BATTLEFIELD VERSES

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3149, 30 July 1917, Page 6

BATTLEFIELD VERSES

THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER

LOVE OP COUNTRY A STRONG NOTE "The moment love of one's country, and all that inhabits there, is thought of as 'patriotism,' the best of its spiritual fragrance is lost," says tho ''Times Literary Supplement." "I'he word»'patriot' is a word that no true patriot can afford to apply to himself or even to his friends, liven so, he who speaks of 1 imself as a gentleman is deservedly in danger of being regarded as merely gentlemanly. In either case 'it goes without saying' that you have the quality in question; only say you have it, and yon have it not. It is pleasant to know, that our sailors, soldiers and flying meii are quite incapable of falling into the pitfall thus disclosed. In their letters home, in the verse which they write in scant moments of leisure—when often 'their lips are touched,' as Mr. Kipling said of Julian Grenfell en reading his Incomparable poem of the mystic joyousness of battle—they never make a virtue of their self-devotion, blissful, sacrificial, Keen to the credo quia incredible of their mystic faith. England Across the Tide. "It is most often _ a sudden, small glimpse of the English countryside with the soul's eye that is the.stuff out of which the soldier makes a poem in honour of liis country—'a mother and a mistress and a friend'; yes, and in the green spring that is coining, also 'comrade and queen and child.' "In a poem as yet unpublished one of the most passionate and yet exquisite of the soldier poets sees that valour is but the price of the far-listening magic of an English evening:— Now that I am ta'en a.wav, And may not .see anothcy day, What Is it to my eye appears? What found rings in my strickon ears? Not even tho voice of any friend, Or eyes beloved world without end, But scenes and sounds of the oountrysido In far England across the tide. And on a shooting briar I see A yellow bird who sings to me. 0 yellow-hammer, once I heard Thy yaffle when no other bird ■' Could to my sunk heart comfort bring! But now I could not havo thee sing, So sharp thy note is with the painOf England I may not see again. Yet sing thy song; there answereth Deep in me a voice which saith: Tho gorse upon the twilit down, Tho English loam so sunset brown, The bowed pines and the sheep bell's clamour, The wet lit lane and the yellow-hammer, The orchard and the chaffinch song, Only to the Bravo belong. And ho shall loso their- ioy for &yo If their price ho cannot pay, Who shall find them dearer far Enriched by blood after.-long war. These lines wero written in France—are they not in the very mode of the Elizabethan lover's sung inventory of a mistress's charm; item, hair like a cloud; item, a forehead like the moon in it; item,; starry eyes; item, scarlet lips with a voice of low music. And so England is loved to the death. The Remembered School. Of poems in which the lifo of a school is remembered as a microcosm of England, as a drop of water mirrors the ocean, there is a complete series; every great school has its' devotee. Strangest and most powerful of all these is a rough sonnet in which - the first tight lines are given to "the foul scampering bellies" of the rats and other horrors of death in No Man's Land. Yet in the sestet .we are told that tho victim of all this lothsomeness— Died radiant. May some English traveller to-day, Leaving his city care behind bim, journeying West To the brief solato of a snorting holiday. Quicken again -with boyish ardor-ss ho sees, For a moment, Windsor Castle tcwering on the crest, * And Eton still enshrined among rcmem- ,•, bered trees. "Only at the cost of such hideous humiliation of the body can the spirit fulfil its devotion. Or it may be that some incident in a game played behind the lines (whero it is said a covey of partridges once whirled up out of the pitch r.s a short run was being stolen, yet the wicket--keeper sternly rebuked the s batsman for not running wido) conjures up a .'ision of school days that seem happy in retrospect. Or the arrival of tho school match card- may be tho stuff out of which a poetical dream is wrought. Or the sudden remombrance of lines in a Gree.k or Latin book reminds the soldier poet that the bright and terrible visage of war, all the disciplined and glittering preparedness, is the same to-day as in the farthest yesterday:— ' I have not brought my Odyssey With me hero aoross the sea; But you'll remember when I say How, when thoy went down Sparta way, To Sandy Sparta, long ere dawn Horses were harnessed, rations drawn; . Equipment polished, sparkling '-right, And breakfast swallowed (as the white Of Eastern heavens turned to gold)— The dogs barked, swift farewells weretold, Tho sun spring up, tho horses neigh, Crackles the whip thrice—then away! And 60 the letter to a school friend goes on and on, until, says, and sings, tho writer:— Away to rightward I descry My liarbary ensconced in sky, Far Underneath the Ogbourne 'wins, And at my feet the thyme and whins, The grasses with their little crowns Of gold, the lovely Aldhourne downs. until at last comes ■ a glimpse of tho school, emblazoned, as it were, on the very helm of Mars. . "Or, again, tho remembered tresses of a sweetheart and her gaze agleam hold a further vision of an English starry night; or a never-absent mother to whom a sapper's busy day of innumerable tasks is dedicate—it'is her birthdayis not only his mother, but also Mother 'England in a grave autumnal mood. It is curious that Cambridge is not as yet a chosen symbol, but it will be so often and often by the time the full harvest of this war poetry by warriors is gathered in. But many of the soldier poets visit Oxford in dreaming verse (often quaintly i\'ewdigate) to number her towers anew, and so— To find tho sacredness of quiet hours And beauty, time near these towers. and ■to overhear, in tho music of a place that is all one great country house in remembrance, tho motives of England's eternal beauty and their own everlasting love of her. \ "You are Blind- Like Us." "There are many more symbols by which the central, naming truth is approached, never attained in words. And needless to say, the worst mistake of noncombatant poets is never made—hatred of the enemy is never woven into this high symbolism. Mud, blood, khaki and tho German are subjects eschewed by tho starkest realist. Tho only soldier's poem 'to Germany' has not a touch of rancour or repining. It begins:— You are blind like us. You hurt no man designed, And no man claimed the conquest of your land. But groncrs both through fields of thought confined. Wo stumble and we do not understand. You only saw your future highly planned, And we, the taocrinE path of our own mind, And in each other's dearest ways we stand, ' And hiss and hate. And the blind fieht the blind. "This is the ono poem addressed to tho euciuy in u thousand. The Countless Crosses. , "Even when tho countless dosses of what shall bo a Via Sacra in peace time are considered, each tho resting-place of a comrade, he will not sing (as David sang) hymns of hate, or oven canticles of contempt. The fallen aro thrice happy and honoured sevenfold; they have been held worthy to die for the love of country; they fulfil the words of a soldier poet now u prisoner of war beynnd tho Rhine:—

Now these like men shall live. And like to princes fall, They tako what fate will give At tliie Croat festival. The wooden, caws atwv.e their dust is the

highest honour that has been won in any war:—

Rest you content, more honorable far. Than all the Orders is the cross of wood, The symbol of self-sacrifice that 6tood Bearing the God whoso brethren you arc. And in the field whore they rest, as Bupert Brooko.said for us in his memorable sonnet, tliere shall bo

In that rich eartli a richer dust concealed; a heart of dust in the dust out of which inarticulate flowers shall spring in inexpressive love of the one and only land. "There is nothing that is not good and fair 'above all nothing that lours,' in the book of our soldier poets, from which tho joyless noncombataiit—sadly conscious that middle-age, always a blunder, is now a kind of crime—may learn to be a patriot and never talk about it."