home dear to him
might be held inviolate.
In a brief introduction to Magpies in
Picardy, Mr. Harold Munro says rightly
that these poems are remarkable i as the
expression of a personality,' and the per-
sonality they express is so intensely human,
of such strength and charm, that one would
not willingly lose anything of it that may
remain to us, and is glad to learn that the
letters and other prose writings of Cameron
Wilson are being brought together and will
presently be published.
Humbly, O England, we offer what is of little worth.
Just our bodies and souls and everything else we have ;
But thou with thy holy cause wilt hallow our common earth ,
Giving us strength in the battle — and peace, if need, in the
grave.
Acting-Captain Charles J. B. Masefieuj, M.C. —
Enlisted, or The Recruits.
What finally emerges from the songs of
all these dead singers is a gracious but
unconquerable spirit of humanity — a sane,
civilised spirit, common to them all, that
hated war with a hatred that was only
strengthened and intensified by contact
with the horrors and primeval barbarities
of it. The burden of their singing is
always that they fight, not for fighting's
sake, but to break the last stronghold of
ancient savagery, to enthrone Right above
Might, to blaze a trail through the dark
forest by which the men of to-morrow may
find their way into a new and happier
world where war shall be no more. From
the heights of their idealism this was the
hope, the promised land that they could
133
134 For Remembrance
see. They did not expect to reach it
themselves ; theirs was only that far-off
Pisgah-view of it ; but they were touched
with pride in the thought that they were
privileged to give their lives that through
them it might remain an inheritance for
the generations yet to come. This was all
that mattered, and for themselves —
My day was happy — and perchance
The coming night is full of stars,
writes Richard Dennys, in one of his
Ballads of Belgium, and in another,
Death flies by night, Death flies by day,
He calls the gay, he calls the sad,
And if he summon me away,
Be sure my going will be glad.
Life had not offered an easy road to
Major John E. Stewart ; from his boyhood
he had fought bravely against poverty and
circumstance and won by hard work every
honour that came to him. He proved his
capacity at school, took his M.A. degree
at Glasgow University, and settled down
as a teacher at Langloan Public School,
Coatbridge. But within a month of the
declaration of war he saw his duty clear,
John E. Stewart 135
threw everything aside and joined the
Highland Light Infantry as a private.
He received a commission after two
months' service, and was attached to a
Border Regiment, in which he rose to be
captain and adjutant. Presently, with
the rank of major, he was transferred to
the South Lancashire Regiment. By then
he had seen much fighting in France. He
had been given the command of a battalion
of the Staffordshire Regiment when he
met his death in action on the 26th
February 1918. Two years before that he
had won the Military Cross for conspicuous
bravery in the field. He had written a
good deal of prose and verse in peace-time
for many periodicals, and from more than
one poem in Grapes of Thorns, the book
of verse he published in 1917, you may
know in what mind he went to his death —
If I should fall upon the field
And lie among the slain,
Then mine will be the victory
And yours the pain ;
For this in prospect comforts me
Against all saddening fears
That, dying so, I make myself
Worthy your tears.
136 For Remembrance
He puts into ' The Messines Road ' that
burning sympathy for France and resolve
to right the wrongs she is enduring which
fired so many of our men who have
fallen in her defence, and none has paid
her higher or more splendid tribute than
he laid at the feet of her heroes in his
song of ' Verdun.' There is a striking
8 Ode of the Poet ' in which he speaks of
how, amid the hell of modern battle, the
bard of these days laughs at Homer and
the sheltered muse of Tennyson, and fore-
sees that a new poet shall yet arise to
sing the new Iliad, that he might be with
us unknown at that hour, enduring all the
agonies and horrors of a war that shall live
for ever in the song he shall make when,
in some future quietness, he can look back
and remember.
Or haply in the silent womb of Time
Stirs the elected spirit to this hour,
He who will build for us the lofty rhyme,
Wearing a god-like vision as his dower,
Wise in the things that he has learned in Heav'n,
And wiser even than he who here has striven
For that he sees as the holy angels see
The foolishness we deem felicity,
John E. Stewart 137
And all the dreadful things beneath the sun
Which we have made to grieve the holy One.
He with His scales
Shall justly weigh us out our due,
And winnow with His righteous flails
The chaff from out the crop we grew.
But this is sure, howe'er it be,
We shall not face ashamedly
The reckoning. For all the price
Of our poor faults is doubly paid
In valour and in sacrifice.
Who, then, of judgment is afraid ?
Loathing war, yet seeing no honourable
way of avoiding it, he faced the worst
manfully, fearing no enemy and afraid
only lest he should show fear when
death seemed imminent and give those
he loved cause to be ashamed of him,
but—
Lo, when I joined the fight,
And bared my breast
To all the darts of that wild, hellish night,
I only stood the test,
For Fear, which I had feared, deserted then,
And forward blithely to the foe I prest,
King of myself again.
Blessed be God above
For His sweet care,
Who heard the prayers of those whom most I love
And my poor suppliance there,
138 For Remembrance
Who brought me forth in life and limb all whole,
Who blessed my powers with His divine repair,
And gave me back my soul !
A far other war-song this, far nobler
in its humility and more courageous
than the brazen, sounding rhymes that
our civilian war-poets used to sing
for us !
It was nothing strange that these men,
nurtured in peace, reared wholly in the
gentler arts of life, should have entered
so suddenly into the new and abhorrent
atmosphere of war, haunted, more or
less, by premonitions that they would
never return. This premonition recurs
in the verse of most of them and is
accepted sometimes stoically and as a
matter of course, sometimes with regret
or with bitterness, but without dread,
and sometimes in an eager and lofty
spirit of self-sacrifice. Something of
this sense of doom is in Geoffrey Bache
Smith's later poems, but it leaves him
untroubled, and when he hints at it it
is with a calm, serene philosophy. He
gave evidence of literary ability while he
Geoffrey Bache Smith 139
was still a student at King Edward's
School, Birmingham. In 1912 he was
elected to a History Exhibition at Corpus
Christi College, Oxford, and took up
residence there in October of that year.
He was looking forward to devoting him-
self to literature as a profession when the
war, at a stroke, shattered all his plans, and
he at once joined the Oxford O.T.C. In
January 1915 he obtained a commission
in the Oxford and Bucks Regiment, but
was transferred to the 19th Lancashire
Fusiliers and went with them to France
in November 1915. He had a hard winter
in the trenches and was in the thick of the
fighting in July 1916. His letters home
show how profoundly he was impressed
bv the horrors of war, but his native
cheerfulness never failed him ; his humour
and good spirits were proof against all the
darkness and danger of his surroundings.
After the Somme advance he was made
intelligence officer, and then adjutant.
While walking down a village street on
29th November 1916, he was struck by
a fragment of a stray shell; the wound
140 For Remembrance
seemed slight but became septic, and he
died three days later. Shortly afterwards
his brother was killed in Mesopotamia,
and they were the only sons of their
mother, who was a widow.
His earlier poems are rilled with the
sweetness of common life, or the dreams
and glamour of old romance, the longest
and one of the best of them, * Glastonbury,'
steeped in the light and atmosphere of
far-off days, being an Arthurian legend
of the repentance of Lancelot. In ' A
Preface for a Tale I never Told ' he says
that in it there shall be
No song
That men shall sing in battle and remember
When they are old and grey, beside the fire :
Only a story gathered from the hills,
And the wind crying of forgotten days. . . .
Of the beauty and the happiness of the
* old quiet things ' of life all his poetry was
fashioned till the war broke through his
dreams and, with ' We who have Bowed
Ourselves to Time,' he bade farewell to
them :
. . . We who have led, by gradual ways,
Our placid life to sterner days,
Geoffrey Bache Smith 141
1 - -
And for old quiet things
Have set the strife of kings,
Who battled have with bloody hands
Through evil times in barren lands,
To whom the voice of guns
Speaks but no longer stuns,
Calm, though with death encompassed,
That watch the hours go overhead,
Knowing too well we must
With all men come to dust. . . .
And in ' Anglia Valida in Senectute '
glimmers a knowledge that not only the
beauty and happiness of the world are
passing away from him :
We are old, we are old, and worn and school'd
with ills,
Maybe our road is almost done,
Maybe we are drawn near unto the hills
Where rest is and the setting sun.
He cannot, in the trenches, remember
Oxford but the thought intrudes :
A little while, and we are gone ;
God knows if it be ours to see
Again the earliest hoar-frost white
On the long lawns of Trinity.
Counting over his comrades who have
fallen, he wonders :
142 For Remembrance
How far now to the last of battles ?
(Listen, the guns are loud to-night !)
Whatever comes, I will strike once surely,
Once because of an ancient tryst,
Once for love of your dear dead faces
Ere I come unto you, Shapes in the mist.
His prayer is :
O God, the God of battles,
To us who intercede
Give only strength to follow
Until there 's no more need ;
And grant us at that ending
Of the unkindly quest
To come unto the quiet isles
Beyond Death's starry West ;
and his comfort is that there are still men
who, fearing nothing,
Love home above their own hearts' blood
And honour more than life.
In one of those letters from which I have
already quoted, Harold Parry writes to his
father, on 13th February 1916, 'I saw
in the Mirror for Wednesday or Thursday
a photograph of one of Mr. D 's friends,
H. R. F., an Exonian and poet of no
mean ability. He paid the final price on
24th January, and England has lost
Hugh Reginald Freston 143
another of the men who would have been
a greater credit to her in life than they
can be even in this most glorious death.
Tell Dorothy he wrote in various of the
volumes of Oxford poetry, and I should
like her to get the Mirror to see how much
F and Mr. D were of a type — both
brilliant and intellectual, driven to war
by a sense of duty.' The H. R. F. referred
to is Hugh Reginald Freston who, like
Harold Parry, went from Oxford into the
Army. When he left Dulwich College to
become an undergraduate at Exeter College
Freston' s intention had been to fit himself
for taking holy orders, but before long he
relinquished this purpose, feeling irresistibly
drawn to a literary career. There is high
promise in the work he has done ; he had
a quiet confidence in his powers and great
hope of his future ; but as soon as the war
was upon us, he allowed no personal
interests to restrain him from what he
conceived to be his duty. After he had
trained in the O.T.C. he was made a
2nd lieutenant in the Royal Berkshire
Regiment, and though he had no liking
144 For Remembrance
for the new life upon which he had entered,
he gave himself up to it completely and
enthusiastically — ' doing the thing he
loathed for the thing he loved.' Early in
December 1915 he was in France ; a few
weeks later he took his place in the front
lines, and after ten days of trench fighting,
was killed. These lines, which are among
the poems collected into his posthumous
volume, The Quest of Truth, might have
been inspired by some strange fore-know-
ledge of the manner of death he was to
die :
Suddenly a great noise shall fill my ears,
Like angry waters or the roar of men ;
I shall be dizzy, faint with many fears ;
Blindly my hands shall clutch the air — and then
I shall be walking 'neath the quiet skies,
In the familiar land of former years,
Among familiar faces. I shall arise
In that dear land where there are no more tears
— for it was so death came to him. He
was inspecting a dug-out which had been
shelled when several shells came over and
one struck him and, engulfed instantly
in its burst of noise and darkness, ' from
that moment,' writes his commanding
Kv'.' I *£.,,-..
HUGH REGINALD FRESTON (REX).
LIEUT., ROYAL BERKSHIRE REGT.
Hugh Reginald F res ton 145
officer, ' he was dead, although he breathed
a few times — no suffering.'
The premonition that he was destined
to die for his ideals, that he was plainly
called to lay down his life for his country
and the cause that was his and hers, is
in other of Freston's poems, as it is in those
of many of his comrades. It is in his
4 Departure,' in ' When I am Dead,'
in ' Two Nights '—
And I laugh to hear the bugles, but I weep to hear
the bells,
For I know the bells of Oxford will ring no more
for me —
It is in ' April 1915,' and again in ' October
31st, 1915,' written not long before he
left England for the last time :
After I am dead,
And have become part of the soil of France,
This much remember of me :
I was a great sinner, a great lover, and life puzzled
me very much.
Ah, love ! I would have died for love !
Love can do so much both rightly and wrongly.
It remembers mothers and little children,
And lots of other things.
men unbom, I go now, my work unfinished !
1 pass on the problem to you : the world will hate
you : be brave !
K
146 For Remembrance
And more movingly and with a deeper sense
of conviction it speaks through ' The Gift,'
where he offers himself in sacrifice without
asking why, for in his heart he knows :
. . . There is a certain ancient city, where he once
was free and young,
(But he leaves it now for you),
Where Oxford tales are spoken, and Oxford ways
are sung,
(But he leaves them now for you),
And his heart is often weary for that dear old river
shore
And he thinks a little sadly of the days that come
no more
(But he gives them up for you).
If his dust is one day lying in an unfamiliar land,
(England, he went for you)
O England, sometimes think of him, of thousands
only one,
In the dawning, or the noonday, or the setting of
the sun
(As once he thought of you),
For to him, and many like him, there seemed no
other way
(England, he asked not why)
But the giving up of all things for ever and for aye,
(England, he asked not why),
And so he goes unshrinking from those dearest paths
of home,
For he knows, great-hearted England, let whatever
fate may come,
You will never let him die !
Leonard Niell Cook 147
Leonard Niell Cook, a Rugby and Oxford
boy who had newly exchanged his student's
gown for khaki, writing of i Plymouth
Sound,' tells how from the greensward he
looked out across the sea he was on the
eve of crossing, heard the harbour gun
sound at sunset, saw
The homing traffic on the water's breast
Fold up their tawny wings and take their rest,
and, with the stars rising above him and
4 God's quietness ' about him, he thought
of how soon he would be yonder in ' the
gloomy courts of Fear ' destined to be cut
down,
Perchance to crown the pallid brow of Death.
In the ' Envoi,' addressed to his parents
before he went out from Edinburgh,
Hamish Mann writes :
Be calm. I follow where my friends have gone.
Have nought to fear,
I go to herald in the Glorious Dawn
Which breaks not here.
Be brave. A myriad mothers' sons before
Have trod this path . . .
and he bids them to be proud in his pride
148 For Remembrance
and only pray that when his hour comes
there may be no stain upon his honour.
This is the end of Charles Masefield's
song of his 4 Sailing for Flanders ' :
We have put life away and spurn the ways of the
living ;
We have broken with the old selves who gathered
and got,
And are free with the freedom of men who have
not ;
We partake the heroic fervours of giving and again
giving.
Was it only for death we were born of our mothers ?
Only for Death created the dear love of our wives?
Only for death and in vain we endeavoured our
lives ?
Yea, life was given to be given ; march onward, my
brothers.
Which matches the earlier mood in which
he took up arms, as he expresses it in
Enlisted, or The Recruits :
Humbly, O England, we offer what is of little
worth,
Just our bodies and souls and everything else we
have ;
But thou with thy holy cause wilt hallow our
common earth,
Giving us strength in the battle — and peace, if need,
in the grave. . . .
W. H. Litt/ejohn 149
And here is the same foreshadowing in
Ewart Alan Mackintosh's ' Ghosts of
War ' :
When you and I are buried
With grasses over our head,
The memory of our fights will stand
Above this bare and tortured land
We knew ere we were dead. . . .
If men with hope and happiness to lose
could thus calmly abjure it all without a
tremor, it is the less to be wondered at
that others who have made a waste of life
and are burdened with shame and remorse,
like the soldier pictured in W. H. Little-
john's dramatic lyric ' To S , A Man
who Died Bravely,' should see a way of
redemption in the sacrifice of self for the
saving of the world and take the road to
death glad in the certainty of gaining
life by losing it :
I have plucked a blowing rosebud, and I trailed it
in the mire,
I have left a spirit's temple frail grey ashes of dead
fire,
—I have made a saintly woman plaything of a foul
desire.
150 For Remembrance
And I 've quit the straight clean-seeing, I 've
attached the label { cad,'
And I want to go down fighting, want to die with
brain blood-mad :
I could spit into their faces when they grin, ' He 's
not so bad ! '
Drawn-out weeks I 've strained the head-rope, weary
months I 've longed to start
For the last and best performance, where for once
I 'm given the part
Of a white man — and a little nickel devil through
my heart.
Church parade, the padre gave out that damnation 's
no man's fate,
That you just report deficient and He never notes
you late ;
But I 'm not a man to whine for mercy passing
through hell's gate.
I don't snivel of repentance when hot tears have run
to flood,
For I plucked a blowing rosebud and I trailed it in
the mud,
But I 'd like to lave its poor soiled petals with my
body's blood.
I would leave the merest speck of gold within the
filth-clogged sieve,
Gold that she and God might notice there and,
noticing, forgive ;
I would show I knew to die although I never learned
to five.
W. H. Littlejohn 151
So there 's just a laughing death-song in my heart as
up I plod
To the trenches, where my meed will be a six-foot
stretch of sod
With a plain wood cross above it — leave the rest of
me to God.
Littlejohn joined the Territorial branch
of the Middlesex Regiment when it was
inaugurated, and had become a sergeant
before the war. It is likely that the man
whose story he tells was one of the motley
new recruits who marched in his platoon.
He had risen to be company- sergeant-major
when he was sniped at the battle of Arras,
while in the act of cheering his company in
the moment of victory. Before he went to
France, he had fought at Gallipoli, and
several of his ballads and poems are of
incidents in that campaign, but I think I
like best some later verse of his in which
he accepts the probability of death for
himself, not 4 with a laughing death-song '
but with a prayer that matches it in per-
fect courage, and that, in the manner
of his going, would seem to have been
granted :
152 For Remembrance
Lord, if it be Thy will
That I enter the great shadowed valley that lies
Silent just over the hill,
Grant they may say, ' There 's a comrade that dies
Waving his hand to us still.'
Lord, if there come the end,
Let me find space and breath all the dearest I prize
Into thy hands to commend :
Then let me go, with my boy's laughing eyes,
Smiling a word to a friend.
Yet you are not to imagine that these
men took life sadly or half-heartedly or
were one whit the less soldierly and fear-
less because such dark thoughts lurked
at the backs of their minds and they sat
now and then to fashion them into verse.
Freston's more prevailing spirit is in his
stirring sonnet ' On Going into Action,'
and the gladness that was behind all his
acceptance of death shouts triumphantly
in another sonnet, ' O Fortunati ' :
Oh happy to have lived these epic days !
To have seen unfold, as doth a dream unfold,
These glorious chivalries, these deeds of gold,
The glory of whose splendour gilds death's ways,
As a rich sunset fills dark woods with fire
And blinds the traveller's eyes. Our eyes are blind
With flaming heroism, that leaves our mind
Dumbstruck with pride. We have had our hearts'
desire !
Photo by Vandyk, Ltd.
CHARLES J. B. MASEFIELD, M.C.
LIEUT. (ACTING-CAPT.), 5TH NORTH STAFFS. REGT.
/
Charles Mase field 153
Oh happy ! Generations have lived and died
And only dreamed such things as we have seen
and known !
Splendour of men, death laughed at, death defied,
Round the great world on the winds is their tale
blown ;
Whatever pass, these ever shall abide :
In memory's Valhalla, an imperishable throne.
Leonard Cook had won his M.C. before he
died, fighting gallantly. Hamish Mann
has met the fate he foresaw for himself
when he wrote his ' Envoi ' and told in
another song of the dream that he would not
rest now on some placid hillside of home, but
in France within hearing of the guns. . . .
And I shall sleep beneath that foreign soil
As peacefully as e'er 'neath heather flower.
Knowing that I have answered Duty's call,
Knowing that I have died in England's hour
— but he met his fate heroically leading
his platoon in that Arras advance in which
Little John fell.
Under whatever premonitions may have
come to him, the one firm conviction
Charles Masefield carried with him into
the war, and that made him indifferent
to what might happen to himself, was that
Right is might, and we shall prevail.
154 Por Remembrance
Masefield was thirty-five when he died ;
he had done distinguished work in litera-
ture before the war, and the growing
mastery of his art that is apparent in his
later work sufficiently indicates that he
had not yet reached the summer of his
powers. Born at Cheadle, he went from
a preparatory school at Southport to
Repton, in Derbyshire, where his tutor
was Dr. Furneaux, the present Dean of
Winchester. He gained there the Aylmer
prize for Divinity and the Howe prize for
English verse, writing for the latter 4 A
Vision of Italian Painters.' Leaving
school, he was articled to his father, and
later became a partner in the old family
firm of solicitors at Cheadle, Messrs. Blagg,
Son and Masefield. From his childhood
he had divided his affections between
nature and books, and in 1908 Blackwoods
published a first book of his own, a novel
on rather unorthodox lines called Gilbert
Hermer. But he was drawn more to verse
than to prose, and in 1911 appeared a
collection of his poems, The Seasons'
Difference, in which you make contact
Charles Mase field 155
with a mind that is keenly susceptible to
natural beauty and to what is finest in the
nature of man. Just because he was
conscious of the goodness that was in
men and was keen to see them live up to
their highest level, he lashed with an
indignant scorn their weaknesses, their
snobbery, follies, meannesses, in the series
of modern satires, Dislikes, that he
published in 1914, the year that was to
rouse us from many of the vanities he
denounced and reawaken our slumbering
ideals. It is not satire, though, that
burns in the last poem in the book,
8 Beauty Cast Out,' but a passionate
earnestness of regret that the England of
those latter years should, in Jonson's
phrase, have ' let the noble and the
precious go ' in the race for wealth and
material prosperity, that in her great
towns the sense of beauty and the desire of
it should have been banished by the lust
for power and commercial gain :
Ye have your gains —
Your transient gains ; ah, hug them to you fast,
For after all your toilings and your pains
Shall come a day to fling them wide at last,
156 For Remembrance
Yearning for Beauty, not to be for ever baulked.
What of you then, who when the dreamers
dreamed
Sang praise of Hell ; who your true treasures hawked
For coined dust, and all your days blasphemed ?
For all else dies
But what is beautiful ; the eternal dark,
Wherein nor moon nor star doth ever rise,
Bends o'er imperial Carthage, but the spark
That lit the soul of Hellas glows unquenched still.
Fast runs the world, and soon the massy gold
Casts from her, but her hungering mind doth fill
With all the loveliness e'er dreamed of old.
Little we know
Of Beauty who do never face to face
Speak with her now in all the ways we go ;
She hath, we say, the wanton's swooning grace
And luscious tempting wiles the idle fool to
snare.
So we divorce her who has been man's wife,
And hound with insults her who still would share
And lift his struggle and exalt his life.
Suffer us not
Longer to clutch our drifting lies unsure ;
Lady, forgive us, who so soon forgot
The true incredible Thou — strong, eager, pure
As fits a thought God thinks throughout His endless
day—
The something always singing overhead,
The vision man takes with him far away,
Most radiant then when all things else lie dead.
Charles Mase field 157
O once adored
Dear lady we have lost, return again,
Bring us not peace nor languors, but a sword,
Even as death, dealing thy needful pain ;
Upbraid, accuse, destroy, but make our spirit
whole,
Come as an indignation, a desire
All unawares discerned in every soul,
And on thy ready altars light the fire.
How was it possible for a man
of such spiritual insight to hesitate
when the war came with its instant
appeal to all of honour and chivalry
that had power with us ? By then
he had been four years married, and
was happy in his work and in the
home life with his wife and little son,
but he could not rest so in his own
happiness. He felt that his duty was
elsewhere, and nothing could dissuade
him from going where it led. The
death of the head of his firm delayed
him, but so soon as he could get his
business affairs in order, in August
1915 he obtained a commission in the
5th North Staffordshire Regiment, and
after some months of training and
158 For Remembrance
assistant adjutant work, went to France
in June 1916. One of the poems
written in those days, ' Candle Light,'
gives a delightful sketch of his life in a
French billet :
Candle light is so mellow and warm
When a man comes in all hungry and cold,
Clotted with mud or wet with the storm —
Only of candle light you shall be told.
Of Madame's brave, sad eagerness
And French serenity of dress,
Her quiet, quick ways as she goes
To dry our heavy, sodden clothes
And bring all hot the great ragout
That makes once more a man of you,
Her pains to help us put away
The sights that we have seen all day,
Her talk of kine, and oats, and rye,
And Francois' feats when but so high —
You 'd never guess, did you not know,
He died for France three months ago.
And then there 's Marthe, whom he has left
(So proud, and yet so all bereft),
And Marie, with her hair in ties,
Looking at you with great round eyes
That make you wish to Heaven you were
The hero that you seem to her.
And last, and least,
There 's Francois' little Jean-Baptiste,
Charles Mase field 159
For whom, deep slumbering in his cot,
All wounds and wars and deaths are not. . . .
Such is the household every night
Illumined by the candle light.
Searchlights are so blinding and white,
The things they show you shall not hear ;
Enough to see them ; it is not right
We should tell of them too, my love, my dear.
In October he was called back home by
the sudden death of his only partner,
his mother's brother, and was granted
three months' special leave. He crowded
much strenuous work into that brief space,
and in February 1917 rejoined his regiment
in England. In May he returned to
France, and next month received the M.C.
for the brilliant handling of his men in
an attack on 14th June near Lens ; but
he never knew of this honour, for leading
his troops— he had now been made acting-
captain — in another attack on 1st July
he was fatally wounded and taken prisoner,
and died the next day. I began speaking
of him by quoting some verses in which he
seemed calmly to accept as inevitable the
certainty of his own death, but his 4 In
Honorem Fortium ' will tell vou that the
160 For Remembrance
shadowy premonition that touched him
had in it no shadow of fear :
. . . Grief though it be to die, 'tis grief yet more
To live and count the dear dead comrades o'er. . . .
Peace. After all, you died not. We 've no fear
But that, long ages hence, you will be near —
A thought by night — on the warm wind a breath,
Making for courage, putting by old Death,
Living wherever men are not afraid
Of aught but making bravery a parade ;
Yes, parleying with fear, they '11 pause and say,
' At Gommecourt boys suffered worse that day ' ;
Or, hesitating on some anxious brink,
They will become heroic when they think,
' Did they not rise mortality above
Who staked a lifetime all made sweet with love ? '
Grenf ell's joy of battle, the high spirits,
the courage, and grim, gay humour of
our old and new armies, and some of the
noblest poetry the war has occasioned live
in the two volumes of Ewart Mackintosh,
who also, as I have shown you, seemed to
foresee that he would find his grave in
France.
Born at Brighton, he was a son of the
late Alexander Mackintosh, of Alness, in
Ross-shire, and a grandson of Dr. Guiness
Rogers. At Brighton College he won a
Photo by J. Soame, Oxford.
EWART ALAN MACKINTOSH, M.C.
LIEUT.. SEAFORTH HIGHLANDERS.
Ewart Alan Mackintosh 161
St. Paul's scholarship, and in October
1912, says John Murray in a prefatory
memoir to War the Liberator, went to
Christ Church as a classical scholar. He
made good there more by his natural
capacity than by routine study, developed
a passion for poetry and for the arts and
traditions of his native Highlands. The
war ended his two happy years at Oxford,
and before the close of 1914 he was a sub-
altern of the 5th Seaforths. By the
following July he was in the fighting line
in France, and in May 1916 received the
M.C. for his conduct of a daringly success-
ful raid. Gassed and wounded, he was
sent back to England in August, and
whilst training cadets at Cambridge became
engaged, and had schemes of marrying and
settling down in New Zealand after the
war. But he could not rest here in safety ;
he was troubled with yearnings to be back
with the comrades who had fought beside
him and who were carrying on now while
he was not there. This feeling is in the
poem written at Cambridge, ' From Home ' ;
living at peace he could still hear the roar
162 For Remembrance
of the shells, still see the tired patrols out
in the rain, and
The dead men's voices are calling, calling,
And I must rise and go.
You will understand how irresistible that
call was to him if you read his ' In
Memoriam ' on Private David Sutherland
and other of his men who were killed,
where, addressing David's father, who
mourns the loss of his only son, he sorrows
that he, their officer, had fifty such men
who followed and trusted him, and it
wrung his heart to remember how they
had seen him with their dying eyes and
held him while they died. I am not
quoting from this poem, for it is a tender
and poignantly beautiful thing that must
be read in its entirety, and it helps one
to interpret, if any help be needed, the
lines 'To Sylvia,' dated October 1917,
when he had had his way and was with
the Seaforths in France again, with death
waiting him only a month ahead in the
battle that was to come near Cambrai :
God knows — my dear — I did not want
To rise and leave you so,
Ewart Alan Mackintosh 163
But the dead men's hands were beckoning
And I knew that I must go.
The dead men's eyes were watching, lass,
Their lips were asking too :
We faced it out and paid the price —
Are we betrayed by you ? . . .
But you '11 forgive me yet, my dear,
Because of what you know,
I can look my dead friends in the face
As I couldn't two months ago.
VI
Mayhap I shall not walk again
Down Dorset way, down Devon way,
Nor pick a posy in a lane
Down Somerset and Sussex way ;
But though my hones unshriven rot
In some far distant alien spot,
What soul I have shall rest from care
To know that meadows still are fair
Down Dorset way, down Devon way.
Sergt. Leslie Coulson, From an Outpost.
But all this conscious sacrifice of self
must needs have been a small matter if one
could have made it without any regrets,
without any wistful looking back on
happiness forgone and hopes it was hard
to relinquish. Making such deliberate re-
nunciation of life and all it meant to them,
even for honour and the most sacred cause
that ever called for the shedding of blood,
these men would have been less admirable,
less lovable, less human if they had been
touched by no moods in which they knew
and felt the full bitterness of it all and
164
Leslie Coulson 165
could almost find it in their hearts to wish
that the cup might pass from them.
This mood is a passing cloud over Freston's
Let 's suppose that I am dead,
and over his ' Renunciation ' :
Not always do I find myself complain
Against this harsh new order of the day,
Where we must put the old loved things away
And rise up to embrace new toil and pain ;
For amongst much of loss there lies much gain :
We have learned new strength from learning to
obey
Necessity ; and hearts that used to stray,
Often too selfishly, are kind again.
Yet oftentimes to me there cometh one,
With sorrow in his eyes, whom half I know :
Who loved to paint the flowers and the sun
In gentle language musically slow :
Who grieves to leave his life-work scarce begun,
Who hoped so much, but now must turn and go.
A passing mood, that works differently
on different temperaments, and differently
at different times on the same temperament,
it edges with mordant irony Alexander
Robertson's ' We shall drink to them that
Sleep,' and by turns with irony and with
pathos certain of the poems of Leslie
166 For Remembrance
Coulson, and his ' . . . But a Short Time
to Live ' with both :
. . . Our little hour — how short it is
When love with dew-eyed loveliness
Raises her lips for ours to kiss,
And dies within our first caress.
Youth flickers out like wind-blown flame,
Sweets of to-day to-morrow sour,
For time and Death relentless claim
Our little hour.
Our little hour — how short a time
To wage our wars, to fan our hates,
To take our fill of armoured crime,
To troop our banners, storm the gates :
Blood on our sword, our eyes blood-red,
Blind in our puny reign of poAver,
Do we forget how soon is sped
Our little hour ?
Our little hour — how soon it dies ;
How short a time to tell our beads,
To chant our feeble litanies,
To think sweet thoughts, to do good deeds :
The altar lights grow pale and dim,
The bells hang silent in the tower —
So passes with the dying hymn
Our little hour.
All his love of the open road and the
green ways of the English countryside
pulses and glows in his song * From an
Outpost ' :
Leslie Coulson 167
I 've tramped South England up and
down,
Down Dorset way, down Devon way,
Through every little ancient town
Down Dorset way, down Devon way :
I mind the old stone churches there,
The taverns round the market square,
The cobbled streets, the garden flowers,
The sundials telling peaceful hours
Down Dorset way, down Devon way . . .
and the joyance and quaintnesses of
English country life laugh pleasantly,
too, through ' In Abbas Now.' But
4 From the Somme,' found on him among
his papers after he had fallen in the
forefront of a charge against the German
position near Lesbceufs, on 7th October
1917, recalls the past delight he had
in tramping English highways, loitering
through English forest paths, or by
the sea, and resting in homely roadside
taverns, and realises with a painful in'
tensity that these things are left behind
him for ever :
... I played with all the toys the gods
provide,
I sang my songs and made glad holiday.
Now I have cast my broken toys aside
And flung my lute away.
168 For Remembrance
A singer once, I now am fain to weep,
Within my soul I feel strange music swell,
Vast chants of tragedy too deep — too deep
For my poor lips to tell.
There is a stern and darkly passionate
protest in the sonnet, 4 Judgment,' against
the senseless waste and carnage that is
making the world desolate, and the same
protest is voiced powerfully and as
bitterly in ' Who Made the Law ? ' which
was also found with his papers after his
death :
Who made the Law that men should die in
meadows ?
Who spake the word that blood should splash in
lanes ?
Who gave it forth that gardens should be bone-
yards ?
Who spread the hills with flesh, and blood, and
brains ?
Who made the Law ?
Who made the Law that Death should stalk the
village ?
Who spake the word to kill among the sheaves ?
Who gave it forth that Death should lurk in hedge-
rows ?
Who flung the dead among the fallen leaves ?
Who made the Law ? . . .
But a happier spirit breathes through such
Leslie Coulson 169
lyrics as c For City Folk ' and ' A Soldier
in Hospital,' and ' The Rainbow,' written
while he was in the trenches in France*
is rilled with a limitless gratitude for the
common gifts of life and a sure faith in
the new day that burgeons at the heart of
all the darkness :
I watch the white dawn gleam
To the thunder of hidden guns ;
I hear the hot shells scream
Through skies as sweet as a dream
Where the silver dawnbreak runs ;
And stabbing of light
Scorches the virginal white ;
But I feel in my being the old, high, sanctified thrill,
And I thank the gods that the dawn is beautiful still.
From death that hurtles by
I crouch in the trench day-long,
But up to a cloudless sky
From the ground where our dead men he
A brown lark soars in song.
Through the tortured air,
Rent by the shrapnel's flare,
Over the troubleless dead he carols his fill,
And I thank the gods that the birds are beautiful
still.
Where the parapet is low
And level with the eye,
Poppies and cornflowers grow,
And the corn sways to and fro
In a pattern 'gainst the sky ;
170 For Remembrance
The gold stalks hide
Bodies of men who died
Charging at dawn through the dew to be killed or to
kill—
I thank the gods that the flowers are beautiful still.
When night falls dark we creep
In silence to our dead ;
We dig a few feet deep
And leave them there to sleep —
But blood at night is red,
Yea, even at night,
And a dead man's face is white ;
And I dry my hands, that are also trained to kill,
And I look at the stars — for the stars are beautiful still.
And he wove into his verse something of
the dream that was at the hearts of all the
fighting-men when he gave language to his
never-to-be-realised vision of ' When I
Come Home ' :
When I come home, dear folk o' mine,
We '11 drink a cup of olden wine ;
And yet, however rich it be,
No wine will taste so good to me
As English air. How I shall thrill
To drink it in on Hampstead Hill,
When I come home !
When I come home and leave behind
Dark things I would not call to mind,
I '11 taste good ale and home-made bread,
And see white sheets and pillows spread,
Leslie Coulson 171
And there is one who '11 softly creep
To kiss me ere I fall asleep
And tuck me 'neath the counterpane,
As if I were a boy again,
When I come home.
When I come home, from dark to light,
And tread the roadways long and white,
And tramp the lanes I tramped of yore,
And see the village greens once more,
The tranquil farms, the meadows free,
The friendly trees that nod to me,
And hear the lark beneath the sun,
'Twill be good pay for what I 've done,
When I come home.
Always this love for and longing after the
quiet country places of little old England —
' I have seen men shattered, dying, dead —
all the sad tragedy of war,' he said in a
letter home, when he was quartered near
a devastated French village in July 1916.
1 And this murder of old stone and lichened
thatches, this shattering of little old
churches and homesteads brings the
tragedy home to me more acutely. I
think to find an English village like this
would almost break my heart.'
I knew Leslie Coulson from the days
when he was a child in his mother's arms,
172 For Remembrance
and it is not easy for me to realise that he
grew to manhood, played such a man's
part in the war, and had finished with life
when he had numbered only half my years.
Son of a well-known journalist, he chose
journalism as his profession, and after a
year or so in the provinces came to London
and was rapidly winning recognition as
one of the most brilliant of the younger
men. That he was much more than a
journalist the few short stories he published
and this book of his verse bear witness
enough. A month after the declaration
of war he enlisted in the 2nd London
Regiment of the Royal Fusiliers as a
private. ' He was counselled to enter an
Officers' Training Corps and obtain a
commission,' says his father in a memoir.
'"No," he said, "I will do the thing
fairly. I will take my place in the ranks."
High-minded, conscientious, self- critical,
it seemed to him that this was his plain
path of duty— to serve as a simple private
soldier. He left England with his bat-
talion in December 1914. And none of
those to whom he was dear ever saw him
Leslie Coulson 173
again.' From Malta and Egypt he went
to Gallipoli, shared in all the horrors of
that campaign, and was slightly wounded.
4 Never physically robust, he had experi-
enced much ill-health before he became a
soldier, and his endurance astonished all
who knew him. But after recovery in
Egypt from fever — the result of Gallipoli —
he rose once again to endure.' By April
1916 he was in France, attached to the
12th London Regiment — the Rangers.
1 He was now sergeant, and was recom-
mended for a commission. With his new
regiment he took part in the Somme
advance on 1st July.' Thenceforward he
was almost continually in the trenches until
he fell in action in October. ' He was not
by nature a fighter. He was gentle,
affectionate, and like all sympathetic
natures shrank from inflicting pain. He
declared he could never " see red." But
he was endowed with the quiet courage
and determination that invariably accom-
pany the finer spirit.' Like so many of his
comrades, he hated war and its barbarities
— ' it was just his lion-hearted courage and
174 For Remembrance
pride of race that carried him through,'
says Major Corbett Smith, who knew him
well in the years of peace ; ' a sweet and
gallant English gentleman who died that
the England he loved might live.' His
elder brother, Raymond, a journalist and
author as gifted and promising as himself,
has been throughout the war a lieutenant
on active service in the Indian Army.
It was while serving with an Indian
regiment in Mesopotamia, in the desperate
fighting on the road to Kut, that Howard
Stables passed beyond human ken. He
was reported wounded and missing in
February 1917, and it was supposed that
he had been taken prisoner at Sanna-i-yat,
when the Turks recaptured their first line
of trenches there ; but after long and
exhaustive inquiry the authorities have
placed his name on the roll of the dead.
Born in 1895, he was educated at St.
David's, Reigate, and at Winchester ;
entered Christ Church College, Oxford, in
1913, and promptly on the coming of war
joined the 6th Hampshires, and was sent
to India. In 1915 he received his com-
Howard Stables 175
mission in the 5th Gurkha Regiment, and
embarked for Mesopotamia :
Now can we test life's quickness, pay the fee
For splendid living . . .
he writes in a sonnet ' On leaving India for
Mesopotamia.' His letters home show
that he took the keenest interest in his work
and made light of the difficulties and
dangers he had to meet. He was an
accomplished musician, and in one letter
mentioned that as he had no instrument
and could get no music (until one of his
Gurkhas, hearing him regret the lack of
this, made a native pipe for him) he had
taken to writing verses. Presently, he
sent a collection of this verse over to Elkin
Mathews for publication, but his family
knew nothing of his literary projects until
the book made its appearance, under the
quaint title of The Sorrow that Whistled,
at the end of 1916. His poems, which
have a strong individual note, had a very
favourable reception at the hands of the
reviewers. They are largely a poetical
itinerary of his war experiences at home
and in the East, with a memorv of
176 For Remembrance
Winchester, a handful of love poems and
two on music. He catches the glamour
and magic of the Orient in the best of his
verse— in this, for instance, of ' High
Barbary ' :
The distant mountains' jagged, cruel line
Cuts the imagination as a blade
Of dove-grey Damascene. In many a raid
Here Barbary pirates drave the ships of wine
Back to Sicilian harbours, harried kine,
Pillaged Calabrian villages and made
The land a desolation. . . .
Saracens, Moors, Phoenicians — all the East,
Franks, Huns, Walloons, the pilgrims of the Pope,
All, all are gone. The clouds are trailing hence :
So goes to Benediction some proud priest
Sweeping the ground with embroidered golden cope.
— Go, gather up the fumes of frankincense.
Something, too, of the magic and glamour
of his alien surroundings he distils into an
unpublished poem that sighs with his
unsatisfied longing for music :
I have not heard music for so long a time,
For twenty dusty months blown by, and each
a year
Spent in a dusty prison-house it seems, no rhyme,
No tune to cut the hours upon the walls,
Only the taunt of fading bugle-calls
To rouse a memory from sleep and make it stir.
LESLIE COULSON.
SERGT., LONDON BATT. ROYAL FUSILIERS.
Howard Stables 177
Though from red ramparts I can see the city
swarm
With press of life, look on the swinging caravans
Of camels come from Gwalior beneath the moon,
Hear all the glinting hum of things that take
The curious fancy, can they ever wake
Those slumbering tunes with all their wealth of
jewelled fans ?
And shall I hear again the swaying orchestras —
Those rhythmic cohorts — and low passionate songs
sung
For Sorrow ; the tense preluding of operas
So rare and fraught ; canorous harmony
Of bourdons ; airs my mother played to me
And sweet old fiddled strains I knew when I was
young ? . . .
And from carven doors and lattices, and throng
Of narrow ways that lace the long bazaar's mosaic
Of human hearts and painted curious walls, the
song
Of evening, all the city's tintamar
Springs up like sandalwood or cinnabar,
A drench of heavy-scented noises, mixed to slake
My thirst for music. Yet right dead I am to all,
Dram-wrapped in unsung harmonies that seem to
climb
With cool, slow, rippling strength towards a god's
grey hall
Through wind-swept woods of tonal mysteries,
Up granite fugues . . . abysmal cadences. —
Ah, I have not heard music for so long a time !
M
178 For Remembrance
War widened his horizon and took him
into new, strange lands that were an un-
failing source of interest and delight to
him. These and their strangeness and
bizarre loveliness were themes that attracted
him ; only now and then he touched on the
war itself, more or less elusively, as in
4 Credit and Debit ' and * While Scouring
Linen,' or satirically as in ' Thoughts of a
Refugee.' He spends no hate or rage on
his enemies — I do not remember, indeed,
that he ever has anything to say of them.
He fought them because they had made
that his duty, but he was not inclined to
write about them. He had no fear of
death, but no love of it. ' Dearest,' he
says in the last letter to his mother,
written three days before he fell wounded
and was no more seen, ' how beautiful a
thing life is ! '
Perhaps on the dreadful and vaster
battlefields of France Death slew such
myriads and the menace of it was so con-
stant that there was not often such escape
there from the thought of it. Most of the
poets who have written from there have
Victor Ratcliffe 179
been moved to sing of its sadness, its pain,
its tragedy, to speculate on it philosophi-
cally, to hail it as the honour that shall
crown the memory of the brave, or to
fling a proud defiance in its face, or to
welcome it and hymn its praise as if they
looked to rise upon the tomb like triumph
on a pedestal. The too-constant presence
of Death and the desire for respite is the
burden of Victor Ratcliffe's ' Optimism ' :
At last there '11 dawn the last of the long year,
Of the long year that seemed to dream no end,
Whose every dawn but turned the world more drear
And slew some hope, or led away some friend.
Or be you dark, or buffeting, or blind,
We care not, Day, but leave not Death behind.
The hours that feed on war go heavy-hearted,
Death is no fare wherewith to make hearts fain.
Oh, we are sick to find that those who started
With glamour in their eyes come not again.
O Day, be long and heavy if you will,
But on our hopes set not a bitter heel. . . .
Fell year unpitiful, slow days of scorn,
Your kind shall die, and sweeter days be born.
This is the simple, eternal confession
of faith that though the winter is here
and has put out the sun and laid the world
in ruins, we have only to be patient and
180 For Remembrance
the spring will yet return and all be well
again. But how is it with those to whom
now all seasons are as one ? Buried so far
from home, with their dearest dreams
unsatisfied, do no blind longings reach
down to them still and trouble them with
vain regrets ? A haunting fancy came to
Walter Wilkinson, the adopted son of Mrs.
William Sharpe, that the spring which
brought life back to all the earth wakens
old yearnings after lost happiness in the
dust of his comrades who are dead, and he
could hear their voices in the silence :
Peace ! Vex us not — we are the Dead !
We are the Dead for England slain.
(O England and the English Spring,
The English Spring, the Spring-tide rain :
Ah, God, dear God, in England now !)
Peace ! Vex us not ; we are the Dead !
The snows of Death are on our brow :
Peace 1 Vex us not !
Brothers, the footfalls of the year
(The maiden month 's in England now !) —
I feel them pass above my head :
Alas, they echo on my heart !
(Ah, God, dear God, in England now !) —
Peace ! Vex me not, for I am dead :
The snows of Death are on my brow :
Peace I Vex me not !
Walter L. Wilkinson 181
Brothers, and I — I taste again,
Again I taste the Wine of Spring
(0 Wine of Spring and Bread of Love,
lips that kiss and months that sing,
O Love and Spring in England now !)
Peace ! Vex me not, but pass above,
Sweet English love, fleet English Spring —
Peace ! Vex me not ! . . .
Then the still living man makes answer,
urging them to a resigned acceptance of
their loss :
Brothers, I beg you be at rest,
Be quite at rest for England's sake.
The flowerful hours in England now
Sing low your sleep to English ears ;
And would you have your sorrows wake
The mother's heart to further tears ? —
Nay, be at peace, her loyal Dead.
Sleep ! Vex her not !
The pity and tenderness of that are not
surpassed in any poem of the war, and the
man who wrote it was soon to make the
great acceptance himself— he was killed on
Vimy Ridge, and maybe some one of his
brothers-in-arms saw him laid to rest with
much such thoughts as were his when he
witnessed a similar scene and wrote ' The
Wayside Burial,' which is dated the
4th April 1917, five days before he died :
182 For Remembrance
They 're bringing their recent dead ! — No pomp, no
show :
A dingy khaki crowd — his friends, his own.
I too would like — (God, how that wind does moan !)
To be laid down by friends : it 's sweetest so !
A young life, as I take it ; just a lad —
(How cold it blows, and that grey sky how sad !)
And yet : ' For Country ' — so a man should die :
Comrade unknown, good rest to you ! — Good-bye !
They 're burying their dead ! — I wonder now :
A wife ? — or mother ? Mother it must be,
In some trim home that fronts the English sea
(A sea-coast country ; that the badges show).
And she ? — I sense her grief, I feel her tears :
This, then, the garnered harvest of my years !
And he ? — ' For Country, dear, a man must die.'
Comrade unknown, good rest to you ! — Good-bye !
Walter Wilkinson was born at Bristol
in 1886. His father, who was chief
manager of goods traffic on the Great
Western Railway, was an inventive
engineer. His mother died when he was
a child, and on the death of his father he
was introduced to Mrs. William Sharpe,
the widow of the well-known author, by
Sir Alexander Nelson Hood (Duke of
Bronte), who asked her to interest herself
in the youngster's striking literary gifts,
which, hampered by ill health, he was
Colin Mitchell 18
o
sedulously developing down to the out-
break of the war. Then, although in
peace-time, for the benefit of his health,
he had become an expert aeronaut, he
was rejected by the Flying Service, solely
on the score of his age, and enlisted in the
University and Public School Corps as a
private in September 1914. Later, he
entered the Inns of Court O.T.C., and in
1916 obtained his commission. He was
sent to France in January 1917, and within
three months was killed in the attack on
Vimy Ridge.
It was the voice of the living that cried
through Colin Mitchell's ' Autumn in Eng-
land,' but reading it now is to hear again
in fancy that longing of the dead for the
England they had loved, for since the
spring of 1918 his place has been with them :
Autumn in England ! God ! How my heart cries
Aloud for thee, beloved pearl-gowned bride,
With tresses russet-hued and soft grey eyes
Which sometimes weep and sometimes try to hide
Sweet sadness in a smile of transient bliss,
Painting the West with blushing memories
Of Summer's hot and over-ardent kiss
Betokening farewell. . . ,
184 For Remembrance
Autumn in England, why art thou sublime,
So meekly mantled in thy Quaker grey ?
No shining coquetry of tropic clime
Could e'er estrange me, nor could e'er allay
My longing for the country of my birth,
Where winds are passion-voiced, and lullabies
Of raging tempest rock the sons of Earth.
Autumn in England, mine till memory dies !
Sincerity and a simple naturalness of
thought and sentiment are the key-
notes of Sergeant Colin Mitchell's little
collection of verses, Trampled Clay.
The brotherly regard that grew up
betwixt officers and men whose days
were bounded by the common peril of
the trenches is in the breezy, rugged
story of ' Our Captain ' ; there is naked
realism and power in the thumb-nail
battle-sketch ' Hooge ' ; charm in the
brief idyll of ' Hughine and Ninette ' ;
the boyish fun of the regiment in 'Solil-
oquies on the March ' ; and in others
are a man's unpretentious musings on
life and death and the ways of God,
and a sorrow for the dead and for those
who will miss them.
The wonder is that so much verse,
J. W. Streets 185
written on active service, posted to
friends at home, or stowed away in a
man's kit, or in his pockets, and often
found on him or among his belongings only
after he was dead, has survived all the
chances of loss or destruction and arrived
at ultimate preservation in print. The
wonder, too, is not that some of such verse,
scribbled down in odds and ends of time,
under all manner of inconveniences and
discouragements and amidst the grimmest
preoccupations, should be halting and
flawed in utterance, but that so much of
it should be so careful of form and finish as
it is. Through the kindness of his brother,
the worn, red-covered pocket-book that
J. W. Streets carried with him on his
campaigning has come into my hands.
There are jottings in it of stray ideas or
phrases that occurred to him for stories or
for verses, and on certain of its pages,
or on loose leaves folded in between them,
are various poems, two or three of which
have not been included in his published
volume. They all bear marks of haste,
are in pencil and often difficult to read,
186 For Remembrance
and show little sign of revision. Two of
these unpublished poems are characteristic
of the high idealism and the spirit of
mystical exaltation in which he entered
upon the war. All his beliefs, all his
instincts were opposed to it, and nothing
but the martyrdom of Belgium, and a
burning love of his own country and of the
peace and liberty that must be saved from
the menace of the Hun, could ever have
made a soldier of him. What death in
such causes meant to him glimmers upon
you from ' The Vigil ' :
Sentry, what do you see out there ? —
Sorrow, mourning, everywhere,
Death in youth, and stranger things,
Yet dawn appearing on wild, swift wings.
Sentry, what do you see out there ?
Youth grown old, and Spring grown sere,
Life a bitter memory,
Love a dark Gethsemane.
Sentry, what do you see out there ?
Madness, chaos, everywhere,
Men entwined in sanguine strife,
Yet Youth in Calvary finding Life.
—it glows like a dawn of triumph in the
J. W. Streets 187
second of these unpublished poems, 'The
FaUen ' :
Their laughter and their merriment have ceased ;
Their dreams have found Life's winter in the bud ;
The cycle of their life, its dawn decreased
Ere Love had sung the matin-song ; their good
Was in the embryo, lips had scarcely known
The first mad kiss of love, scarce felt the thrill
Of woman's hair and cheek ; their dreams had grown
Not yet to fadeless purpose, tireless will.
There is a dawn whose flush outlives the day,
Engraves itself upon the consciousness :
There is a fate that Youth will gladly pay
So honour flourish, beauty grow no less :
To Liberty their heritage they gave
And won immortal glory at the grave.
Streets was a coal miner, and quitted
work in the pit to be one of ' Kitchener's
men.' J. M., a schoolmaster and mission
worker, who was a friend of his, writes in
a postscript to The Undying Splendour,
that ' born in the same village, attending
the same Sunday School, playing in the
same cricket team, finally coming to in-
timacy, the ideals and pursuits of J. W. S.
flowed into our common chat. Condemned,
as he was, to toil from boyhood in the mine,
and also to environment that woimded his
188 For Remembrance
sensitive nature, his was yet ever the
search after the beautiful and the true.'
He was a keen helper in the work of ' the
small Wesleyan community of his village,'
and ' early, too, he tried to express himself
with the brush, and gave great promise,
though always the call of a written mode
of expressing himself was with him. . . .
His poems tell the secret of his whole life,
which was an untiring love of nature,' and
there is one line from them, says this friend,
O Liberty, at thy command, we challenge Death,
which ' tells in essence the reason that led
one who hated war to go from that quiet
North Derbyshire village to make one of
the millions who are righting for us and
our Allies.' From the training camp at
Hurdcott, from the trenches in France, he
sent home his poems from time to time,
pencilled on scraps of paper, and looked to
revising them in proof, but he was reported
wounded and missing in July 1916, and
the following May, while his book was in
the press, it was officially notified that he
had been killed.
J. W. Streets 189
In a letter to Galloway Kyle, enclosing
the sonnet sequence, ' The Undying
Splendour,' which was to give the title to
his volume, Streets offers this apologia
and explanation : ' They were inspired
while I was in the trenches, where I have
been so busy I have had little time to
polish them. I have tried to picture some
thoughts that pass through a man's brain
when he dies. I may not see the end of the
poems, but hope to live to do so. We
soldiers have our views of life to express,
though the boom of death is in our ears.
We try to convey something of what we
feel in this great conflict to those who
think of us, and sometimes, alas ! mourn
our loss. We desire to let them know
that in the midst of our keenest sadness
for the joy of life we leave behind, we go to
meet death grim-lipped, clear-eyed, and
resolute- hearted.' Which merely reflects
the man as he reveals himself, without
premeditation, in his verses ; and there is
testimony to the truth of the picture in
a note from his company officer, Captain
Moore : ' . . . When he was reported
190 For Remembrance
missing, few of us who knew him had
much hope of seeing him again. We knew
that Streets was not the man easily to
surrender ' : and in a letter from Major
Plackett, under whom Streets served in
England, in Egypt and, to the last, in
France : 4 . . . He died as he had lived —
a man. If his verses are as good as his
reputation as a soldier, you may rest
assured that the book will be a great
success.'
Some of us used to say, perhaps too com-
placently, that Waterloo was won on the
playing-fields of Eton. Be that as it may,
it is clear to all eyes that the more terrible
battles of the Great War were won on the
playing-fields and in the class-rooms of the
Council Schools, as well as of the Colleges,
and in the homes of the whole nation
—in cottages and workmen's dwellings no
less than in town and country mansions.
The Public School spirit is a splendid and a
potent tradition, but it does not account
for such men as Streets, and, in our days,
there are not a few of them. I honour their
memories too profoundly to think for a
J. W. Streets 191
moment that it was just their Public
School training which made such dear and
heroic souls as Grenfell, Philipps, Palmer,
Ivar Campbell or Wyndham Tennant the
fearless and perfect gentle knights that they
were ; for without that training at least as
many have risen, like Ledwidge from his
scavengering, like Flower from his clerking,
like Streets from toiling in the mine, fired
by the same shining ideals, the same hatred
of cruelty and scorn of wrong, the same
selfless love of country, and have died for
these things with a chivalry and courage
that are of no school but of all schools, that
are of no class, no limited section of the
community, but are in the very blood and
bones of our people, in the large tradition
of the race. Whatever else we may
learn from the war, this it has taught us
already, for it is the emergence in rich
and poor, plebeian and aristocrat, of funda-
mental qualities which are the natural
heritage of all that drew us together and
brought us to a recognition of our common
brotherhood.
This good sense of brotherhood, at all
192 For Remembrance
events between officers and men, runs
pleasantly through the verse of Lieutenant-
Colonel Short, who was killed in France
in June 1917; it is in his warm-hearted
response on receipt of a Christmas card
from the Sergeants' Mess of his battery,
and you glimpse it in and between the
lines of other of his poems. He was of the
Old Army, and in character and tempera-
ment had much in common with Brian
Brooke. There is sometimes a sombre
touch, but always a sturdy, breezy,
soldierly courage, in his war verse and
often a delightfully whimsical humour.
Perhaps one lingers most over the tender,
fanciful series to his wife — such as this,
'To Venus,' with its gallant, gracious
ending :
Mars leads me now, but shall thy worship cease ?
Shall war blot out the memory of ease ?
When I am ' under arms before the dawn,'
Thy star shines just as brightly as in peace.
No, Venus, Aphrodite, Ashtoreth,
Whatever pretty name whatever faith
Has given thee, thou Perfect Woman, I
Am still thy servant to my dying breath. —
and over the three charmingly playful
Photo by Seaman, Sheffield.
JOHN WILLIAM STREETS.
SERGT, 12TH YORK AND LANCASTER REGT.
William Ambrose Short 193
poems to his baby daughter on her birth-
days, the second of which —
My little lady now that you are two —
was written in an interval of fighting on
the retreat from Mons. He is so genially
frank and unaffected that, after reading
his posthumous volume, you feel you have
become as intimate with the man himself,
the brave, gracious, friendly spirit of him,
as if you had known him personally.
N
VII
Come home ! — Come home !
The winds are at rest in the restful trees,
At rest are the waves of the sundown seas ;
And home — they're home —
The wearied hearts and the broken lives —
At home ! At ease !
Lieut. Walter L. Wilkinson, At Last Post.
Clifford Flower, to whom a few lines
back I made casual reference, was a Leeds
boy, who began life at the age of thirteen
and a half in the office of a local firm of
iron and steel tube manufacturers. He
had been promoted to the drawing office
of the firm's headquarters at Birmingham,
and was in his twenty-third year when
Germany invaded Belgium. No sooner
were Kitchener's posters calling from walls
and hoardings for volunteers than he
offered himself for enlistment, and was
rejected. He tried to dodge in at two
or three other recruiting depots, but was
consistently barred out by them all because
he was half an inch short of the standard
194
Clifford Flower 195
military height. But the youngster who,
a year before, could pour such a passion of
sympathy for the Black Country strikers
into his verses, ' My People's Voice,' could
not be deaf to Belgium's greater agony,
and was too bent on doing his duty to
be easily baulked. He wrote to Lord
Kitchener direct, says the memoir which
prefaces the privately printed sheaf of
his verse, and ' stated his case as to how
he had presented himself for enlistment at
various recruiting offices and been rejected
every time owing to a slight shortness of
height. He concluded his letter thus :
" My Lord, I have answered your appeal,
will you answer mine ? " It cannot be
said that the letter ever reached Lord
Kitchener, but a reply came from the War
Office by return of post, enclosing a sealed
document which he was instructed to
deliver to the recruiting officer. It was
an order to " Enlist the bearer, Clifford
Flower, at once." ' And it worked like
magic. Without any further examination,
he was passed as a private into the
2nd Battalion of the Warwickshire Regi-
196 For Remembrance
ment, but got himself transferred to the
Royal Field Artillery. ' Three weeks after
joining, he was offered a stripe on the
condition that he joined the clerical staff,
but this he declined, preferring to rough
it with the ordinary Tommies.' Rough it
he did out in France during the first year
of the war, but, cheerful and a sturdy
optimist, he ignored his hardships in his
letters or made a jest of them. Most of
his verse dates from his civilian days ; of
the four poems he wrote at the front, two
are in a lighter vein, blithely anticipating
peace, and commemorating the luck of his
battery ; one calls upon Red, the king of
colours, to pay homage henceforth to
Khaki ; and the fourth, ' A Calm Night
at the Front,' sketches the scene around
him and the thoughts that it stirs in him :
. . . The rifle fire has died away,
All silent now : the moon on high
Would set a truce until the day,
God staying the hand of destiny. . . .
O womenfolk of British lands,
Who toil and sweat in holiest cause,
Oh raise in prayer your clasped hands
That men may see the curse of wars
Clifford Flower 197
A single star-light held in space
Has filled the trench with radiance white,
A cautious soldier hides his face,
Somebody 's calling, so good-night.
He took a shrapnel wound in his left
arm as buoyantly as he took every other
trouble that came his way, and remained
on duty. Nominally a driver, for the
last eighteen months of his service he was
on the signalling staff. On Easter Sunday
1917 he was one of three signallers who
volunteered to accompany an infantry
battalion in the advance towards Lens, and
at six in the morning went over the top
with them in a blinding snowstorm. At
Easter in the year before the war he had
returned home from Birmingham, and
described his delight in that home-coming
very simply and vividly in ' Easter —
Home Again ' :
The wheels of the train sing a full-toned song
As they rattle the hours of waiting along,
And soon I am swinging across the street
To the rhythm of joy which my pulses beat,
To arrive at the gate, which creaks as of old ;
Its bars of iron seem like pillars of gold
Flashing behind as I leap to the top
Of the clean-scoured steps then, brought to a stop,
198 For Remembrance
I ring at the bell, give the firm hand to Len,
And I 'm fast in your arms and home again !
It might well have stood as a snapshot of
his home-coming from France, but he was
not to return from there. On 20th April,
he was in a dug-out in the lines that had
been newly captured from the enemy when
a German shell thundered at the entrance
and he was instantly killed.
Born in the same year as Flower, Eric
Fitzwater Wilkinson embarked for France
early in 1915 as a lieutenant in the Leeds
Rifles, and within a few months won the
M.C. for bringing in wounded under fire.
He was educated at Dorchester and Ilkley
Grammar Schools and, having gained
scholarships, went to Leeds University for
a three years' engineering course, and
joined the O.T.C. there. Presently, he
became a junior master in his old school
at Ilkley, and his contributions of verse,
serious and humorous, to the school
magazine intimate that his bent was not
exclusively towards engineering. Having
passed his intermediate B.A. (London)
examination with honours, he was pre-
Brie Pitzwater Wilkinson 199
paring for his final when, as with so many
others, the war put an end to his plans.
After a year of hard fighting in the Ypres
trenches, he was appointed town mayor
of Varennes, and had risen to the rank of
captain when he was killed ' very gallantly
leading his company ' in the attack on
Passchendaele Ridge. Writing to his
mother on the eve of that action a letter
that reached her when he was dead, he
tells her that, apart from ' a shrinking of
the nerves which I always have to conquer,
I can honestly say that I have not the
slightest fear of death in me, which makes
it vastly easier.' That is in keeping with
the lines on ' Death,' where he turns from
his question indifferently and sees how a
man may find life in losing it :
What is it ? Though it come swiftly and sure
Out of the dark womb of fate,
What that a man cannot dare and endure,
Level heart steady, eyes straight ? . . .
The fight shall roll o'er us — a broad crimson tide,
Feet stamp, shells wail, bullets hiss,
And England be greater because we have died :
What end can be finer than this ?
200 For Remembrance
And he dedicates himself to death for the
victory of right over wrong with a note of
still loftier triumph in ' To My People
before the Great Offensive, 5 offering com-
fort to those whose son he is and bidding
them not to sorrow overmuch for him if
he falls —
If then, amidst some millions more, this heart
Should cease to beat,
Mourn not for me too sadly ; I have been
For months of an exalted life, a King ;
Peer for these months of those whose graves grow
green
Where'er the borders of our Empire fling
Their mighty arms. And if the crown is death,
Death while I 'm fighting for my home and king,
Thank God the son who drew from you his breath
To death could bring
A not entirely worthless sacrifice,
Because of those brief months when life meant more
Than selfish pleasures. Grudge not then the price,
But say, ' Our country in the storm of war
Has found him fit to fight and die for her,'
And lift your hearts in pride for evermore.
But when the leaves the evening breezes stir
Close not the door,
For if there 's any consciousness to follow
The deep, deep slumber that we know as Death,
If Death and Life are not all vain and hollow,
If life is more than so much indrawn breath,
ERIC FITZWATER WILKINSON.
CAPTAIN. WEST YORKS (LEEDS RIFLES).
Eric Fitzwater Wilkinson 201
Then in the hush of twilight I shall come —
One with immortal Life that knows not Death
But ever changes form — I shall come home ;
Although beneath
A wooden cross the clay that once was I
Has ta'en its ancient earthy form anew,
But listen to the wind that hurries by,
To all the song of Life for tones you knew :
For in the voice of birds, the scent of flowers,
The evening silence and the falling dew,
Through every throbbing pulse of nature's powers
I '11 speak to you.
It were easy enough to write so cour-
ageously of dying and play with fancies of
what may happen after death if, writing
as a distant onlooker and in no danger, one
merely dramatised the thoughts and
emotions of the men who were in the
battle lines ; but the strength and glory
of these soldier poets is that they wrote in
the heart of darkness, that the terrors they
clothed in beauty were storming round
about them, that they were fronting the
bitter death they felt they were doomed
to die and welcomed in their songs, and
that they justified in action the highest
and proudest of their written words. They
could look forward without a tremor, and
202 For Remembrance
if they could not always glance back
without regret it was because the sacrifice
they were making was a very real one —
they were all young, life was sweet to
them and had been rich in promise ;
yet they had it in them to subdue them-
selves and trample their regrets unflinch-
ingly underfoot, upheld by the faith that
they gave their lives that the world
might remain worth living in for the rest
of us.
That is the feeling, plainly expressed or
implicit, in so much that the soldier poets
have written of the war. To turn for a
moment from the poets to a prose writer —
it is the feeling, the desire that speaks to
you from the letters of Harold Chapin,
who was on the high road to success as
a dramatist when, after attending classes
in first aid, he enlisted in the R.A.M.C. on
the 2nd September 1914, to be killed at the
battle of Loos, on the 26th September, a
year later. So far as I know, he wrote
nothing in verse, but there is the truest
poetry of idea and of emotion in certain
of his plays. American by birth, he had
Harold Chapin 203
lived many years in England and done the
best of his work here, but it was not for
England only that he went into the war.
Nor was he out after the quickest peace
of any sort that would last his time. He
thought less of his own future than of the
future of his little son, and contemplating
the likelihood of his not returning, he
writes more than once of what he would
wish his son to be taught, and not to be
taught, when he is old enough. c Have I
warned you against rumours ? ' he says
in a letter from the front to his wife.
6 Yes, I believe I have. Beware of them,
especially rumours of peace. We don't
want peace till they 're beaten, do we ? '
And to his mother, in June 1915 : 'I made
the discovery yesterday that unless I can
leave a nice, well-finished-off war behind
me I don't want to come home. This in
spite of the fact that I am regularly and
miserably homesick for at least half an
hour every morning and two hours every
evening, and heartily fed up with the war
every waking hour in between. ... To
go home to Vallie and Mummy is not what
204 For Remembrance
I want yet. I want from the bottom of
my heart to see it out ' ; and to his mother
again a week later : c Don't listen to peace
talk yet — discourage it if you can. Nothing
makes us madder out here. Remember
we are on the wrong side of the top to talk
of peace. It is a worse idea than the war.
A patch-up peace with those bloody gentry
over there ! ' This was a man at the front
who wrote that, and added, ' Do you
realise that I can see one of them now ?
... I can hear them in the distance
too. . . . No peace until we are on top,
please.' It was the home-staying pacifist,
claiming to be more humane than such
men as these, who clamoured incessantly
for peace by immediate negotiation
because, forsooth, as he speciously re-
iterated, peace would have to be made
by negotiation at last — as if it made no
difference whether you tried to reason
with your enemy while he had his foot
on your neck or after you were well
on your feet again and at no such dis-
advantage.
There is a passage in Dixon Scott's
Dixon Scott 205
Men of Letters, in an essay on Rupert
Brooke — almost the last literary work
that he did — which chimes with the songs
of our poet soldiers and has always seemed
to me to embody the motives, the ideals,
often inarticulate, that, in the main,
prompted our younger generation, as they
prompted him, to their impetuous defence
of the rights of every man against the out-
rageous brigandage of the Hun. Loathing
war and unable to imagine, as he told me,
that he could ever really bring himself to
4 stick a man,' he joined up at once and
was already a lieutenant of artillery
when he wrote this essay, in which he
says that for him Brooke's sonnet com-
mencing,
If I should die think only this of me,
captured completely i one of the dimmest
and deepest, one of the most active but
most elusive, of all the many mixed motives,
beliefs, longings, ideals, which make those
of us who have flung aside everything in
order to fight still glad and gratified that
we took the course we did. There do
come moments, I must admit,' he adds,
206 For Remembrance
' when doubts descend on one dismally,
when one's soldiering seems nothing but a
contemptible vanity, indulged in largely
to keep the respect of lookers-on. And,
of course, cowardice of that sort, a small
pinch of it anyway, did help to make
most of us brave. There was the love of
adventure, too, the longing to be in the
great scrum — the romantic appeal of " the
neighing steed and the shrill trump " —
all the glamour and illusion of the violent
thing that has figured for ever in books,
paintings and tales, as the supreme earthly
adventure. . . . But beneath all these im-
pulses, like a tide below waves, there lies
also a world of much deeper emotion. It
is a love of peace, really, a delight in fair-
ness and faith — an inherited joy in all the
traditional graces of life and in all the
beauty that has been blessed by affection.
It is an emotion, an impulse, for which the
word " patriotism " is a term far too simple
and trite. . . . One fights for the sake of
happiness — for one's own happiness first
of all, certain that did one not fight one
would be miserable for ever — and then, in
Dixon Scott 207
the second place, for the quiet solace and
pride of those others, spiritual and mental
sons of ours, if not actually physical— the
men of our race who will depend for so
much of their dignity upon the doings of
the generation before. War is a boastful,
beastly business ; but if we don't plunge
into it now we lower the whole pitch of
posterity's life, leave them with only some
dusty relics of racial honour. To enter
into this material hell now is to win for our
successors a kind of immaterial heaven.
There will be an ease and a splendour in
their attitude towards life which a peaceful
hand now would destroy. It is for the
sake of that spiritual ease and enrichment
of life that we fling everything aside now
to learn to deal death.'
This is why he and thousands of his
fellows went to war — not for the glory of
conquest and with insane ambitions of
world power — but for love of peace and
honour and freedom, and that it might
not be said of them that they had betrayed
posterity into bondage. After all, there
are dearer things than life, things without
208 For Remembrance
which life is not worth having ; and in
this knowledge Scott laid down his own
at Gallipoli in October 1915.
In the same month of that year, a kindred
spirit, Charles Hamilton Sorley, was killed
in action at Hullach ; and look what a
little thing he could make of the death he
was to die :
All the hills and vales along
Earth is bursting into song,
And the singers are the chaps
Who are going to die, perhaps.
Oh sing, marching men,
Till the valleys ring again.
Give your gladness to earth's keeping,
So be glad when you are sleeping.
Cast away regret and rue,
Think what you are marching to.
Little live, great pass.
Jesus Christ and Barabbas
Were found the same day.
This died, that went his way.
So sing with joyful breath.
For why, you are going to death.
Teeming earth will surely store
All the gladness that you pour. . . .
From the hills and valleys earth
Shouts back the sound of mirth,
Tramp of feet and lilt of song
Ringing all the road along.
CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY
CAPTAIN, SUFFOLK REGT.
Charles Hamilton Sorley 209
All the music of their going,
Ringing, swinging, glad song-throwing,
Earth will echo still, when foot
Lies numb and voice mute.
On, marching men, on
To the gates of death with song.
Sow your gladness for earth's reaping,
So you may be glad, though sleeping.
Strew your gladness on earth's bed,
So be merry, so be dead.
Here, in a splendour of bizarre meta-
physical fantasy, is the rapt sense of
mystical joy in dying for a great end that
shines through Grenf ell's ' Into Battle,' and
Rupert Brooke's
If I should die think only this of me :
That there 's some corner of a foreign land
That is for ever England . . .
and is the prevailing note in the poems
of J. W. Streets, whose love of life is so
intense that he never doubts but he shall
pick up the thread of it again on the other
side of night :
And if thy twilight fingers round me steal
And draw me unto death — thy votary
Am I. O Life, reach out thy hands to me.
The same ecstasy thrills in his many
references to the privilege of offering up
o
210 For Remembrance
one's youth on the altar for the realisation
of a noble purpose :
The soul of life is in the will to give
The best of life in willing sacrifice :
Youth only reaches greatness when he dies
In fullest prime that love and truth may live.
8 Youth's Consecration ' is achieved when
he has gladly sacrificed himself for the
salvation of freedom :
Lovers of Life, we pledge thee, Liberty,
And go to death calmly, triumphantly.
Christ taught us to succour need and ' led
the way to Life — to Sacrifice ' :
O Thou who pleaded ever 'mid disdain
That when for weaker comrades we did give
Our own sweet lives, alone then did we live —
Know Thou, O Christ, Thou didst not live in vain,
For youth hath found in Love vitality
And treads with thee the way to Calvary.
His 4 Triumph ' is that ' feeling the presage
of the unborn years,' Youth will
Brave the dark confines
And wrest from Death his diadem of tears,
and that though he should die in Belgium
he will have no regret nor dream that his
Youth has been in vain, knowing still
J. W. Streets 211
' that Love its life in death can find ' ; and
his requiem over the dead is a rejoicing :
For these like some great planet spheric-whirled
Have swung into the orbit of a greater world.
These topped the hill of Youth ; stood on the verge
Of vision ; saw within the furthest star
Spiritual presences, Love's own avatar ;
These the twin worlds of soul and flesh did merge
Into a dream, a consciousness that stole
Around their spirits like an aureole.
He hails the dead as
Youth triumphant, greater than his fate ;
and elsewhere exults that he and his
comrades, dying, will have given their all,
even their heritage of youth, that the
reign of humanity shall be restored :
We march to death singing our deathless songs,
Like knights invested with a purpose high,
and foresees how the youth of the years
to be
Will hear our phantom armies marching by,
and learn from them how to die for liberty.
No militarism is here, nor in any of the
poems I have read by these soldiers ; no
strut of the goose-step, no taste for
slaughter nor lust of conquest for its own
sake, nor any of the cheap, dazzling
212 For Remembrance
blatancies that belong to the militaristic
spirit. These men were too sanely human
to cherish hatred except of war and the
folly or mad ambition of those who had
plunged the world into it. Streets at one
end of our social scale is not more passionate
in his love of humanity, his detestation of
the wrong and brutality of war and the
silly desire for such glory as it can give
than, at the other, was the younger son of
the Earl of Selborne, Captain the Hon.
Robert Palmer, who died a wounded
prisoner in the hands of the Turk, and in
the year before his death made this his
battle prayer :
How long, O Lord, how long before the flood
Of crimson-welling carnage shall abate ?
From sodden plains in West and East the blood
Of kindly men streams up in mists of hate
Polluting Thy clean air ; and nations great
In reputation of the arts that bind
The world with hopes of Heaven, sink to the state
Of brute barbarians, whose ferocious mind
Gloats o'er the bloody havoc of their kind,
Not knowing love nor mercy. Lord, how long
Shall Satan in high places lead the blind
To battle for the passions of the strong ?
Oh touch Thy children's hearts, that they may know,
Hate their most hateful, pride their deadliest foe.
Charles Hamilton Sorley 213
Staying in Germany, a month before
the war Charles Sorlev wrote that
though there was a type of German
who had been ruined by Sedan he
liked the German nature, 4 as far as it
is not warped by the German Empire.'
After war had commenced and he
was in the army, he says, 4 1 think the
Kaiser not unlike Macbeth, with the
military clique in Prussia as his Lady
Macbeth, and the court flatterers as
the weird sisters ' ; and in another letter
he thinks ' a close parallel may be drawn
between Faust and present history ' (with
Germany as Faust and Belgium as
Gretchen). ' And Faust found spiritual
salvation in the end ! ' At the outset,
before the Hun had proved himself by
such appalling inhumanities as sink him
below the level of aboriginal negroes,
Sorley could find it in his heart to write a
largely tolerant, compassionate sonnet 4 To
Germany,' commiserating her and ourselves
on the woe that had overwhelmed both :
You were blind like us. Your hurt no man designed
And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
214 For Remembrance
But gropers both through fields of thought confined
We stumble, and we do not understand. . . .
And Alexander Robertson, finding on the
body of a dead German soldier a prayer-
book, letters, and photographs of wife and
children, writes pityingly in c Thou Shalt
Love Thine Enemies ' :
They were not meant for our too curious eyes
Or our imaginations to surmise
From what they tell much that they leave
untold.
Strangers and foemen we, yet we behold,
Sad and subdued, thy solace and thy cheer. . . .
When you know something of Alexander
Robertson, scholarly, peace-loving, high-
minded, you recognise how unself- con-
sciously he has revealed his personality
in the verse he has written. He was born
at Edinburgh in 1882 ; had a brilliant
career at school and college, winning at
Edinburgh University medals in Latin,
Education, and Political Economy. He
took his M.A. degree there, with a First
Class Honours in History. Then for three
years he taught, as senior master in History,
at his old school, George Watson's College,
Alexander Robertson 215
Edinburgh. He also taught in a French
Lycee at Caen, and attended the university
of that city. But feeling that school-
teaching narrowed his sphere too much, he
gave it up, and went for three years to
Oxford. ' With his scholarly tendencies
and aspirations, these were very happy
years to him,' says his brother, Dr. Niven
Robertson, ' as the tenor of the poems
in Comrades show. He spent most of his
time in historical research, and gained the
B.Litt. of Oxford. The subject of his
thesis was The Life of Sir Robert Moray.
This is to be published in book form, but
its publication has been delayed by the
war. By those who are able to judge he
was regarded as one who would, sooner
or later, make his name as a historian,
but this was not to be.'
In September 1914 he enlisted as a
private, joining from a sincere sense of
duty only, as he had no inclination to
fighting — his whole life had been devoted
to study ; he had never cared for sport or
strenuous doings of any but a studious
sort ; and he could not but have wistful
216 For Remembrance
recollections, such as came to him ' On
Passing Oxford in a Troop Train ' :
. . . Away with memories ? Yet there 's one
I fain would keep till life be done ;
No pining for a vanished bliss
Which once we had but now we miss —
Such is the comfort of the weak ;
The strong another solace seek ;
New circumstance alone can bring
Fresh outlook and imagining.
So that dear mother of the soul
Who found us sick and made us whole
Restrained not but enjoined the quest
Of Truth until the final rest,
And hinted that the search might be
The object of eternity ;
That in defiance and in hope
Alone may lie the means to cope
With what life brings of ill ; that naught
Is failure but despairing thought.
Him who remembers this the years
Can bring no too triumphant fears
Nor the stern future's gaze appal,
Mysterious-eyed, inimical.
War could have no possible attractions
for a man of his intellectual aims and
gracious personal character. ' When he
entered the Army he sacrificed all his
joy of life in the world of intellectual
pursuits,' but the great mood in which
ALEXANDER ROBERTSON.
CORPL., 12TH YORK AND LANCASTER REGT.
Alexander Robertson 217
the sacrifice was made is in that verse
of his. The love of culture remained
with him even in the midst of army
life, when there was little time or privacy
to foster it, and in Egypt, where he
went with his battalion in December
1915, he gave the leisure he could get
from railway making and trench digging
to the study of Italian. His regiment
was transferred to France in April 1916,
and after a spell in hospital, with epidemic
jaundice, he was glad to rejoin his old
university comrades in the front line
near Albert, early in June. On the morn-
ing of 1st July, in the great offensive on
the Somme, he died along with several of
those comrades in the verv forefront of
our attack on the German position. All
his poems were written while he was on
active service. ' It was his greatest joy
and a great solace to him,' writes his
brother, ' to express his soul in them, as
army life was far from congenial to a man
of his character.' Like his ' Moses on
Pisgah,' he saw far off the land of promise
he was not to tread. Strife and bloodshed
218 For Remembrance
were around him, but his dreams were not
of them — always, as in the hospital at
Provence, he was grateful for a window,
a small space, through which he could yet
see nature and humanity. His vision of
the ' Survivors,' who shall reach the goal,
sees them looking back with sadness on
the dark hours when necessity made them
blind to pity, as to danger,
Our human kind
Debasing to an instrument to slay
Man and his hopes ;
and the reward that is to be theirs for all
they have done and endured is not the
crushing of their enemy, the conquest of
his land, but to live their own lives once
more, to have
Self-mastery again, once more the sweet
Beatitude of freedom and the sense
Of quiet and security, intense ;
Home and home faces lit with unexpressed
Joy, and the gladness of the spirit's rest.
Less of a student, perhaps, more of a
man of action, Lieutenant A. L. Jenkins
was still a dreamer, an idealist, whose
ideal of happiness was not of a kind
that could ever be won by the sword, but
is the strange, sweet, immaterial some-
Arthur Lewis Jenkins 219
thing that he sighs after in ' Forlorn
Adventurers,' the lyric that lends its title
to his book :
. . . The sweetest love of the loves of earth ;
Treasure thrice tried in fire,
Power beyond the dreams of kings —
These we have got in our venturings,
But never our heart's desire.
And of such spoil we are content
Our loves alone to keep :
Gold through our careless hands shall run,
And all the lands we lightly won
Wiser than we shall reap.
Wayfaring men, yea, fools are we,
Who do not count the cost :
Of little worth in men's esteem,
Yet happy, for we chase a dream
More fair than aught we lost.
The eldest son of Sir John Lewis Jenkins,
K.C.S.I., I.C.S., he had himself hoped to
enter the Indian Civil Service, ' for which,'
writes Frank Fletcher, in an introduction
to Forlorn Adventurers, ' he seemed natur-
ally destined by the traditions of both
sides of his family and by his father's
brilliant record.' Another Marlborough
boy, he went to Balliol with a classical
scholarship, but abandoned all personal
ambitions, and became a lieutenant in
220 For Remembrance
the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry
in 1914. He served for a year in India,
and then went in charge of a machine-
gun section to Aden, and his recollec-
tions of campaigning there are in
4 Arabia,' written just before he left Aden
for Palestine :
An aching glare, a heat that kills,
Skies hard and pitiless overhead,
And, overmastering lesser ills,
Sad bugles keening comrades dead :
Fever and dust and smiting sun,
In sooth a land of little ease :
Yet, now my service here is done,
I think on other things than these.
Dawn on the desert's short-lived dew,
Blue shadows on the silver sand,
Grey shimmering mists that still renew
The magic of the hinterland :
Sunsets ablaze with crimson fire,
Pale moons like plates of beaten gold,
Soft nights that fevered limbs desire,
And stars whereto our stars are cold :
Sharp, rattling fights at peep of day,
Machine-guns searching scrub and plain,
Red lances questing for the prey,
And kites quick stooping to the slain :
Swift shifting stroke and counter-stroke,
Advance unhurrying and sure,
Until the stubborn foeman broke —
These are the memories that endure. . . .
Arthur Lewis Jenkins 221
His section being disbanded, he joined
the Royal Flying Corps, trained in
Egypt, returned to England, and while
serving in a home - defence squadron
was killed in an aeroplane accident
on the last night of 1917. That he
too knew for what he died and was
more than willing to die for it let his
4 Happy Warriors,' an elegy on his dead
friends who had fallen in battle, bear
witness :
Surely they sleep content, our valiant dead,
Fallen untimely in the savage strife :
They have but followed whither duty led,
To find a fuller life.
Who, then, are we to grudge the bitter price
Of this our land inviolate through the years,
Or mar the splendour of their sacrifice
That is too high for tears. . . .
God grant we fail not at the test — that when
We take, mayhap, our places in the fray,
Come life, come death, we quit ourselves like men,
The peers of such as they.
The gallantry and glamour of old wars
is in his ' Crusaders,' written in Palestine,
and the one dread that, as in the verse of
Major Stewart and others, haunted these
brave men — the fear of being afraid — is
222 For Remembrance
in his finely impressive lyric, c Fear ' ; but
an eager joy in the charm and loveliness
of the kindlier, sweeter ways of the world
blows like a wind of morning through his
before the war ' Song of the Road,' ' The
Land of Dreams,' and ' In Praise of
Devon ' ; and in one of the last of his
poems, ' Bondage,' you see that, like
Robertson, he was not fighting for any
vain glory of conquest :
Oh, I am sick of ways and wars
And the homeless ends of the earth,
I would get back to the northern stars
And the land where I had birth,
And take to me a dainty maid,
And a tiny patch of ground,
Where I may watch small green things grow
And the kindly months come round. . . .
The wine of war is bitter wine,
And I have drunk my fill ;
My heart would seek its anodyne
In homely things and still. . . .
If I have stressed this essentially human
note, it is because it is so implicit and
insistent in the songs that the soldier
poets of this war have sung. They went
into battle soberly or with a mystical
exultation, prepared to die in it, but with
Richard Dennys 223
a will to victory for the sake of peace and
right and with a settled courage that
nothing could shake. They descended
into the pit and fought with beasts, but
remained unconquerably human. Noel
Hodgson, coming out of the desperate
fighting at Loos, wrote on his way back
to the rest camp :
We that have seen the strongest
Cry like a beaten child,
The sanest eyes unholy,
The cleanest hands denied ;
We that have known the heart-blood
Less than the lees of wine,
We that have seen men broken,
We know man is divine.
And Dennys, when his death was imminent,
sent up from amidst the carnage and
desolation a vastly different message than
that which Achilles shouted over his
trenches :
But now I know that nought is purposeless,
And, even in destruction, we can find
A power whose steady motive is to bless
The ultimate redemption of mankind. . . .
Ours is the privilege of sacrifice,
And cheerfully we heap the sacred pyre,
Our willing selves the offering — the price
Demanded to make fierce the cleansing fire.
224 Por Remembrance
Ourselves we set the light, and know it wise,
(Seek not, O faint of heart, our hands to stay),
That, phoenix-like, a nobler world may rise
From out the ashes of a dead to-day.
Belief in a divinity that is shaping the
rough-hewn brutalities of war to beneficent
ends breaks as clearly from ' The Shrine,'
one of Eugene Crombie's poems :
. . . Returning through the woods at evening's hour
I lay before Thy shrine my offering,
My candle-flame a yellow crocus flower,
Its life but newly lit, to Thee I bring,
In thanks that I can see Thy guiding hand
In every flower that decorates the land.
He wrote this at his billet in France
shortly before he marched out to the
attack in which he fell. Surely, it is
more wonderful that he, and others with
him, could hold by such faith there, where
the vast menace of death was close about
them, than that the saint of old, in no
immediate peril, should be able to say,
4 Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.'
Eugene Crombie was the only son of
J. W. Crombie, who for sixteen years was
Member of Parliament for Kincardine-
shire. From Summersfields School he
went to Winchester, and but for the out-
bJs££
W
t
\ ^
— w
*
Photo by Auxiliary Portrait Studios, Westminster.
ARTHUR LEWIS JENKINS.
LIEUTENANT, ROYAL FLYING CORPS,
Eugene Crombie 225
break of war was to have gone to Oxford.
He obtained a commission, was trained
at Bedford, and was out in France, a
Lieutenant of the Fourth Battalion of
the Gordon Highlanders, by January 1915.
Three months later, on the 23rd April, he
was wounded, and on the same day of
the same month, in 1917, he was killed
in the battle for the Chemical Works at
Roeux, on the Somme.
A friend who was with him at Win-
chester writes that even at eighteen
Eugene Crombie ' had an air of perfect
maturity. He was wise beyond his years,
yet there was a golden thread of boyish-
ness and humour running through all he
said and did. He was courageous, morally
as well as physically. Those who knew
him well knew that within him there was
a spiritual fire of true religion which made
him love right for its own sake, and that
his mind was exquisitely susceptible to
the influences of poetry, nature, and music.
But this side of him was kept hidden ; not
all who came into contact with him found
it ; but it was there, and reveals itself in
the few poems he has left us, especially in
226 For Remembrance
the last two that he wrote. He owed
much to Winchester, but has repaid the
debt by adding one more name to the long
roll of those who have lived and died in
accordance with her highest traditions.'
He had looked forward to following in
the steps of his father, grandfather, and
great-grandfather, who had all been in
the House of Commons, and he showed
every promise of becoming an eloquent
speaker, possessing a fine voice, a good
presence, and considerable dramatic talent.
A faith as sure as his, a quiet religious
earnestness, are characteristic also of Cyril
Winterbotham, especially in his last poems,
1 A Christmas Prayer from the Trenches '
and c The Cross of Wood,' the latter
written a month before he was killed in
action. He had written verses since his
childhood, and the early poems gathered
into his little volume show a delight-
ful sense of humour and a real love of
nature. From Cheltenham College he
went to Oxford in 1906 ; and in 1911 he
was called to the Bar. He was keenly
interested in politics, and in 1913 was
adopted as prospective Liberal candidate
Cyril William Winterbotham 227
for East Gloucestershire. His warmest
sympathies went out to the poor and
unfortunate, and he gave much of his
time to useful work with the Oxford and
Bermondsey Mission. In September 1914
he obtained a commission in the 1/5
Gloucestershire Regiment, and was in
Flanders and France from March 1915
until his death. ' He was essentially a
man of peace,' writes his mother, ' and
had a horror of war and bloodshed, but
when the call came he did not hesitate—
every other feeling gave way to the desire
to serve his country, and to deliver the
oppressed. He sacrificed his own ambition
to the great cause of Liberty and Honour,
to which he believed he was called by
God Himself. His horror of it all made
no difference to the doing of what he felt
was his duty, even to the laying down of
a life which had always been pleasant to
him and held so much promise for the
future.' He was only twenty-nine when
he died, and those two last poems of his,
written on active service, shall surely give
him a lasting place in our remembrance
among the soldier poets of this war.
228 For Remembrance
A succession of bizarre, imaginative
stories beginning with The Boats of the
Glencarrig, had established Hope Hodgson's
reputation as a novelist before, at the out-
break of war, he came home from the
south of France to qualify for a commis-
sion in the R.F.A. He was sent to the
western front in October 1917. At the
beginning of the following April he dis-
tinguished himself by saving his guns in a
stubborn rearguard action ; and on the
17th of the same month he was killed while
acting as observation officer. Before he
settled down to a literary career, he had
served eight years at sea, and his memories
of those days are in his stories and in the
lyrics and ballads that are gathered into
his one book of verse, The Calling of the
Sea, which is now in the press. I recall
him as a forceful, enthusiastic personality,
seeming much younger than his forty
years ; an idealist who aimed at the highest
both in literature and in life, and I know
that if he could have chosen the manner
of his ending he would have had no other
than the brave death he died.
VIII
Upon his will he binds a radiant chain,
For Freedom's sake he is no longer free.
It is his task, the slave of Liberty,
With his own blood to wipe away a stain.
That pain may cease, he yields his flesh to pain.
To banish war, he must a warrior be.
He dwells in Night, eternal Dawn to see,
And gladly dies, abundant life to gain.
Joyce Kilmer, The Peacemaker.
Until Thomas Hardy wrote The Dynasts,
no poet had attempted to fashion into
one great poem the epic story of the
Napoleonic wars. There had been odes,
lyrics, sonnets, narrative and didactic
poems innumerable on Waterloo and other
famous battles by land and sea, on
dramatic or sentimental episodes in the
fighting, on the aims or personality of the
Emperor himself, but the theme as a
whole had seemed too vast, too complex
even for epic treatment, and had been
left to the plodding Muse of History.
Nor has Hardy welded it all into anything
like another Iliad ; there is something
229
230 For Remembrance
more in his verse that the ' horror of
arms endlessly thundering, piety, justice,
valor and royalty ' which Chapman found
in Homer's. He has not the simple direct-
ness of the story-tellers of the ancient
world, because he has not their simple
faith in the glory of war nor in the warrior
as the loftiest of possible heroes. He rele-
gates the supreme war-maker to his place
in the universal scheme of things, puts
him in relation to the spiritual significance
of life and human progress, and recognises
that he merely fulfils his destined function,
Like meanest insects on obscurest leaves.
The pomp and circumstance of war are
the business of both The Dynasts and the
Iliad, but Hardy has a habit of looking
through the dazzling pageantry to the
underlying wrong and individual suffering,
to the squalor, the cruelty, the tragedy,
the stupid and piteous waste of it all, and
shows you his defeated hero at the last,
stripped of his childish splendours and
dignities, and foreseeing the coming of a
day when, despite the showy and noisy
wonders he has done :
The Men from Overseas 231
I shall be nothing. . . .
To shoulder Christ from out the topmost
niche
In human fame, as once I fondly felt,
Was not for me. I came too late in time
To assume the prophet or the demi-god,
A part past playing now.
Possibly his pinchbeck German imitator
has by this arrived at the same self-know-
ledge. The war-monger has become an
anachronism in the modern world which
has, from hard experience, got sense
enough to know that if stealing a man's
purse be a vice, stealing his country can
scarcely count as a virtue ; that it is a
hypocritical mockery to build a gallows
for the man who slays one of his fellows,
and a throne for the man who slaughters
millions. That was the great argument
in the latest that was to have been the
last of wars, and you cannot read the
literature, especially the poetical literature,
that the war inspired without realising
that the free peoples of the world rose to
the height of that argument.
The Napoleonic wars were not so im-
measurably vaster than the siege of Troy
232 For Remembrance
as the titanic world-war was than the far-
reaching campaigns of Napoleon ; and the
probability is that it will take more than
another century to produce the poet who
shall be fitted to put the full story and
significance of our Armageddon into one
tremendous song. Meanwhile, to say
nothing of what has been done by civilians,
the soldiers themselves have written such
an enormous body of verse touching on
its infinitely varied aspects that it would
be possible to compile from their ballads,
lyrics, sonnets and miscellaneous rhymes,
a sort of composite epic which in range
and variety, in poignant truthfulness and
intimacy of experience, would excel all
that any one poet could compass.
That compilation is outside our scope
here, within the limits of a single volume,
where we can look to do no more than pay
due tribute to the soldier poets of our own
islands, and only to the too many of those
who have died for the faith that was in
them. But their work is sufficiently re-
presentative to indicate how different
such an epic would be from any that has
The Men from Overseas 233
yet been written ; for the attitude towards
war, the feeling against the wrong, the
crime of it, that was theirs is expressed or
implied in the work of their comrades in
arms and in song who fought the same
good fight and lived to see the end of it.
But though it is also impossible, within
our limits, to attempt any adequate record
of the poet soldiers of the other English-
speaking peoples, a passing reference to
what they have done may serve at least to
show that the purpose and ultimate hope /
behind our and their patriotism was not
peculiar to any one of these nations, but
common to them all. At the risk of re-
peating oneself, one must emphasise that
from their own words it becomes clear
that they went to their deaths for a love
of justice and liberty in which the love of
country was swallowed up in a larger love
of mankind. They died not merely for
England, America, Australasia, Canada,
South Africa, but that France, the very
Mecca of the free, might be saved ; not
merely to rescue and avenge Belgium or
Serbia, but for the redemption once for
234 For Remembrance
all of all humanity from the iniquities and
maniacal horrors of war.
These were the ideals, and nothing but
these, that led hundreds of young Ameri-
cans to anticipate the decision of their
Government and enlist in the French and
Canadian and English armies immediately
the war was upon us ; and one of the first
of those hundreds was Alan Seeger. He
came of an old New England family, and
was born in New York in 1888. Two or
three years' residence in Paris had in-
spired him with a deep love and admira-
tion of France and the French, and when
the Huns were swarming into Belgium,
the menace to Paris, the prospect of
France being broken and humiliated again
as in 1871, so wrought upon him that he
promptly joined the French foreign legion.
Rupert Brooke's ideal of self-sacrifice
was not higher, nor Julian Grenf ell's joy
in battle keener, than are the idealism and
the eager, soldierly spirit that are alive in
Seeger's letters and diary and poems. He
claimed to share with Sidney a devotion
To my three idols — Love and Arms and Song ;
Alan Seeger 235
but, like the friend he honours in ' Cham-
pagne, 1914-15,' he went to his heroic /
martyrdom, not for military glory, but
That other generations might possess —
From shame and menace free in years to come —
A richer heritage of happiness.
4 Nothing but good can befall the soldier,
so he plays his part well,' he writes in his
diary ; and in a letter to his mother from
the front he says :
You must not be anxious about my
not coming back. The chances are about
ten to one that I will. But if I should not,
you must be proud like a Spartan mother
and feel it is your contribution to the
triumph of the cause whose righteousness
you feel so keenly. Everybody should
take part in this struggle which is to have
so decisive an effect not only on the nations
engaged but on all humanity. ... If so
large a part should fall to your share, you
would be in so far superior to other women,
and should be correspondingly proud.
There would be nothing to regret, for I
could not have done otherwise than what
I did, and I think I could not have done
236 For Remembrance
better. Death is nothing terrible after
all. It may mean something even more
wonderful than life.'
8 It is the slackers and shirkers alone
in this war,' he writes, again to his mother,
in 1915, ' who are to be lamented. Had I
the choice I would be nowhere else than
where I am.' He notes in his diary that
he is glad to be fighting with the French,
who have ' the admiration of all who
love liberty, and heroism in its defence. . . .
Whatever be the force in international
conflicts of having justice and all the
principles of morality on one's side, it
at least gives the French soldier a strength
that 's like the strength of ten against an
adversary whose weapon is only brute
violence.' And in a last letter, to a friend,
written on 28th June 1916, the night
before he was killed in a victorious charge,
he rejoices : ' We go up to the attack to-
morrow. We are to ha^ve the honour of
marching in the first wave — I am glad
to be going in the first wave. If you are
in this thing at all it is best to be in to the
limit. And this is the supreme experience.'
Alan Seeger 237
A delight in the loveliness of nature, a
passion for life and all the beauty and
mystery of it find expression in the sensi-
tive music and jewelled phrasing of the
poems he wrote at peace in his homeland
or in Paris ; but there is a deeper note of
feeling, a more passionate sincerity, in
the verses he wrote after he had started
on his last adventure, down the Valley /
of the Shadow. I think if he had
lived another year he would have revised
some bitter passages of his ' Message to
America ' and of his glorious ode ' In
Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen
for France ' ; but assuredly he would have
left untouched in the former his call to
his countrymen to pay homage to the
French who ' wanted the war no more
than you,' but would fight heroically to /
the end ' for their hearths, their altars,
and their past.' Nor would he have
found it necessary to take anything from
his triumphant eulogy of those Americans,
his friends, who had died beside him for
Liberty :
Yet sought they neither recompense nor praise,
Nor to be mentioned in another breath
238 For Remembrance
Than their blue-coated comrades whose great days
It was their pride to share — ay, share even to the
death !
Nay, rather, France, to you they render thanks
(Seeing they came for honour, not for gain)
Who, opening to them your glorious ranks,
Gave them that grand occasion to excel,
That chance to live the life most free from stain
And that rare privilege of dying well.
And as surely he would have taken no
word from his appeal to America to be
proud of those sons of hers who thus had
died :
And cry : Now Heaven be praised
That in that hour that most imperilled her,
Menaced her liberty who foremost raised
Europe's bright flag of freedom, some there were
Who, not unmindful of the antique debt,
Came back the generous path of Lafayette ;
And when of a most formidable foe
She checked each onset, arduous to stem —
Foiled and frustrated them —
On those red fields where blow with furious
blow
Was countered, whether the gigantic fray
Rolled by the Meuse or at the Bois Sabot,
Accents of ours were in the fierce melee ;
And on those furthest rims of hallowed ground
Where the forlorn, the gallant charge expires,
When the slain bugler has long ceased to sound,
And on the tangled wires
Joyce Kilmer 239
The last wild rally staggers, crumbles, stops,
Withered beneath the shrapnel's iron showers :
Now heaven be thanked, we gave a few brave
drops ;
Now heaven be thanked, a few brave drops were ours.
When the right hour struck, all the
youth of America uprose, as Seeger and
his gallant companions had risen, to go
back along ' the generous path of Lafay-
ette,' and take their stand by the legions
of France and Britain, and carry the
Stars and Stripes to victory. And among
the earliest regiments to land in France
from America came Joyce Kilmer, a
private of the 165th U.S.A. Infantry, a
brilliant and distinguished journalist who
had thrown up his post on the New York
Times to go and enlist. He was born at
New Brunswick, New Jersey, on the 6th
December 1886. His mother came of
an old English family that went to Con-
necticut in 1638 ; and though it is said
there were Scottish as well as English
strains in him, and he himself claimed, on
no particular evidence, to be half Irish,
it is safer to say that he was keenly Irish
240 For Remembrance
in his sympathies, but all American. After
leaving Columbia University, he set up as
school-teacher in ' a (more or less) rural
community.' Then he became instructor
of Latin at Morristown High School, New
Jersey, and while at Morristown he
married. 4 At the conclusion of a year's
teaching,' writes Robert Cortes Holliday,
in the prefatory Memoir to Kilmer's poems,
4 he tore up the roots he had planted, and,
together with the young lady he had
married and the son born to them, and
with a few youthful poems in his pocket,
he advanced upon the metropolis, even in
the classic way, on the ancient quest of
conscious talent.'
He began in New York as editor of a
journal about horses, of which he knew
nothing ; then for a short time he was a
retail salesman in Scribner's Sons' book
store, and one takes it that his early poem,
4 In a Book Shop ' :
All day I serve among the volumes telling
Old tales of love and war and high romance. . . .
dates from those days. He withdrew
from the book shop to do strenuous work
a
»
kii
V
*
*&
RICHARD DENNYS.
CAPTAIN, LOYAL NORTH LANCS. REGT.
Joyce Kilmer 241
as assistant editor of a new edition of the
Standard Dictionary, and had contributed
a good deal of verse and prose to various
papers before he was appointed literary-
editor of The Churchman. He was soon
known in his own and other periodicals as
an able and delightful essayist and re-
viewer ; he conducted the Poetry depart-
ment of The Literary Digest and Current
Literature, and wrote a quarterly article
on poetry for the American Review of
Reviews. In 1913 he emerged as what he
called ' a hard newspaper man,' and be-
came a special writer for the New York
Sunday Times. Mr. Holliday gives a
graphic and amusing picture of the in-
exhaustible energy with which he got
through enormous amounts of work all
day at his office ; while at home :
4 Night after night he would radiantly
walk up and down the floor singing a
lullaby to one of his children whom he
carried screaming in his arms while he
dictated between vociferous sounds to his
secretary or wife ... his wife frequently
driven by the drowsiness of two in the
242 For Remembrance
morning to take short naps with her head
upon the typewriter while the literally
tireless journalist filled and lighted his
pipe.' Meanwhile he was growing popular
as a lecturer and reader of his own poems,
and proving himself in those capacities
a masterly elocutionist and an excellent
man of business. He showed in his life,
as so many of our truest poets have shown,
that sane living and efficiency in the
ordinary affairs of the world are not in-
compatible with the finest poetical sen-
sibility. You have something of the
fineness and the robust healthfulness of
his philosophy in his scathing lines ' To
Certain Poets ' :
. . . You little poets mincing there
With women's hearts and women's hair !
How sick Dan Chaucer's ghost must be
To hear you lisp of ' Poesie ' ! . . .
This thing alone you have achieved :
Because of you, it is believed
That all who earn their bread by rhyme
Are like yourselves, exuding slime.
Take up your needles, drop your pen,
And leave the poet's craft to men !
Joyce Kilmer 243
All life was a battle to him ; he knew the
joy of that battle and loved to be in it ;
but poetry was his holy place, his refuge /
and his strength amid the rough and
tumble of it. He turned from his other
occupations to poetry in much the same
spirit as he came home after any wan-
derings :
But I 'm glad to turn from the open road and the
starlight on my face,
And to leave the splendour of out-of-doors for a
human dwelling-place. . . .
If you call a gipsy a vagabond, I think you do him
wrong,
For he never goes a-travelling but he takes his home
along.
And the only reason a road is good, as every wan-
derer knows,
Is just because of the homes, the homes, the homes
to which it goes.
They say that life is a highway and its milestones
are the years,
And now and then there 's a toll-gate where you buy
your way with tears.
It 's a rough road and a steep road and it stretches
broad and far,
But at last it leads to a golden Town where golden
Houses are.
Few love lyrics have more grace and charm
/
244 For Remembrance
than his poems ' For Aline ' ; always
there is charm, tenderness, playfulness in
his verses about children ; he was ex-
quisitely sensitive to the beauty of the
world and a conscious artist in conjuring
its magic into his lines, but he saw no
reason why the poet should not be still a
sensible, practical human creature, and
is merciless in his lines ' To a Young Poet
who Killed Himself,' and was never blind
to the fact that even the loveliest words
fall short of the loveliness of things :
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
Before the war came he had won wide
recognition as a poet and a high and
assured position among American jour-
nalists. ' For a sapling poet,' says Mr.
Holliday, ' within a few short years and
by the hard business of words, to attain
to a secretary and a butler and a family
of, at length, four children, is a modern
Arabian Night's Tale.' He was not given
to heroics nor to letting his emotions run
away with his judgment, but the grim
struggle in Europe stirred him profoundly,
Joyce Kilmer 245
and his own course was clear to him. ' To
any one who knew Kilmer,' as his bio-
grapher has it, ' it would have been per-
fectly dumbfounding if, when war was de-
clared between his country and Germany,
he had not done exactly as he did. It is /
inconceivable ... to picture him moving
about here, from restaurant to office, in
this hour. Flatly, the thing can't be
done.' Which is what I, too, should have
said, even from the little that I saw of him.
In 1914 he paid a flying visit to England
i to rescue his mother from war difficulties
in London,' and it must have been during
this visit that I met him for the first and
last time. He lunched with me at the
Savage Club, and I have the vividest
recollection of him and the three hours of
that afternoon spent in his company. I
remember how alive and alert he was ;
how, with all his geniality and ready
humour, he was keenly and seriously in-
terested in everything that was happen-
ing among us here, and spoke with warm
enthusiasm of the self-control and im-
perturbable resolution with which our
246 For Remembrance
people were facing the greatest crisis in
their history.
4 In New York,' said he, ' there are
crowds all day outside the newspaper
offices waiting to see the latest news
thrown on to a big screen, but there 's
nothing of that here. I 've been around
your big newspaper offices and there 's
nothing doing ... no crowds ; people
just going by about their business as if
there was nothing to worry about. It 's
fine. I believe we are more excited over
it all than you are in little old England.
You seem to take it for granted that how-
ever much things go wrong at the moment
they are bound to go right for you in the
finish. I like that confidence. It looks
like indifference, but it isn't ; you 've only
got to scratch the surface a little and you
find there 's no indifference underneath.
I 'm a mixture of three or four nations, I
suppose, but since I 've been here I 'in
glad I 'm partly English.'
I remember how he gloried in the posters
that were then calling from all our walls
and hoardings, appealing for recruits ; he
Joyce Kilmer 247
felt, as most of us did, how much finer was
that call for volunteers and the wonderful
response to it than any prompt, auto-
cratic recourse to conscription could have
been. 4 We shall be in with you before
long,' he said. ' We 're a good way off,
and some of us don't know all about it
yet, but we 're getting to know, and
nothing can keep us out, unless you finish
the job up quickly.' He thought that
Americans who had not crossed the At-
lantic since the war began did not realise
the spirit in which England was meeting
it, and to help them to that realisation he
was anxious to secure as complete a set
as possible of our recruiting posters for
reproduction in his newspaper when he
returned home ; so we presently taxied on
that quest to the Government Stationery
Department. ' You do all the talk,' he
urged, as we went in. 'If they hear my
American accent they may suspect I am a
German, and that will settle our chances.'
The Stationery Department was sym-
pathetic, but referred us to the War Office,
which could do nothing for us, but assured
248 For Remembrance
us that the Stationery Department could
do everything. A second visit to that
Department resulted in our invading the
War Office again with the name of an
official who, when we found him, protested
that he knew no more of the posters than
we did, and it was on the advice of a police-
man outside in Whitehall that we rode
round to the big recruiting depot in Old
Scotland Yard, walked past the crowd
waiting to enlist and the officers who were
shepherding it, as if we belonged there,
and, once inside, were directed to a large
basement room in which we discovered
what we were seeking. I had to answer
a good many questions, Kilmer standing
by in discreet silence, and, in the end, with
a little diplomacy, we possessed ourselves
of samples of almost every variety of
poster and window-card and carried them
out between us, a bulky armful apiece, to
the taxi.
We piled them in, and then Kilmer
paused to look round for a minute at the
long queue of young men who were waiting
to offer themselves for enlistment — a long
Joyce Kilmer 249
queue that stretched from the door in
Scotland Yard right out and round the
corner out of sight in Whitehall. It was
being continually lengthened by new
arrivals. Something in the sight touched
him profoundly, and he turned of a sudden,
laid his hand on my arm and said, ' Come
on. My God, if I look at these boys much
longer I '11 have to hook on at the tail of
this queue and join up with them ! '
He joined up immediately America
entered the war, and this personal re-
collection of mine explains why I feel they
are right who say it was unthinkable that
he could have done otherwise. And once
he was a soldier it was characteristic
of him that he was one wholeheartedly.
1 He ceased altogether to be a journalist
of any kind,' writes Mr. Holliday ; 4 that
is, even the instinct of the journalist
dropped from him when he touched it.'
He wrote of himself, ' My days of hack
writing are over, for a time at least. . . .
The only sort of book I care to write about
the war is the sort people will read after the
war is over — a century after it is over.'
250 For Remembrance
He told the Rev. Edward F. Garesche, S. J.,
in a letter from France, ' I have discovered,
since some unforgettable experiences, that
writing is not the tremendously important
thing I once considered it. You will find
me less a bookman when you next see me,
and more, I hope, of a man.'
He won the admiration and affection of
his comrades in arms ; they ' speak with
awe of his coolness and his nerve in scout-
ing patrols in No-Man's-Land ' ; and the
chaplain of his regiment, Father Duffy,
says, ' He was absolutely the coolest and
most indifferent man in the face of danger
I have ever seen. It was not for lack of
love of life, for he enjoyed his life as a
soldier — his only cross was distance from
home. It was partly from his inborn
courage and devotion — he would not
stint his sacrifice — partly his deep and
real belief that what God wills is
best.'
The spirit of that faith and devotion
are in the ' Prayer of a Soldier in France,'
one of the five poems he wrote while he
was there on service :
Joyce Kilmer 251
My shoulders ache beneath my pack
(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back).
I march with feet that burn and smart
(Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart). . . .
My rifle hand is still and numb
(From Thy pierced palm red rivers come).
Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me
Than all the hosts of land and sea.
So let me render back again
This millionth of Thy gift. Amen.
He was killed in action near Ourcq, on
the 30th July 1918. ' At the dawn of a
misty Sunday, 28th July, the 165th had
made a gallant and irresistible charge
across the river and up the hill. In the
height of the great five days' battle for
the mastery of the heights that followed
Kilmer was killed.'
We pride ourselves at times on being
unsentimental internationalists, citizens
of the world, superior to the weakness of
loving any one country, any one people
more than another ; but so long as we are
human (and we are a long way yet from
being anything else) the people that we
252 For Remembrance
know, the country made sacred to us
by the memories and the graves of our
dead and associated with the joys and
sorrows of our own lives, will always keep
a surer hold upon our hearts than a people
we have never known and the countries that
enshrine for us no memories that are ours.
What but that mystic love of one's own
land, one's own race, brought the myriads
of Canada and Australasia rallying to the
banners of the Motherland ? Thousands
in those armies were not born in England
and had never trodden its soil, but it had
been the home of their fathers ; they were
linked to it by all the records and traditions
of their ancestry ; they drew their life
from it as from the very root of their
being. They may have thought little of
such things or forgotten them in ordinary
times, but when the shadow of peril was
over these islands they remembered, and
went out to fight with a hatred of tyranny,
a love of freedom that was bound up in-
dissolubly with a love which was instinct
in their blood and spirit of the land whose
people and whose history were also theirs.
Geoffrey Wall 253
A song by Corporal James Burns, who
fought in the ranks of the Anzacs, voices
the heart of Australia in that dark hour
when she heard the far-off reveille :
The bugles of England were calling o'er the sea,
As they had called a thousand years, calling now
to me ;
They woke mc from dreaming in the dawning of
the day,
The bugles of England — and how could I stay ? . . .
O England, I heard the cry of those who died for
thee
Sounding like an organ voice across the winter sea ;
They lived and died for England, and gladly went
their way,
England, England — how could I stay ?
He answered the call and gave his life
at Gallipoli for the ideals of life and con-
duct that are the equal inheritance of all
the English-speaking nations. It was the
same impulse that brought Geoffrey Wall
over to England to enlist. Born at Lis-
card, in Cheshire, he went with his family
to Melbourne when he was twelve years
old. The war came while he was still at
school there, a graduate of Queen's College
in Melbourne University, and in 1915 he
offered himself for the Australian Army,
254 For Remembrance
but fell short of the standard of measure-
ment, and was rejected. Towards the
end of 1916 he arrived in England, bent
on joining the Royal Flying Corps, and,
after surmounting the usual War Office
obstacles, succeeded in getting into the
Service, and qualified as a pilot.
The Letters of an Airman, and the
diary included in the same volume, pub-
lished after his death, narrate his experi-
ences and express shrewd and frank
opinions on some of our national institu-
tions, and on things and people in general.
He took the rough as cheerfully as the
smooth ; was full of pluck and energy and
eager to play his part in the war, but he
saw the absurdities as well as the necessity,
in the circumstances, of Army discipline.
1 How do I like it ? ' he wrote to his
mother. ' Well, frankly I hate it. I was
never cut out for a soldier and have no
desire to be one longer than I can help. . . .
It is easy enough to theorise and idealise
at a distance, but when you get right up
against it you begin to see that absolutely
nothing can justify war.'
Geoffrey Wall 255
Young as he was and fired with boyish
enthusiasms, he was not slow to see
through the romantic show of it to that
revolting, inglorious side of war that
darkens like a disillusioned afterthought
through so much of the poetry, especially
the later poetry, that the soldiers wrote
out of bitter knowledge of the difference
between sending others into hell and going
there yourself. Meanwhile, seeing that,
as a matter of commonsense, there was no
hope of ending war by meekly leaving the
aggressor to overrun the earth and gather,
unopposed, the full harvest of his iniquity,
Geoffrey Wall devoted himself eagerly
and resolutely to the mastery of his new
profession. In one of his letters is an
extraordinarily graphic account of his
sensations on his first flight alone in an
aeroplane ; and that he enjoyed life in
England, even the slack days when he
was loitering about London while the War
Office made up its mind to employ him, is
evident all through his letters and his
diary. He was interested and puzzled
by the happenings at a spiritualistic
256 For Remembrance
seance where among other answers he
obtained by table-rapping was one assur-
ing him he would return to Australia,
unwounded, on the 12th February 1918,
and he made a note to recollect that date ;
but before it was reached he had been six
months dead. He got a thrill out of
recognising Kipling seated near him at
an Albert Hall concert. Replying to an
inquiry from his father as to what literary
work he had been doing lately, he says,' I
shall never write in the proper sense. For
one thing, between them, Chesterton and
Rupert Brooke have left nothing for me
to write about ' ; and he goes on to give
a capital sketch of the only glimpse of
Chesterton he ever had. 8 Did I tell you
I had met him — quite unofficially ? It
was at the War Office. I was waiting for
an interview with some person Sir Astley
Corbet gave me an intro. to — I forget his
name — and while I was waiting G. K. C.
came in and sat down heavily opposite
me. It was unmistakably himself — with
a cape thrown across his shoulder and a
soft felt hat over his eyes. He picked up
Photo by Searle Bros.
J. EUGENE CROMBIE.
CAPTAIN, 4TH GORDON HIGHLANDERS.
Geoffrey Wall 257
a couple of papers, grunted, glared at me
(I was the only other occupant of the
waiting-room), then regarded the chande-
lier fixedly for about ten minutes, and
suddenly heaved himself up on to his feet
again and remarked sonorously, " My God !
am I to wait here all day ? " and lumbered
out.'
When he died, in an aeroplane accident
in August 1917, Geoffrey Wall was only
twenty. He had shared his early am-
bitions chiefly between literature and
mechanics ; some years before he dreamt
of flying he built himself a motor-car ;
but all along he had been following avia-
tion developments, and in the first month
of the war wrote in praise of Wilbur
Wright— that he had toiled, not for gain,
and, indifferent to the sneers of the
doubters, was the first who shaped 4 the
burden of an age's thought ' and fearlessly
navigated the air :
Because of these his name shall sound
Till, gleaming like a comet's tail,
Across the dark that knows no bound
We ply the Inter-Planet Mail.
R
258 For Remembrance
He poured his keen delight in life into
such ringing songs as ' The Road,' ' The
Call of the Road,' and ' Moonshine ' ; his
sorrow for those who had died in battle,
and his confidence that a better world
would rise out of the chaos which had
engulfed them, into his ' Requiem ' :
Yet not in vain that final sacrifice,
For when Australia's sons have shed their blood,
The petty bickerings that, 'neath peaceful skies
The people's weal, the nation's wealth withstood,
Shall cease : through sorrow unity shall rise —
There shall Australia come to Nationhood.
That the war had already welded Aus-
tralia into a nation is the text of one of
the letters of Adrian Consett Stephen.
When the news reached him in France
that his country had voted against con-
scription he was disappointed, and, writing
home, insisted that the soldiers had only
voted against it because they shrank from
forcing an unwilling mate to join them in
that hell, or because they did not want
the sort of man who would not come
willingly. c Australians don't seem to
realise their own significance, that each
Adrian Consett Stephen 259
one of them is a guardian of a name, and
of a nationhood that has suddenly been
revealed to the world. More than that —
Australia has at last found a soul — there
is no denying that — no denying that before
the war we were the most soulless people
alive, as a nation. . . . The life of a
man is as nothing compared to the con-
tinuity of a nation, to the greatness of its
soul.'
That is a great saying, but he meant it,
and sealed it with his blood. If Adrian
Stephen wrote no poetry — and I am not
sure that he did not — it was not because
he had none in him. An Australian in
the R.F.A., and Four Plays, published
since his death by W. C. Penfold, of
Sydney, and by the Australian Book Com-
pany in London, contain his letters home,
with the diary he kept at the front, and
the plays he wrote between twenty and
twenty-three, two of which were produced,
and all of which show that he had the
true dramatic instinct, and gifts of satirical
humour and characterisation that justify
one of his critics in the opinion that had
260 For Remembrance
he lived he would have enriched ' the
literature of Australia on its dramatic
side.'
Born in 1892, the second son of Mr.
Consett Stephen, of the firm of Stephen,
Jaques and Stephen, Sydney, Solicitors,
he graduated B.A. of Sydney University
in 1913, and obtained his LL.B. in 1915.
He was to have been called to the Bar,
but decided that just then his place was
in the Army, and joined the R.F.A. as a
2nd Lieutenant. After six weeks' training
in England, he was sent to France, and
his life there, and the general life of the
soldier in the trenches, in raids, in pitched
battle and behind the lines, are admirably
pictured in his letters, with a realism that
is salted with humour and an extraordin-
ary and apparently unstudied skill in de-
scription. They are less introspective than
the letters of Vernede, or Parry, or Chapin ;
he seldom pauses to analyse his own
sensations, but is more concerned to
relate incidents and events that are passing
around him, and relates them with such
dramatic forcefulness that you can see
Adrian Consett Stephen 261
them happening again before you as you
read. He was awarded the Croix de
Guerre, with palm, for distinguished
bravery in the Somme fighting, and the
Military Cross for his cool courage and
resourcefulness in temporary command of
his Battery during the terrific fight for
Passchendaele Ridge. He brings the whole
thing home to you not only by describing
the big scenes, but by his skill in touching
in little everyday details for a setting
to his more momentous experiences, as
thus :
' French peasants herded their cows in
the field, or piled up their haystacks, old
women for the most part, slaving like
niggers, women with wrinkled eagle faces —
a regular stage type. The peasants are
dull machines, and seem to care little for
the war. But one has only to speak to
them about the Boches and their voices
sharpen like a razor and one reads in their
eyes something of the soul of France.'
' Last Friday the gramophone arrived.
What excitement ! How I roared at
feeble jokes. It was strange to sit in
262 For Remembrance
one's dug-out listening to bright music,
whilst shells wailed overhead. Never,
perhaps, had the war appeared more ugly.'
1 At 2 a.m. we went down the trench as
arranged, and sat with the men in their
dug-out. They drank a cup of tea, and
then drew lots as to who should share my
flask with me. I was armed, let me add,
with a flask and a fat cigar. Thus nowa-
days do we go to war ! The Infantry
went over the parapet at about 2 a.m.
whilst we waited, waited. The password
was " How 's your father ? " Answer, " All
right ! " At 4 a.m. our guns opened,
roaring continuously for half an hour. At
about 5 we received orders to fire, and
darted down to our guns. The Germans
were retaliating in a desultory fashion.
We fired fifteen rounds from each gun in
as many minutes. The flash was enormous
and lit up the whole trench, so that the
men staggering under the bombs and
bending over the strange -looking weapon
might have been demons in a corner of
Inferno.' ' It snows — all the morning it
has snowed ' (February 1916). ' Many
Adrian Consett Stephen 263
gaping holes and broken walls have been
smoothed and beautified. The snow has
covered and conquered everything — except
the mud. King Mud still reigns supreme,
coiling his clammy self two feet deep along
the trenches. Mud ! Mud that clings
like a burr, that has to be pushed away
with your legs before you can walk, mud
that squelches and squeals as you tread
on it, and gurgles and chuckles as you lift
your heavy swollen boot out of its em-
brace. Snow and mud ! ' ' One of our
best servants has been killed, and my
sergeant has died of wounds. I have just
written to his wife. At such times one
feels sick and weary of this world silliness,
this mud and death called war. There are
times when the greatest victory seems
small compared to the grief in one little
home.'
To understand all the inner significance
of the poetry of the war you must read
the prose of it ; such letters as Stephen's
are the complement of much of the verse
that the poets have written, and not in-
frequently they are as fine, in feeling and
264 For Remembrance
in phrase, as the poems they involuntarily
interpret.
One of the first of Canada's soldier poets
to fall in the war was Sergeant Frank
Brown, and one of the last was Lieutenant-
Colonel John McCrae. Frank Brown, a
sergeant of the ' Princess Pat's Regiment,'
was the son of an Ontario clergyman, and
had been a schoolmaster in the Quebec
district. But he had spent some of his
life before that in Western Canada and
was a good horseman and an expert shot.
He crossed to France with the first draft
of his regiment, and was shot at St. Eloi,
in February 1915, on his first day in the
trenches. His homely, hearty, soldierly
rhymes, with their glowing loyalty to the
Empire, a ready sense of the humours and
the hardships of campaigning, and the
glory of fighting against tyranny and
wrong, are the simplest, clearest expression
of his native courage and honour and
sterling manhood. There is in ' The Call '
and ' The Convoy ' the heart-beat of that
love of her sons for the homeland which
stirred all Canada, as it had stirred all
Frank Brown 265
Australia and New Zealand, when the
war-drums began to beat ; he sketches the
types of men who were his brothers-in-
arms in ' Fall In,' ' The Grouch,' and
' Opened by the Censor ' ; and ' Glory '
is his rugged song of the firing line and
of how
For every deed rewarded,
For every laurel crown,
Unknown, unsung, forgotten,
A hundred lives go down.
And it was even so that his own life went
down when by his active zeal (on his one
day in the trenches ' he fired nearly eighty
rounds at the enemy, probably as much
as the rest of the company put together ')
he drew upon himself the bullet of a
German sniper. ' It is one of the sad
things of this war,' wrote Captain Talbot
M. Papineau to Sergeant Brown's father,
4 that those who will have done most and
sacrificed most to bring it to a successful
conclusion will not be there to receive
their earthly reward nor share the glory
of the achievement.'
That might have been said, too, of
266 For Remembrance
Colonel John McCrae, who has written
his name imperishably in Canada's military
and literary annals. He had studied and
practised medicine for twenty years, and
between serving as resident house officer
and later as physician at various hospitals,
went to South Africa in 1900 and fought
throughout the Boer war as a private in
the Canadian contingent. At the out-
break of the war with Germany he was on
a visit to England, and wrote home saying
he had immediately cabled to Ottawa that
' I am available either as combatant or
medical if they need me. I do not go into
it very light-heartedly, but I think it is
up to me.' In the general upheaval and
uncertainty of those days there was some
little delay in accepting his offer, but
presently he had a cable from Colonel
Morrison provisionally appointing him
surgeon to the 1st Brigade Artillery ; and
sailed for Canada on the 28th August, and
within a few weeks was at the front.
The letters in McCrae 's posthumous
volume, In Flanders Fields, give most
vivid realistic impressions of his life under
John McCrae 267
fire, especially of the grim righting in that
terrible second battle of Ypres, which will
always be remembered as one of the most
splendid chapters in the great story of
Canada's armies. And an essay by Sir
Andrew Macphail, in the same book,
chronicles the life and work of McCrae,
and elaborates an intimate and admirable
full-length character study of the man.
Always a hard worker, he established a
sound reputation in medicine and natural
science between 1900 and 1914, but amid
his multifarious activities retained his
delight in social life and found time to
make many friends, who loved as much
as they honoured him. He wrote largely
on medical subjects ; apart from these
articles, and his verse, letters and diaries,
he left few writings and, as Sir Andrew
frankly admits, ' in these there is nothing
remarkable by reason of thought or ex-
pression. He could not write prose. Fine
as was his ear for verse he could not pro-
duce the finer rhythm of prose, which
comes from the fall of proper words in
proper sequence. He did not scrutinise
268 For Remembrance
words to discover their first and fresh
meaning. He wrote in phrases, and used
words at second-hand as the journalists
do.' That in him, as in so many other of
its poets, the war wakened new powers of
thought and utterance is clear from a
comparison of his earlier verses with the
poems he wrote under its influence.
Before the war he had looked younger
than his years ; but when he had endured
and suffered and seen others suffer two
years of life in the trenches, he aged so and
seemed so old and worn that a nurse who
had known him well for long past, meeting
him after an interval, did not recognise
him. ' If I were asked to state briefly the
impression of him which remains with me
most firmly,' writes Sir Andrew, ' I should
say it was of continuous laughter. That
is not true, of course, for in repose his face
was heavy, his countenance more than
ruddy, it was even of a choleric cast, and
at times almost livid, especially when he
was recovering from one of those attacks
of asthma from which he habitually
suffered. But his smile was his own, and
John McCrae 269
it was ineffable. It filled the eyes and
illuminated the face. It was the smile of
sheer fun, of pure gaiety, of sincere play-
fulness, innocent of irony ; with a tinge
of sarcasm — never. When he allowed him-
self to speak of meanness in the profession,
of dishonesty in men, of evil in the world,
his face became formidable. The glow of
his countenance deepened ; his words were
bitter, and the tones harsh. But the
indignation would not last. The smile
would come back. The effect was spoiled.
Every one laughed with him. After his
experience at the front the old gaiety never
returned.'
He went into the war ' with no illusions,'
but strong in a profound sense of duty and
the certainty that he was doing the right
thing for the right cause. ' On the eve
of the battle of Ypres,' he wrote to his
mother, ' I was indebted to you for a
letter which said "take good care of my
son Jack, but I would not have you un-
mindful that, sometimes, when we save
we lose." I have that last happy phrase
to thank. Often when I had to go out
270 For Remembrance
over the areas that were being shelled, it
came to my mind. I would shoulder the
box and "go to it."' The tragic misery
of war could not shake his dogged resolve
though it could rob him of his youth and
all his gaiety and reduce him almost to
despair. ' The truth is : he felt that he
and all had failed, and that the torch was
thrown from failing hands. We have
heard much of the suffering, the misery,
the cold, the wet, the gloom of those first
three winters ; but no tongue has yet
uttered the inner misery of heart that was
bred of those three years of failure to
break the enemy's force.'
It was with some dark forefeeling of
this mood upon him that, in April 1915,
with the second titanic battle of Ypres
raging around him, ' the enemy in full cry
of victory,' and Paris and the Channel
ports apparently doomed, he wrote ' In
Flanders Fields ' :
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place ; and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
John McCrae 271
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe :
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch ; be yours to lift it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
4 This poem,' writes General Morrison,
' was literally born of fire and blood during
the hottest phase of the second battle of
Ypres. My headquarters were in a trench
at the top of the bank of the Ypres Canal,
and John had his dressing station in a
hole dug in the foot of the bank,' and there,
as he himself said, he wrote the poem ' to
pass away the time between the arrival of
batches of wounded.' He sent it to Punch,
enclosing a stamped envelope for its
possible return ; but Punch knew better
than to return it, and swiftly after its
appearance there it flashed like a running
fire across the world ; was reprinted in
innumerable papers, recited from plat-
forms and at recruiting meetings ; and be-
came ' the poem of the army ' in Flanders,
/
272 For Remembrance
where the soldiers soon had it by heart.
It was a cry from the dead that reached
the hearts of men and everywhere stiffened
the determination not to break faith with
those who had died but to take up the
torch they had dropped and carry it, at
all costs, through the long night into the
day of victory. Not a great poem, yet
no poem of the war made a more poignant
or more powerful appeal to the minds and
imaginations of the British and American
peoples.
But even when the prolonged stress had
told upon him at last, and he was weary
and seemed despondent, McCrae did not
despair nor doubt of the ultimate issue ;
behind his settled sadness was the dogged
will and calm confidence that breathes
through ' The Anxious Dead,' which he
wrote in 1917, less than a year before his
health was irrevocably shattered and he
laid down his life :
O guns, fall silent till the dead men hear
Above their heads the legions pressing on :
(These fought their fight in time of bitter fear,
And died not knowing how the day had gone).
Photo by Wykeham.
FRANCIS ST. VINCENT MORRIS.
LIEUT.. SRD SHERWOOD FORESTERS (ATTACHED R.F.C.).
William Hamilton 273
O flashing muzzles, pause, and let them see
The coming dawn that streaks the sky afar ;
Then let your mighty chorus witness be
To them, and Caesar, that we still make war.
Tell them, O guns, that we have heard their call,
That we have sworn, and will not turn aside,
That we will onward till we win or fall,
That we will keep the faith for which they died.
Bid them be patient, and some day, anon,
They shall feel earth enwrapt in silence deep ;
Shall greet, in wonderment, the quiet dawn,
And in content may turn them to their sleep.
His hope has been realised, but he was
not to witness its fulfilment ; he died of
pneumonia on the 28th January 1918, and
is buried at Wimereux.
William Hamilton was a South African
who, like the Australian Geoffrey Wall,
came over to enlist in England. He was
a Lecturer in Philosophy at University
College, Cape Town, and while training
here, in 1916, for the Machine Gun Guards,
in which he took a commission, he collected
for publication the verses that are bound
up in his Modern Poems. A preface dated
from Victoria Barracks, Windsor, mentions
that most of the poems ' were written in
s
274 For Remembrance
barracks in the intervals between parades.'
There is less of the martial strain in his
verse, perhaps, than in that of any other
poet-soldier of the British overseas domin-
ions, but not less of the patriotic and
humanitarian ardour that drew us and
our scattered kindred together into the
great struggle. His attitude towards war
is essentially the modern attitude :
God ! It is inconceivable that man,
Made in Thine image, should thus desecrate
The Temple Thou hast built,
is the recurring burden of his series of
war sonnets. Looking on the sleepy hills
and the peace of the wide landscape, he
feels
It is incredible that this should be
Ploughed by the lethal weapons of the Hun :
Sown with the bodies of the sons of men —
The sons of England — and that Liberty
Is still so ill-defined by thinkers' pen
That it must yet be bought by battles won !
We could not sacrifice honour and rest in
peace, is his cry, but he has faith in the
conception of a larger Patriotism when the
nations shall be one brotherhood :
William Hamilton 275
It is for England that we take up arms
And, with the name of England on our lips,
Go forth in serried multitudes to die,
yet, though he freely offers up his life on
that altar, he cannot but marvel that in
these days of enlightenment such a wasteful
sacrifice should be necessary, and thinking
how
Our history is luminous with names
Of those who might have found some other path
To greatness,
he asks,
Is there no way but this to settle claims
That rise when nations climb to high estate ?
and far from hoping that War can end
War sees that ' the end of War is War '
again. He is no pessimist, but, not afraid
to face the stern truth, has no inclination
to deceive himself with pleasant illusions.
He can believe that a new and wiser
spirit will enter into all mankind, putting
an end to the foolish, crude injustices and
barbarities that shame our civilisation
and
Turning the world all golden like the sun
— to borrow a phrase from one of his peace
276 For Remembrance
poems, i The Amateur ' — but that time
is not now, and, meanwhile, he faces the
facts as he finds them. This facing of
facts leads him to an almost brutal frank-
ness in his treatment of the girl and her
man whom he sees dining together in a
cheap restaurant and sketches with a
merciless, bizarre realism in ' Apollo in
Soho ' ; but there is tenderness as well as
truth in ' Retrospect ' and ' The Parting,'
and there is the love and longing a man
has for the home he has left in ' The Song of
an Exile,' written while he was in England :
I have seen the Cliffs of Dover,
And the White Horse on the Hill ;
I have walked the lanes, a rover ;
I have dreamed beside the rill ;
I have known the fields awaking
To the gentle touch of Spring,
The joy of morning breaking,
And the peace your twilights bring.
But I long for a sight of the pines, and the blue shadows
under ;
For the sweet-smelling gums, and the throbbing of
African air ;
For the sun and the sand, and the sound of the surf's
ceaseless thunder,
The height, and the breadth, and the depth, and the
nakedness there. . . .
William Hamilton 277
I have listened in the gloaming
To your poets' tales of old ;
I know when I am roaming
That I walk on hallowed mould.
I have lived and fought beside you,
And I trow your hearts are steel ;
That the nations who deride you
Shall, like dogs, be brought to heel.
But I pine for the roar of the lion on the edge of the
clearing ;
The rustle of grass snake ; the bird's flashing wing
in the heath ;
For the sun-shrivelled peaks of the mountains to blue
heaven rearing ;
The limitless outlook, the space, and the freedom
beneath.
His book was not published till after
he had gone to the front, and a copy of it
reached him only a few days before he was
killed in action there, in France.
Maybe because they both saw the truth
of war too starkly to idealise it at all, I
find myself linking William Hamilton in
my mind with our English soldier poet
Henry Simpson ; and setting down the
records in this chapter of one South
African soldier, of a few from Canada,
Australia, America, and inevitably leaving
so many unnamed, one's thoughts turn
278 For Remembrance
involuntarily to some lines from one of
Simpson's poems, 'If It Should Chance ,'
that might have been written for so many
of the unremembered thousands who have
fallen in battle :
If it should chance that I be cleansed and crowned
With sacrifice and agony and blood,
And reach the quiet haven of Death's arms,
Nobly companioned of that brotherhood
Of common men who died and laughed the while,
And so made shine a flame that cannot die,
But flares a glorious beacon down the years —
If it should happen thus, some one may come
And, poring over dusty lists, may light
Upon my long-forgotten name and, musing,
May say a little sadly — even now
Almost forgetting why he should be sad —
May say, ' And he died young,' and then forget. . . .
And because that must be true of the vast
majority, one is the happier that these at
least will be held longer in remembrance
who could give words to their thoughts
and emotions, which were the thoughts
and emotions also of their comrades who
died and made no sign, and have put
their hearts and minds into songs that are
not so perishable as the singer.
IX
The clamorous guns by day and night
Toss echoes to and fro,
White-winged above the dusty fight
The ranging war-hawks go,
And stout King Richard's proud array
Is but a shining tale,
But English courage goes as gay
In khaki as in mail.
Lieut. A. L. Jenkins, Crusaders.
I am not attempting anything of criticism
here ; I am attempting nothing more
than to show in their own words what was
in their hearts and minds when these men
of peace, these civilians in grain, made
soldiers of themselves under stress of
necessity, and what was the real object of
their fighting. Going about their every-
day business in the trenches or in the
hurly-burly of conflict, they were like the
rest of that incomparable fellowship of our
fighting men who, as Lieutenant Coningsby
Dawson has it in his Khaki Courage, ' wear
their crown of thorns as if it were a
cap and bells ' ; but behind the scenes,
279
280 For Remembrance
waiting for their cues to go on again, they
opened their inmost thoughts in these
verses of theirs, laid bare their ideals and
the secret sources of their strength. With-
out some compelling cause which they
could defend with clean consciences, some
appeal to what was highest and most
chivalrous in them, it is obvious in all
they have written that they were not men
who could have brought themselves to
turn aside from the arts of peace to master
the black art of war.
There are lyrics in St. Vincent Morris's
little book that are thoughtful, fanciful,
touched with religious fervour, and more
carefully finished than his sonnet, ' The
Eleventh Hour,' but there is nothing more
simply earnest or more self - revealing.
He was the son of Canon Morris, of
Ashbourne, Derbyshire. When the war
came he was only eighteen, too young
for the Army, and the feeling that
fretted him while he waited and made
him glad to take up his duty as soon as
he was old enough, finds an outlet in
that sonnet :
Photo by Keoiih Bros.
T. M. KETTLE.
LIEUT., DUBLIN FUSILIERS.
St. Vincent Morn's 281
Is this to live ? — to cower and stand aside
While others fight and perish day by day ?
To see my loved ones slaughtered, and to say :
* Bravo ! bravo ! how nobly you have died ! '
Is this to love ? — to heed my friends no more,
But watch them perish in a foreign land
Unheeded, and to give no helping hand,
But smile, and say, ' How terrible is war ! '
Nay, this is not to love, nor this to live !
I will go forth ; I hold no more aloof ;
And I will give all that I have to give,
And leave the refuge of my father's roof.
Then, if I live, no man shall say, think I,
' He lives, because he did not dare to die ! '
He left Brighton College in the summer of
1915 and, on 7th August, was gazetted to
the 3rd Battalion of the Sherwood
Foresters. ' Finding that his chance of
getting across to France seemed remote,'
says the memoir in his book, l he trans-
ferred in the year following to the Royal
Flying Corps. In the spring of 1917 he
crossed to France. On 10th April his
machine was brought down b}^ a blizzard
at Vimy Ridge. His right leg and left
thigh were fractured, and he sustained
several cuts about the head.' On 29th
April he died of his wounds.
282 For Remembrance
A yet more irresistible call to action
than Morris's chivalrous love of comrades
was the martyrdom of Belgium. Flight
Sub-Lieutenant Frank Lewis was a boy
of nineteen when he was killed in France
in an air battle. The call that drew him
out to France is in the second of two
sonnets on ' Belgium, 1914 ' that he wrote
in the first months of the war, while he
was still at Marlborough :
There came a voice from out the darkness crying —
A pleading voice, the voice of one in thrall :
' Come, ye who pass- — oh, heed you not my sighing ?
Come and deliver ! Hear, oh, hear my call !
For when the invader stood before my gate
Demanding passage through with haughty tone,
A voice cried loud, " Wilt thou endure this fate ?
Better have death than live when honour's flown ! "
And so my children now lie slain by him
I had not wronged ; with strife my land is riven ;
Dishonoured here I lie with fettered limb,
To desecration all my shrines are given,
And nought remains but bondage drear and grim —
God ! Is there any justice under heaven ? '
This was the cry, too, that Reginald
Freston heard and could not but answer :
Suppose, as some have done, I had made excuse,
I, who am poor,
T. M. Kettle 283
Suppose I had sought seclusion in the dim far lands
of exile,
Over the leagues of foam ;
And there in warmth and safety, far from the din
and roar,
Had built me another home !
Surely, had I done this, in the dark still hours of
night,
I should have woke from sleep, with my soul in
great affright,
Hearing the cry of innocent blood
From over the Eastern wave,
Voices of little children
That I could but would not save.
But beyond and above even pity for
the foully slaughtered children and women
of Belgium rose the stronger, holier call
to save the sanctuaries of civilisation from
the destroyer, and so shatter his power
for destruction that the peace of the world
and the rights of the weak should never
go in fear of it again — a call that rings like
a tocsin in some of the noblest poetry of
the war.
Though the delightfully frivolous and
satirical things in the Poems and Parodies
of Professor Kettle justify the prefatory
description of him as ' a genial cynic,'
what the preface says further of his
284 For Remembrance
personal charm and his love of humanity
are as amply justified in the dedicatory
sonnet to his wife :
Faith lasts ? Nay, since I knew your yielded eyes,
I am content with sight ... of paradise —
in the impassioned appeal c To Young
Ireland ' ; in the subdued pathos of the
lines * On Leaving Ireland ; July 14,
1916,' when in the glow of the sunset he
could think only of bayonet flash and bugle
call,
And knew that even I shall fall on sleep.
He notes at the head of these lines that
' the pathos of departure is indubitable,'
and adds a reference to his essay " On
Saying Good-Bye.' If you turn to that
essay in The Day's Burden these are its
closing words : fc " However amusing the
comedy may have been," wrote Pascal,
" there is always blood in the fifth act.
They scatter a little dust on your face ;
and then all is over for ever." Blood there
may be, but blood does not necessarily
mean tragedy. The wisdom of humility
bids us pray that in that fifth act we may
T. M. Kettle 285
have good lines and a timely exit.' Well,
he had a brave ending to his fifth act and
fell in action, and for the good lines,
there could have been none better than
his own ' To My Daughter Betty,' written
c on the field, before Guillemont, Somme,
September 4, 1916,' telling her that when
she grows up she may ask why he aban-
doned her to dice with death :
And oh ! they '11 give you rhyme
And reason : some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh with mud for couch and
floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scriptures of the poor.
That was the great cause he had at heart,
and he acclaims it again in his ' Song of
the Irish Armies,' which in reality is the
song of all our armies, old and new. Sing
the old soldiers :
. . . Not for this did our fathers fall,
That truth and pity and love and all
Should break in dust at a trumpet call,
Yea, all things clean and old.
286 For Remembrance
Not to this had we sacrificed :
To sit at the last where the players diced
With blood-hot hands for the robes of Christ,
And snatch at the Devil's gold.
Sing the new soldiers :
To Odin's challenge we cried Amen !
We stayed the plough and laid by the pen,
And we shouldered our guns like gentlemen,
That the wiser weak should hold. . . .
Time for the plough when the sword has won ;
The loom will wait on the crashing gun,
And the hands of Peace drop benison
When the task of death is through.
Sing the old and new soldiers in unison :
Then lift the flag of the last Crusade !
And fill the ranks of the last Brigade !
March on to the fields where the world 's remade,
And the Ancient Dreams come true !
A typical new marching song, to stand
by that, is the powerful protest and appeal,
4 Before the Assault,' into which R. E.
Vernede has distilled the innermost soul
and purpose of the Allied Armies :
If through this roar o' guns one prayer may reach
Thee,
Lord of all Life, whose mercies never sleep,
Not in our time, not now, Lord, we beseech Thee
To grant us peace. The sword has bit too deep.
R. E. Vernbde 287
We may not rest. We hear the wail of mothers
Mourning the sons who fill some nameless grave :
Past us, in dreams, the ghosts march of our brothers
Who were most valiant . . . whom we could not
save. . . .
We see all fair things fouled — homes Love's hands
builded
Shattered to dust beside their withered vines,
Shattered the towers that once Thy sunsets gilded,
And Christ struck yet again within His shrines. . . .
We have failed — we have been more weak than
these betrayers —
In strength or in faith we have failed ; our pride
was vain.
How can we rest who have not slain the slayers ?
What peace for us who have seen Thy children
slain ?
Hark, the roar grows . . . the thunders reawaken —
We ask one thing, Lord, only one thing now :
Hearts high as theirs who went to death unshaken,
Courage like theirs to make and keep their vow :
To stay not till those hosts whom mercies harden,
Who know no glory save of sword and fire,
Find in our fire the splendour of Thy pardon,
Meet from our steel the mercy they desire. . . .
Then to our children there shall be no handing
Of fates so vain — of passions so abhorred. . . .
But Peace . . . the Peace which passeth under-
standing. . . .
Not in our time . . . but in their time, O Lord.
Vernede had made a name as a writer
288 For Remembrance
of fiction and was in his fortieth year when
the war burst upon us. He had been
educated at St. Paul's School, and at
Oxford ; and four years after leaving
Oxford was, in 1902, married to Miss Carol
Howard Fry, and was settled in Hertford-
shire, happy in his work and the growth
of his literary reputation, when the fatal
August 1914 changed everything. Within
a month, though he was well beyond
military age, he enlisted in the Public
Schools Battalion of the 19th Royal
Fusiliers as a private. ' He was/ says Mr.
Edmund Gosse, in an introduction to
Vernede's War Poems, t without any pre-
dilection for military matters and without
any leaning to what are called " Jingo "
views. But when once the problem of the
attack of Germany on the democracy of the
world was patent to him, he did not
hesitate for a moment.' His profound
conviction of the Tightness of the cause for
which he was to lay down his life runs like
a glowing thread through much of his
poetry. The selfless aspiration he voices
in 4 A Petition ' is
Photo by Elliott & Fry.
R. E. VERNEDE.
LIEUT., RIFLE BRIGADE.
R. E. Vernbde 289
That now when envious foes would spoil thy
splendour,
Unversed in arms, a dreamer such as I
May in thy ranks be deemed not all unworthy,
England, for thee to die.
And he is as fearless and high-hearted in
the touching lines ' To C. H. V.' :
What shall I bring to you, wife of mine,
When I come back from the war ? . . .
Little you 'd care what I laid at your feet,
Ribbon or crest or shawl —
What if I bring you nothing, Sweet,
Nor maybe come back at all ?
Ah, but you '11 know, Brave Heart, you '11 know
Two things I '11 have kept to send :
Mine honour, for which you bade me go,
And my love — my love to the end.
He went to France as a lieutenant of
the 3rd Rifle Brigade ; was wounded in
September 1916, was invalided home for a
while, but had returned to the front by the
end of the year. Scattered through the
Letters to his Wife are his views on the
war, his unbounded admiration of the
cheerfulness and courage of his men, his
deep resentment of the crimes of Germany,
and his conviction that there could be no
safety for the world and no peace till the
T
290 For Remembrance
Allies had fought on to victory. Here
from various letters are some of the
things he wrote : ' I still think it right
that war should be damnable, but I wish
everybody could have an idea of how
beastly it can be. . . . The papers are so
complaisant over every little success that
they are almost bound to be equally
downhearted over every failure — don't
believe them. Only believe that we shall
win in the end. . . . The Germans seem
to have been behaving abominably ; that
is in keeping with their traditions appar-
ently, but it makes me feel that they
won't realise the war till they have had
their own houses deliberately blown up
by a number of insulting fiends. Losing
colonies or navies doesn't affect the in-
dividuals at all closely, and though they
mayn't have the guilt of their government,
I think they have to bear the punishment
of the crimes they commit to order.' He
hopes that when the war is past ' people
won't altogether forget it in our generation.
That 's what I wanted to say in the verses
I began about —
R. E. Vernbde 291
Not in our time, O Lord, we now beseech Thee
To grant us peace — the sword has bit too deep —
but never got on with. What I mean is
that for us there can be no real forgetting.
We have seen too much of it, known too
many people's sorrow, felt it too much,
to return to an existence in which it has
no part.' He finishes a letter dated
8th April 1917 : ' I think it will be
summer soon, and perhaps the war will
end this year and I shall see my Pretty
One again.' Next day he fell mortally
wounded, leading an attack on Havricourt
Wood.
In easier times we have sorrowed over
the untimely fate of the young poet who
has died with all his promise unfulfilled.
Here is not merely one such, but a great
and goodly company of poets, and in face
of a tragedy so immeasurable, a loss so
utterly beyond reckoning, words become
idle and meaningless. It is something,
it is much, to all those whose sons, hus-
bands, brothers, lovers they were that
their countrv shall hold them for ever
in grateful remembrance, something that
292 For Remembrance
these songs of theirs shall live and their
names be written imperishably in the
records of these terrible years ; but the
greater consolation has been written by
themselves — by Lieutenant Cyril Winter-
botham, in ' The Cross of Wood ' :
God be with you and us who go our way
And leave you dead upon the ground you won ;
For you at last the long fatigue is done,
The hard march ended ; you have rest to-day.
You were our friends, with you we watched the
dawn
Gleam through the rain of the long winter night,
With you we laboured till the morning light
Broke on the village, shell-destroyed and torn.
Not now for you the glorious return
To steep Stroud valleys, to the Severn leas
By Tewkesbury and Gloucester, or the trees
Of Cheltenham under high Cotswold stern.
For you no medals such as others wear —
A cross of bronze for those approved brave —
To you is given, above a shallow grave,
The Wooden Cross that marks your resting there.
Rest you content, more honourable far
Than all the Orders is the Cross of Wood,
The symbol of self-sacrifice that stood
Bearing the God whose brethren you are.
— and it has been written by Lieutenant
St. Vincent Morris 293
St. Vincent Morris in the poem to a friend,
whose home the war has left desolate,
bidding her be comforted :
Still do you grieve, in that your loved one lies
Beneath some lonely, unforgotten grave. . . .
Like an immortal offering sacrificed ?
Because he died that others might not die ?
And yet, and yet,
Even though sorrow Love may not forget,
Such was the death of Christ.
Comfort, sad heart ! Beyond that little grave
Rests an immortal soul in God's repose :
' Others He saved, Himself He could not save,'
This was the task he chose.
Your love is crucified on that small cross,
That lonely Sentinel where he has trod,
Leaving thereon all trace of grief and loss.
And then your love
Will rise to find him where he waits above
Before the throne of God.
X
But God grant your dear England
A strength that shall not cease
Till she have won for all the earth
From ruthless men release,
And made supreme upon her
Mercy and Truth and Honour
Is this the thing you died for?
O brothers, sleep in peace.
Lieut. R. E. Vernede, To Our Fallen.
If one may say so without seeming boastful
I sometimes wonder whether, just now,
there are not too many apologists among
us — too many well-meaning persons who
paint our national past in darker colours
than belong to it and write as if the war
had lifted us to heights we had not trodden
before ? War cannot endow a nation with
qualities it does not already possess ; it is
merely the acid which tests the metal and
proves it to be either gold or a base
imitation. At the risk of repeating myself,
I want to emphasise that the minds and
souls of the fifty-four soldier poets whose
work we have been considering — and they
294
For Remembrance 295
and their many living peers have spoken
for the general mind and soul of our
people — were not formed on the battlefield ;
their opinions, ideals, aspirations were
engendered in the home atmosphere during
years of peace. We and our Allies, and
Germany and her Allies, remained in
war what racial instincts, long traditions,
and peace-time training had naturally
made of us all. The war did not make us
or them one thing or the other ; it did
no more than give those who went into it
opportunity to show whether they were
beast or human, and I, for one, am not
ashamed of the witness it has borne to
the inherent character of my country-
men.
German professors, inflated with envy
and a ridiculous pride in that German
culture which has culminated in poison-
gas, piracy, and the murder of civilians,
have denounced us as land-grabbers and
bloodthirsty ; and no answer to that
charge seems necessary beyond a com-
parison of the widely different ways in
which the British and German empires
296 For Remembrance
have been built. Fifty years ago Prussia
resolved to transform itself into a great
empire. To this end, it picked a quarrel
with its neighbour Austria and defeated
her. Then it attacked its small neighbour
Denmark, broke her, and stole one of her
provinces. Then it brought about a war
with France, crushed her and stole two
provinces from her. Then, having menaced
or persuaded the weaker German states
into combining with it, it settled down to
forty years of subtle, strenuous preparation
on a gigantic scale with the avowed object
of seizing Belgium, and more of France,
and annexing divers other lands by
murderous, irresistible might and so
achieving a mammoth empire and world
domination. The fruit of its labour is an
empire that has sprung up like the un-
wholesome fungus-growth of a night, and
the signs are that it will prove as transitory
as any toadstool.
Never at any period of her history has
Britain developed in this furtive and
obscene fashion. Our empire is not the
realisation of any deliberate plan ; it has
For Remembrance 297
come into being gradually and by accident
rather than by design ; it has grown slowly
and healthfully through the centuries as
an oak grows, and its strength and its
justification are in that. Our sons took
their lives in their hands and went exploring
on their own account into savage regions
and settled down and colonised the waste
places of the earth ; our merchant adven-
turers sailed into unknown parts to do
business among strange races and establish
markets where none had been before.
They had little enough encouragement
and often the most crass discouragement
from their own government, which was
so far from dreaming of conquest that not
infrequently it extended its protection to
its wandering children with reluctance,
and formally took over the control of this or
that uncivilised land not to colonise it,
but because its subjects had colonised it
already. Germany's wise professors even
sneered at our inefficiency as empire-
builders, because we had gone about it so
unscientifically and did not really govern
our colonies ; we had not efficiently
298 For Remembrance
riveted them to us as with iron bands ;
we did not rule them, but left them to
rule themselves. If ever we were in danger
they would not take the risk of coming
to our assistance, and, inept, incompetent
rulers as we are, we could not compel them
to do so — they would gladly seize upon our
necessity as a chance to cut themselves
free of us altogether and leave us to our
fate. So said the German professors,
and the war has revealed the measure
of their knowledge. No sooner were we
threatened than our kindred overseas
were by our side, ready to stand or to
fall with us.
Not because of our perfections. We
know that, and thev know it. We have
made mistakes, we have done many wrongs,
we have been foolish and faulty in our
time, as fallible human creatures were
bound to be. Our own sons in the home-
land, ' who,' as Noel Hodgson says of his
fallen comrades :
Who loving as none other
The land that is their mother,
Unfalteringly renounced her
Because they loved her so —
Wilfred Campbell 299
did no more, maybe, than the sons of any
land might do, but they did it with an
eagerness and a joy in the self-sacrifice
that could not have been possible to them
had they been dying for a land that was
all unworthy of them. Nor was it solely
because they were more or less distantly
of our blood that Canada, Australasia,
South Africa, and the rest of our scattered
commonwealth remained so loyal to us.
It touches us with pride and yet humbles
us to think we can glimpse something
of Canada's thought and feeling towards
' Britain ' in these glowing lines by one of
Canada's poets, Wilfred Campbell, who
has died since the war moved his nation
to show that his were no empty words :
Great patient Titan, 'neath thy wearying load
Of modern statecraft, human helpfulness ;
To whom do come earth's weak in their distress
To crave thine arm to avert the oppressor's goad :
Thou sovereignty within thine isled abode,
Hated and feared, where thou wouldst only bless,
By fools who dream thine iron mightiness
Will crumble in ruin across the world's wide road.
Though scattered thy sons o'er leagues of empire's
rim,
Alien, remote, by severing wind and tide ;
300 For Remembrance
Yet every Briton who knows thy blood in him
In that dread hour will marshal to thy side ;
And if thou crumbiest earth's whole frame will
groan.
God help this world, thou wilt not sink alone !
The innermost secret of that faith in
Britain and that spontaneous loyalty to
her — the real reason why our kindred,
who are separated from us and have
shaped themselves into new, independent
nations, feel that Britain is still worth
fighting and dying for is enshrined again,
I think, in a poem by an Australian, John
Farrel, who has been dead these fourteen
years. He and his countrymen know the
worst of us, but they know the best of us
too, and believe that the best more than
atones for the worst. No enemy has
indicted us more scathingly than he, in his
' Australia to England.' He does not
forget that we have lapsed into evil,
have been guilty of sins of greed, cruelty,
hypocrisy ; that
Some hands you taught to pray to Christ
Have prayed His curse to rest on you —
yet, when he has reckoned up all our
John Farrel 301
grievous errors, he can find it in his heart
to add :
But praise to you and more than praise
And thankfulness for some things done,
And blessedness and length of days
As long as earth shall last, or sun !
You first among the peoples spoke
Sharp words and angry questionings
Which burst the bonds and shed the yoke
That made your men the slaves of kings !
You set and showed the whole world's school
The lesson it shall surely read,
That each one ruled has right to rule —
The alphabet of Freedom's creed,
Which slowly wins its proselytes
And makes uneasy many a throne :
You taught them all to prate of Rights
In language growing like your own.
And now your holiest and best
And wisest dream of such a tie
As, holding hearts from East to West,
Shall strengthen while the years go by ;
And of a time when every man
For every fellow-man will do
His kindliest, working by the plan
God set him. May the dream come
true !
And greater dreams ! O Englishmen,
Be sure the safest time of all
For even the mightiest State is when
Not even the least desires its fall !
302 For Remembrance
Make England stand supreme for aye
Because supreme for peace and good,
Warned well by wrecks of yesterday
That strongest feet may slip in blood !
Here, then, is why the men of the free
nations of Greater Britain cast in their lot
with ours when the Day came — because
though we have stumbled too often
and lost the way, we have still struggled
back into it and moved, however halt-
ingly, through all our divagations, towards
a final goal of freedom and universal
brotherhood, towards the ideal of a
world ruled by love and not by terror.
Neither now nor at any period have
we made war our national industry ; we
have never at any period hammered
our whole people into one vast army
for the subjugation and enslavement of
our neighbours. Whatever sin we have
committed, we have never committed
that sin. Our literature for centuries
past testifies that though, the world
being what it is, we have put our
causes to the arbitrament of the sword,
we have hated war, and the wrong and
The Hatred of War 303
misery of it, with a steadily increasing
hatred.
Among the stirring and splendidly
patriotic thunderings of Henry V., Shake-
speare puts into the mouths of the un-
lettered soldiery of his day a most poignant
sense of the heavy responsibility their
ruler will bear if he sends them to kill
and be killed in a fight that is not
just. Addison's verses on the battle of
Blenheim give an elegant and flattering
picture of Marlborough in the hour of
triumph, but you need not grudge the
Duke his compliment, for, when in
due season he died, Swift wrote the
satirical elegy upon him that is surely
the bitterest, most mordant protest ever
raised against a successful war and its
commander :
Behold his funeral appears :
No widows' sighs nor orphans' tears,
Wont at such times each heart to pierce,
Attend the progress of his hearse.
But what of that ? his friends may say —
He had those honours in his day :
True to his profit and his pride,
He made them weep before he died.
304 For Remembrance
And in the next century, Southey took the
same theme and, in his gentler vein,
satirised the Duke and his triumph in
4 The Battle of Blenheim,' where old
Kaspar, moralising over the skull found
on the battlefield, is unable to explain why
the victory was a great and a famous one,
and can only reiterate, to the end, that it
was that :
1 But what good came of it at last ? '
Quoth little Peterkin.
' Why, that I cannot tell.' said he,
' But 'twas a famous victory.'
Since then, we have come more and
more, as a nation, to little Peterkin's
outlook on this matter of war. We are
more insistently asking why it should
survive among rational Christian people,
what is the good of it, with its brutalities,
its waste, its suffering and heartbreak,
and all the harm it does ? And we grow
less and less contented with the mechanical
explanation of non-combatant philosophers
and professors that it is a biological
necessity, a natural, recurring phase in
our social evolution, and its miseries the
An Unnecessary Evil 305
inevitable price of human progress, that
it is a glorious institution and serves to
preserve the breed of heroes as racing
preserves that of horses. We know, or
if any do not they may know it from
what has been written by our soldiers
themselves, that there is no glory and
little romance in war except for those
who can play with the thought of it from
far off, or after the years have healed
its wounds and hidden the hideous ruin
it wrought, and the agony of it has
dwindled to the glamorous sorrow of a
tale that is told.
Byron on the field of Waterloo felt no
exultant thrill : to him it was a 4 place of
skulls, 5 where ' the red rain hath made the
harvest grow,' and it reminded him only of
the
Vain years
Of death, depopulation, bondage, tears
which had gone to the making of that
Emperor's pride who, as utterly shorn of it
all as if he had never possessed any, was
then eating his heart out at St. Helena.
u
306 For Remembrance
The withering contempt for the pompous
vanity of the military conqueror in Byron's
4 Ode to Napoleon,' and his admiration of
America's clean-handed patriot-ruler are
things we should do well also to remember
now, when all Europe is paying for the
follies of a pettier tyrant who assumed the
part of the dead lion and could not roar
without betraying himself :
Where may the wearied eye repose,
When gazing on the Great,
Where neither guilty glory glows
Nor despicable state ?
Yet one — the first — the last — the best —
The Cincinnatus of the West,
Whom envy dared not hate,
Bequeathed the name of Washington,
To make man blush there was but one.
Time has taken the sting out of that last
line : there has been Lincoln ; there is
Wilson ; to say nothing of others ; and
it seems likely that in the future Wilson's
name will, like Abou Ben Adhem's, 4 lead
all the rest.'
America went into the world war with
such ideals as took us into it, and her
The Modern Standard 307
attitude towards all war is the same as
our own. She has no use for its pinchbeck
glory, but looks beyond all that and sees
what Longfellow saw when he wrote
1 Killed at the Ford ' :
I saw in a vision how, far and fleet,
That fatal bullet went speeding forth
Till it reached a town in the distant North,
Till it reached a house in a sunny street,
Till it reached a heart that ceased to beat
Without a murmur, without a cry.
For the blood-drops on the conqueror's
laurel are not from the brow that wears it.
During that war of North and South which
stirred the conscience of America to its
depths the Quaker Whittier sorrowed in his
poems In War Time that a democratic
people should have no other but the old
world's barbarous way of settling its
differences, saying, as we are saying at
present :
The future's gain
Is certain as God's truth ; but meanwhile, pain
Is bitter and tears are salt ; our voices take
A sober tone ; our very household songs
Are heavy with a nation's griefs and wrongs ;
And innocent mirth is chastened for the sake
308 For Remembrance
Of the brave hearts that never more shall beat,
The eyes that smile no more, the unreturning
feet.
It was one of Washington's countrymen,
too, James Russell Lowell, who raised the
great rallying cry of all civilised demo-
cracies, insisted on the soldier's personal
responsibility for the right or wrong that
he does, and, in The Biglow Papers, spoke
the nakedest truths that have ever been
spoken about war and its makers :
Ez for war, I call it murder —
There you hev it plain and flat ;
I don't want to go no furder
Than my Testament fer that. . . .
Ef you take a sword and dror it
An' go stick a feller thru,
Gov'ment ain't to answer for it,
God '11 send the bill to you.
That is the essentially modern standard,
and nothing but the obsolete ideas that
persist in backward nationalities prevents
the civilised world from living up to it.
You get no conception except of the pity
and barbarism of war in the realistic
scenes and ironic comment of Thomas
The League of Nations 309
Hardy's great epic-drama, The Dynasts,
and in the sombre War Poems he wrote
during the struggle of Briton and Boer.
He is oppressed with the needless tragedy
of it all — that ' this late age of thought '
can only argue in the old bloody mode,
and marvels —
When shall the saner, softer polities,
Whereof we dream, have play in each proud land,
And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas ?
a question to which thinking men of all
nations that have outgrown the crudities
of their childhood are striving now to find
an answer. The one hope that beacons
us through these dark days is that the
shameful savageries of the Great War, its
indescribable horrors, its devastating in-
sanities may shock mankind into so much
of practical wisdom that the peoples of
every race and creed shall, in self-defence,
draw together at last into some league
of free nations, some bond of common
fellowship that shall end the reign of the
brute for ever and realise Tennyson's
prevision of a time when disputes between
310 For Remembrance
men were no longer settled as they arc
between animals, but
The battle-flags were furled
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the
world.
THE END
Index
Brooke, Brian, 1, 36-39, 192.
Brooke, Rupert, 1, 31, 46-48, 51, 103, 119, 205, 209, 234,
256.
Brown, Frank S., 1, 264-265.
Burns, James D., 1, 253.
Campbell, Ivar, 2, 32, 56-60, 191
Campbell, Wilfred, 299-300.
Chapin, Harold, 202-204.
Cook, Leonard Niell, 2, 147, 153.
Coulson, Leslie, 2, 32, 164, 165-174.
Craven, Arthur Scott (A. K. Harvey James), 2, 32, 73-75.
Crombie, Eugene, 2, 224-226.
Day, Jeffery, 2, 116-121.
Dennys, Richard, 2, 33, 134, 223-224.
Farrel, John, 300-302.
Field, Henry Lionel, 2, 33, 83-86.
Flower, Clifford, 3, 32, 191, 194-198.
Freston, Hugh Reginald, 3, 32, 143-146, 152, 165, 282-283.
Grenfell, Hon. G. W., 3, 32, 43.
Grenfell, Hon. Julian, 3, 32, 36, 39-44, 160, 191, 209,
234.
Hamilton, William, 3, 273-278.
Hodgson, William Hope, 228.
Hodgson, William Noel, 3, 44-46, 115, 223, 298
Jenkins, Arthur Lewis, 3, 218-222, 279.
Johnson, Donald F. Goold, 100, 112-116.
Kettle, Thomas M., 1, 4, 33, 283-286.
Kilmer, Joyce, 4, 229, 239-251.
Ledwidge, Francis, 4, 32, 49-53, 98, 191.
Lewis, Frank, 4, 282.
Lister, Charles, 40-41, 43.
Littlejohn, W. H., 4, 149-152, 153. $
811
312 For Remembrance
McCrae, John, 4, 264, 265-273.
Mackintosh, Ewart Alan, 4, 149, 160-16,3.
Mann, Hamish, 4, 147-148, 153.
Masefield, Charles J. B., 4, 33, 133, 148, 153-160.
Mitchell, Colin, 5, 183-184.
Morris, Francis St. Vincent, 5, 33, 280-282, 292-293.
Palmer, Hon. Robert, 5, 32, 191, 212.
Parry, Harold, 5, 75-83, 142.
Philipps, Hon. Colwyn E. A., 6, 32, 61-65, 191.
Pitt, Bernard, 5, 32, 103-111.
Ratcliffe, A. Victor, 5, 179-180.
Robertson, Alexander, 6, 32, 165, 214-218.
Robins, George Upton, 6, 86-90.
Russell, Edward Stanley, 6, 100-103.
Scott, Dixon, 204-208.
Seeger, Alan, 6, 234-239.
Short, William Ambrose, 6, 192-193.
Simpson, Henry Lamont, 6, 121, 122-127, 277-278.
Smith, Geoffrey Bache, 6, 138-143.
Sorley, Charles Hamilton, 6, 10, 32, 208-210, 213-214.
Stables, J. Howard, 7, 174-178.
Stephen, Adrian Consett, 258-264.
Sterling, Robert W., 7, 69-73.
Stewart, John E., 7, 33, 134-138, 221.
Streets, John William, 7, 32, 103, 185-190, 191, 209-212.
Tennant, Hon. E. Wyndham, 7, 32, 53-56, 191.
Thomas, Edward, 7, 32, 93-99.
Todd, Herbert Nicholas, 7, 32, 65-69.
Vernede, R. E., 7, 32, 286-291, 294.
Wall, Geoffrey, 8, 253-257.
White, Bernard Charles de Boismaison, 8, 33, 90-93.
Wilkinson, Eric Fitzwater, 8, 198, 201.
Wilkinson, Walter Lightowler, 8, 180-183, 194.
Wilson, T. P. Cameron, 8, 121, 127, 132.
Winterbotham, Cyril W., 8, 227-228, 292.
Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press
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