I never attempt poetry unless my soul is stirred with deep emotions.
Eight verses were wrenched out of me, when a smudge of smoke was visible on the horizon, and the bets were ninety to one that a German cruiser had sighted us.
The first two verses of that poem went:
Your scribe he is a soldier nit,
Nor used to war's alarms;
He never died, or bled, or fit,
Save bugs upon his farms.
And when at last he went to war
On a big P. & O.,
He went to war, just only for