BY TRACEY
No doubt, O Kaiser, you have thought
Napoleon was a duffer
Compared to you, when you set out
To make Old England suffer.
But if you read your history books,
You'll very quickly find, Sir,
That Boney knew, despite his faults,
How to make up his mind, Sir.
You flutter up, you flutter down,
You flutter night and day, Sir,
Yet somehow victory won't look
Your mad and fluttering way, Sir,
But when the war by us is won,
And in Berlin our men, Sir,
You'll be a bit surprised to find
Where you will flutter then, Sir.
We laughed and thought it ripping; but the Doctor seemed to be hurt, and said: "Silence, silence, boys! It ill becomes us to jest at the spectacle of a fallen potentate, and still less so before he has fallen.
"A more pleasing effort is that of Travers minor," went on the Doctor, picking up the poem of Travers. "We have here nothing to be described as a picture of war, but rather the views of an intelligent and Christian boy upon war. Personally, I think well of these verses. They are unostentatious--no flash of fire--but a temperate lament on war in general and a final conviction not lacking in shrewdness. I will not say that I entirely agree with Travers minor in his concluding assertion, but he may be right--he may be right. At any rate, the poem is a worthy expression of an educated mind, and by no means the worst of those with which we are called to deal."
He then read Travers minor, and we were all frightfully disappointed, for it turned out that Travers hated war, so the result wasn't a war poem at all, but a very tame affair without any dash about it--in fact, very feeble, I thought. His brother would have despised him for writing it. Of course, Peacock wanted a poem praising up the glory of war, not sitting on it, like Travers minor did.
THE FOG OF WAR
BY TRAVERS MINOR
From out the awful fog of war
One thing too well we see--
That man has not yet reached unto
His highest majesty.
For battle is a fiendish art
We share with wolf and bear,
But man has got a soul to save--
He will not save it there.
This is the twentieth century,
We boast our great good sense.
And yet can only go to war
At horrible expense
Of human life. It makes us beasts;
We shout and spend our breath
To hear a thousand enemies
Have all been blown to death.
And each of all those thousand men
Was doubtless good and kind,
As those, no doubt, remember well
Whom he has left behind.
And when I hear that war brings out
Our finest qualities,
I do believe with all my heart
That is a pack of lies.
A deadly silence greeted the prize poem of Travers minor, and I believe the Doctor felt rather sick with us for not applauding it. And Tracey, who was very mad at what the Doctor had said about him, whispered rather loud that Travers minor's effort was almost worthy of Hymns Ancient and Modern.
There were only three poems left now, and the excitement increased a good deal, because nobody had won Peacock's guinea yet, so it was clear that either Mitchell, or Thwaites, or Sutherland minor was the lucky bargee. Both Mitchell and Thwaites seemed beyond the wildest hope, and we felt pretty sure that Sutherland must have done the trick. But he hadn't. The Doctor picked up his poem and put on a doubtful expression.