the enemy under his land fortifications. It is not the battle that is celebrated in the poems on the navy, but the wearisome keeping watch through the long, dark, stormy nights, and there is very little of the old glory in that. And it is not the flagship and her splendid train that figure in these poems, but the destroyers, the trawlers, the merchantmen,—grim shapes moving about swiftly and invisibly. Here we have none of the fighting Temeraire that Newbolt sang, but the hazardous inconspicuous work of the merchantman's captain,— A rough job or a tough job-he's handled two or three And what or where he won't much care, nor ask what the risk may be... . For a tight place is the right place when it's wild weather at sea. -(C. Fox Smith's "British Merchant Service.") Or it is the prosaic work of the mine-sweepers who have to dispose of "mines located in the fairway,”—and they do; or of the unoffending but very necessary merchantman, the poor old hooker, that may meet destruction any moment, not the romantic ship with sails full set that earlier poets sang about: When the waters known of old -(C. Fox Smith's "War Risks.”) It is significant that when the romantic touch is given, Admiral Drake and other old heroes are summoned to watch with the fleets through the long, dark night: Oh, seamen of old, the shadowy gates And out o'er the seas your galleons sweep (M. G. Meugen's "The Fleets.") The most striking poem dealing with the ships and the most romantic is Joyce Kilmer's "The White Ships and the Red," which treats of the crime of the Lusitania. She goes to the bottom all in red to join all the othor dead ships, which are in white, ... the ships of sorrow Who spend the weary night, Until the dawn of Judgment Day, Obscure and still and white. But she went to the bottom as witness to a loathly deed, "a deed without a name," by a blow that was aimed in hell: When God's great voice assembles They shall be white as silver. But one-shall be like blood. Instead of the romance of the shock of battle glorified in the older poetry there is now the grim, hideous carnage from shrapnel and high explosives and the dull, dirty, tiresome work in the trenches. This is something we get in no other war poetry. The verse describing No Man's Land is as different from earlier war verse as the physical conditions are different. The peculiar horror of that space of forbidden ground has been described vividly in prose and verse: No spoken word, no gifted pen or brush Of painter using pigments mixed in Hell, May e'er depict the horror and the hush That lie there when the guns have ceased their yell. -(W. Stonehold's "No Man's Land.") And we have poems telling of the lacerated bodies of the still living soldiers : There he lies now, like a ghoulish score of him, Left on the field for dead: The ground all around is smeared with the gore of him— Even the leaves are red. The Thing that was Billy lies a-dying there, Writhing and a-twisting and a-crying there; Billy, the Soldier Boy! -(R. C. Mitchell's "He Went for a Soldier.") Or we get the mad raving of the soldier suffering from shell shock: Neck-deep in mud He mowed and raved He who had braved The field of blood And as a lad Just out of school Yelled: "April fool!" And laughed like mad. -(W. W. Gibson's "Mad.") Or the agony of the man "shattered beyond repair" who is caught in the wire and gets relief by means of his own pistol (Service's "On the Wire"). Or the grim tragedy is made more awful by the contrast of a comedy that is more tragic than tragedy: That was his sort. It didn't matter Of this and that His little son Had said and done : Till, as he told The fiftieth time And cut him short. -(W. W. Gibson's "The Father.") Is it any wonder that the poets feel like exclaiming with Hermann Hagedorn, who in "The Pyres" tells of their gathering the dead bodies to be burned and then exclaims, Look! How the sparks take flight! Stars, stars, make room! Smoke that was bone and blood! Hark! the deep roar. It is the souls telling God War is no longer romance; rather it is as Alter Brody calls it in "I Am War" "a pestilence sweeping the world,” “a madness riding the necks of men," the death of joy and the joy of death. And yet it is rather curious that no really first-class poems have been written about the guns or the airplanes or other distinctively modern implements of warfare that do appeal to the imagination. The prose-writers have done greater justice to them and in such fashion as really to invest them in a certain glamor. Philip Gibbs, in the New York Times (February 22, 1918), has the following sentences in the course of a cable dispatch, which have more suggestive value than any of the poems I have run across on this subject: Behind them and much farther away were the guns which have no human nature, but which in this war seem to the infantry like powers that belong to the spirit of evil, blind in their destruction, careless in their choice of victims, ruthless as the old devil gods of the world's first darkness. It has remained for the writers of prose also to give some idea of the romance of the air. James Norman Hall's articles in the Atlantic on the high adventure of aviation have done more to give the spirit of that branch of the service than all the poems I have seen. The poets do not seem to be able to conceive of the airplane as a thing in itself, to enter at all into its peculiar being. They present it as a bird and in so doing they view it from the ground; they do not soar aloft in the machine. The sensation has to be caught from actual experience, perhaps, before it can be imaginatively rendered; few aviators are poets, and few poets have made flights. It is a new subject for artistic treatment and it is not to be comprehended and rendered into poetry by an observer 10,000 feet below. Perhaps the poets will be able to enter into the feelings of the aviators after these romantic adventurers have given the world a full knowledge of their experiences. There is need not only of the slow ripening of reflection on experience but of the actual experience upon which experience may ripen. But more characteristic and distinctive of this verse as compared with earlier war poetry is its high moral seriousness. England has awakened to the meaning of the conflict; her soul has been purged as she realizes that she is fighting not merely for her very life but for the spiritual salvation of the world. Never before has the fight for civilization been on such a stupendous scale. The petty concerns of the past sink into their proper insignificance before this terrible danger and this awful responsibility: The cares we hugged drop out of vision; Our hearts with deeper thoughts dilate. Into the grandeur of our fate. There has been a recalling to the heritage of freedom, "which force can neither quell nor cage"; and a cry to endure goes up from the spirit of quickened England :— Endure, O Earth! and thou, awaken, Purged by this dreadful winnowing-fan, Soul of divinely suffering man! -(Binyon's "The Fourth of August.") There has been in the past too much sloth, too much intellectual pride, lawless dreams, and cynic art. The captains and the dreamers and the voices that we thought were dead or dumb "arise and call us and we come": Therefore a Power above the State, Once more upon her altar burns, Once more, redeemed and healed and whole, She moves to the Eternal Goal. -(Noyes's "The Searchlights.") It is a summons to a religious task, and she enters upon it with the feeling of her great soldiers as they held sacred vigil on the night before the battle : Single-hearted, unafraid, Hither all thy heroes came, On this altar's steps were laid Gordon's life and Outram's fame. England! if thy will be yet By their great example set, Here beside thine arms to-night Pray that God defend the right. -(Newbolt's "The Vigil.") There is a spirit of devotion to England and to God as the result of the sacredness of the cause. The splendid youth have |