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 defending, the one goes eagerly into battle, berserker-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
