"The blackbird sings to him 'Brother, brother,
If this be the last song you shall sing,
Sing well, for you may not sing another,
Brother, sing.'"
The whole of this poem is memorable, down to its final prophetic quatrain:—
"The thundering line of battle stands,
And in the air Death moans and sings;
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
And Night shall fold him in soft wings."
"Could any other man in the British Army have knocked out a heavy-weight champion one week and written that poem the next?" a brother officer asked. "Into Battle" remains, and will probably continue to remain, the clearest lyrical expression of the fighting spirit of England in which the war has found words. It is a poem for soldiers, and it gives noble form to their most splendid aspirations. Julian Grenfell wrote, as he boxed and rode, as he fought in the mud of Flanders, as the ideal sporting Englishman of our old, heroic type.
The ancient mystery of verse is so deeply based on tradition that it is not surprising that all the strange contrivances of twentieth-century warfare have been found too crabbed for our poets to use. When great Marlborough, as Addison puts it, "examin'd all the dreadful scenes of war" at Blenheim, he was really in closer touch with Marathon than with the tanks and gas of Ypres. But there is one military implement so beautiful in itself, and so magical in the nature of its service, that it is bound to conquer a place in poetry. The air-machine, to quote The Campaign once more, "rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm." But the poets are still shy of it. In French it has, as yet, inspired but one good poem, the "Plus haut toujours!" of Jean Allard-Méeus, a hymn of real aerial majesty. In English Major Maurice Baring's ode "In Memoriam: A.H." is equally unique, and, in its complete diversity from Allard-Méeus' rhapsody, suggests that the aeroplane has a wide field before it in the realms of imaginative writing. Major Baring's subject is the death of Auberon Herbert, Lord Lucas, who was killed on November 3rd, 1916. This distinguished young statesman and soldier had just been promoted, after a career of prolonged gallantry in the air, and would have flown no more, if he had returned in safety to our front on that fatal day.
Major Baring has long been known as an excellent composer of sonnets and other short pieces. But "In Memoriam: A.H." lifts him to a position among our living poets to which he had hardly a pretension. In a long irregular threnody or funeral ode, the great technical difficulty is to support lyrical emotion throughout. No form of verse is more liable to lapses of dignity, to dull and flagging passages. Even Dryden in Anne Killigrew, even Coleridge in the Departing Year, have not been able to avoid those languors. Many poets attempt to escape them by a use of swollen and pompous language. I will not say that Major Baring has been universally successful, where the success of the great masters is only relative, but he has produced a poem of great beauty and originality, which interprets an emotion and illustrates an incident the poignancy of which could scarcely be exaggerated. I have no hesitation in asserting that "A.H." is one of the few durable contributions to the literature of the present war.
It is difficult to quote effectively from a poem which is constructed with great care on a complicated plan, but a fragment of Major Baring's elegy may lead readers to the original:—
"God, Who had made you valiant, strong and swift
And maimed you with a bullet long ago,
And cleft your riotous ardour with a rift,
And checked your youth's tumultuous overflow,
Gave back your youth to you,
And packed in moments rare and few
Achievements manifold
And happiness untold,
And bade you spring to Death as to a bride,
In manhood's ripeness, power and pride,
And on your sandals the strong wings of youth."
There is no rhetoric here, no empty piling up of fine words; it is a closely followed study in poetical biography.
The water has its marvels like the air, but they also have hardly yet secured the attention of the poets. In A Naval Motley, by Lieut. N.M.F. Corbett, published in June 1916, we encounter the submarine:—