But not my heart’s desire.
So I sit thinking and dreaming still,
A dream that won’t come true,
Of you in the German trench, my friends,
And I not there with you.”
I suppose it is almost incredible to the civilian mind that any man who has experienced the Judgment Day of an attack can speak truly when he says that he wants to go back. Lieutenant Mackintosh explains the soldier’s attitude in one line, “And I not there with you.” Each man feels that the war cannot be won without him; if he shirks, the next man may shirk, and the example of duty will be lost.
It has been said that the war has divided the world into two nations—the man of military age and the others. This was never more true than at the time when middle-aged gentlemen were writing recruiting-songs, feeling perfectly confident that they would never be recruited themselves. These songs too often took the form of insulting the younger generation into making up their minds to die; they were sung chiefly in music-halls by people who were paid to be patriotic. Again Mackintosh utters the voice of the Front when he expresses his resentment for such methods. He seems to me to have preserved the wholesome faculty for hatred which most of us Englishmen have lost—the same faculty which has made Raemaekers such an Elijah in his cartoons. I’m not sure
