Page:The Muse in Arms, Osborn (ed), 1917.djvu/18

disheartened about the result of a year's researches; what this Anthology is outweighs all that it is not. More, and perhaps better, verse is yet to come from the many fronts of our amphibious warfare. Nevertheless this collection, with all its imperfections in craftsmanship, is the first coherent picture of the British warrior's moods and emotions in war-time which has ever been painted by himself. For that reason it is far more valuable than all the huge harvest of war poetry by civilian verse-makers. When this war began, the latter had a tremendous innings; the number of high-explosive canticles they produced is past counting, and no living critic can have read a tithe of them. One was disposed to sympathise with the complaint of the ingenious Mr. Dooley, who declared that the bombardment of defenceless persons by "concealed batteries iv poets" had added a new terror to warfare. Moreover, many of the products of this offensive in rhyme were clearly, as the same satirist observed, contrary to the Geneva conventions; specimens which failed to explode had been picked up and proved to contain lines capable of giving one a perpetual ear-ache. Mr. Kipling and the Poet Laureate and other established poets, it is true, had manfully resisted this strange scabies scribendi and so earned the gratitude of their admirers, not so much for the few pieces they put forth, as for the many they left unwritten. Of all the vast mass of civilian war-verse, very little indeed will survive; with the exception of Mr. Laurence Binyon's noble valedictory "To the Fallen," and perhaps a dozen other poems as simple and sincere, it has nearly all been cast ere now into the waste-paper basket of oblivion. The making of verse memorials is perhaps the only task to which the non-combatant poet may address himself without fear of losing his sincerity,