underlying motive of many of these poems, and explicit in but a few (being almost too sacred for an Englishman to write about) rests our best hope for the England that is to be. If the all-engrossing love of the regimental officer for his men, so poignantly expressed in the lines by Robert Nichols—
Was there love once? I have forgotten her,
Was there grief once? Grief still is mine.
Other loves I have; men rough, but men who stir
More joy, more grief, than love of thee and thine.
Faces cheerful, full of whimsical mirth,
Lined by the wind, burned by the sun,
Bodies enraptured by the abounding earth,
As whose children, brothers we are and one—
or with even greater force in two simple lines from a poem by Lieutenant E. A. Mackintosh to the fathers of his friends fallen in action:
You were only their fathers,
I was their officer,—
if this spirit can only be carried on into the hard days of the coming peace-time, we may surely await the future with a firm faith and without any amazement. Here, then, is a book of the munitions of remembrance and hopefulness.
