They have found their expression in the deep and sincere emotion of such poems as “Not Dead,” by Robert Graves, J. C. Squire’s “The Bulldog,” Robert Nichols’s “Fulfilment,” and Siegfried Sassoon’s “In the Pink.”
And working from this basis, it is surely more just to judge Germany less by the cheap vehemence of Lissauer than by those quiet poems that, hidden away among pages of opprobrium and rhetoric, enshrine far more truthfully those emotions that have lingered in the heart of the suffering individual from the very beginning of time.
There is a poem on a captured trench that opens with a brief word-picture of the scene, the squalor, the battered parapet, the dead men. “Over this trench,” the poet continues—
“Over this trench will soon be shed a mother’s tears.
Pain is pain always,
And courage is true wheresoever it may be found.
And in the hearts of our enemy were both these things....
That we must not forget;
Germany must love even with the sword that kills.”
That sentiment is universal, it contains the complete tragedy of conquest.
And indeed for the individual soldier war is the same under whatever standard he may fight. German militarism may have been the aggressive factor, but the individual did not know it. Unless a people feels its cause to be just, it will not enter into the lists. If it is the aggressor, then that people must be hoodwinked. The victory lust of 1914 was a collective emotion springing from the German temperament and from their belief that they were in the right. The individual soldier went to battle with feelings not too far removed from our own.
“The war was a crusade to us then,” a German professor said to me; “we felt that France and Russia had been steadily preparing war for years. We felt that they were only awaiting an opportunity. The Russians mobilised long before we did. They drove us to it.”
It was in that spirit, he told me, that the German volunteer armed himself in August 1914.
“But of course,” he said, “it didn’t last long. The glamour went soon enough. And now, well, all we want is that the war should cease.”
And in the spring of 1918 the individual outlook in many ways resembled that of France and England. There was the same talk of profiteers, of the men who dreaded the cessation of hostilities, of the ministers who were clinging to office. There was the old talk of those who had not suffered in the war. It was all very well for the rich, they could buy butter, they did not have to starve. They managed to find soft jobs behind the lines. They did not want the war to stop. Indeed, the resentment against the “shirkers” and “profiteers” was more acute than the hatred of the Allies. For after all, emotions like love and hate are not collective. One can only hate the thing one knows.