Call it lust, or call it honor. Call it glory in a name!
We’re a handful, more or less, of what we were,
But we praise the grim Almighty that we stuck and played the game,
Till we chased them at the double to their lair.
For the word came, ‘Up and over!’
And our answer was a yell
As we scrambled out of cover—
And we dealt the dastards hell!
Mr. Durkin’s ballad is a human, veracious war-poem in the traditional spirit of Campbell’s Battle of the Baltic, Tennyson’s Ballad of the Revenge, Newbolt’s Drake’s Drum. It is designedly inspirational after the manner, and with the substance, of the old heroic ‘fighting spirit.’ It is, therefore, a recrudescence of a war spirit and an ideal of poetic inspiration, aim, and content which were not the real and authentic spirit, motive, and ideal of the best Canadian, British, French, or American poetry of the world war. In short, Mr. Durkin’s poem, The Fighting Men of Canada, lilting, spirited, and inspiriting as it is, must critically be estimated as an obsolete form of ‘recruiting’ ballad rather than as a true inspirational poem conceived and written according to the characteristic genius of the poetry of the world war. As a reversion to the old type of martial poem, it deserves mention. Possibly it may be instanced as the nearest approach to a Canadian war-song, though the extraordinary fact is that not a single war-song, of the popular or of the marching species, was written by a Canadian civilian or soldier-poet.
In the war verse of another poet we find the kind of poetry that fired the imagination and moved the will of the men of Canada who went to the world war. To Lloyd Roberts, son of Charles G. D. Roberts, the war poetry of the British Empire, as well as Canada, is indebted for two of the most striking and impressive short poems in the new spirit of inspirational verse inspired by the world war. His Come Quietly, England, simple and direct in thought, free in form, colloquial in diction, but positive, candid, sincere, is one of the most arresting and convincing poems that have for a theme ‘the call to arms’—not for King, or Country, nor for fear or anything else undivine:—