Very nearly all of the soldiers of importance have written their memoirs of the Great War. In ponderous volumes the statesmen have excused and defended the conflicting policies that met in a surf of blood along the embattled frontiers. The statisticians have constructed those all-inclusive charts so well known to the students of what Carlyle called the “dismal science” of political economy. They have proved to their own satisfaction that the thousands who sleep under the little crosses at Ypres and in the Argonne died in a struggle for trade and markets. The historians, studying the secret documents flaunted before an astonished world by the revolutionists who flung open the once sacred foreign office archives in Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg, have compiled whole libraries depicting the chain of events that led with the inexorable doom of a Greek tragedy to August, 1914. The questions that once lay so near to the heart of the average man, national innocence and national guilt, the right and wrong of it all, if right and wrong there were, seem to be lost in a maze of literature.
The once familiar slogans sound strange indeed today. England was to be rebuilt with “homes fit for heroes,” but the dingy slums of London are no less dreary today than they were before they sent their quota of fighting men to the battlefields of France and the Near East. A world of dictatorship and revolution seems less safe for democracy than the nineteenth century with its well-ordered governments tempered by a nascent liberalism. Nations are more heavily armed than they were in 1914 on the very brink of an “inevitable war” fought, many honestly believed, to end war for all time.
There has been no flowering of art or literature such as followed the great victories of other centuries, no Spenser or Shakespeare to sing of an Elizabethan England set free from the menace of the Inquisition, no Tennyson to praise the imperial calm of “a land of old and just renown.” Fascist Italy waits a Vergil or a Dante, America an Emerson. Instead of the literary outflowing that has succeeded other wars, we have had a mass of “realistic” war books and plays, All Quiet on the Western Front, It’s a Great War, What Price Glory, and Journey’s End, to mention only the best known, in which the traditional champs d’honneur is pictured as a place of purposeless slaughter. This whole school of writers thinks to make another armed conflict impossible by painting 1914 in colors at once so drab and so revolting that the youth of today will not lightly follow again the paths of glory that lead to horror, exhaustion, and disillusionment.
But is the youth of today so different from the youth of seventeen years ago? It was not in these dismal terms that those of us who were very young men in 1914 thought of war. Perhaps we were misled by romantic nonsense, youthful ideas not yet seared and withered in the furnace of battle. But in those days there seemed to be a right and wrong distinct beyond all political sophistry, and, in the struggle along the battle fronts, there was color and a vision. Very young men at college read war poetry, and to some few favored of the gods, it was given not only to read, but better to write, and best of all to act.
During the fall of 1914, adventurers left America to join the armies, some as ambulance drivers, some as officers, others as common soldiers. They served under many flags, for the older American universities, like Vienna and the Sorbonne, were in a sense international. They came from all walks of life, men from the docks and from the prairies who “shoveled dung against the tide” on eight-knot cattle ships from Boston to Glasgow, athletes whose names had echoed across famous football fields, ill-dressed and lonely scholars who once ate at cheap cafeterias and haunted the college library. Men with proud old names, like Lionel Harvard, who had come to study at the college his forefathers founded in the Massachusetts wilderness went home, were gazetted to famous guards regiments, and shot down in the hopeless offensives at Ypres and Neuve-Chapelle. There were Germans too, from the graduate classes, older men whose faces bore the scars of student duels at Bonn and Heidelberg. When college opened, their accustomed places at commons were empty. They had packed up their books, gone home by devious routes, and joined their regiments. In other days, they might have returned to be pointed out in their college towns as “Herr Doktor who studied in America.” But it was 1914 and the world was ablaze. They took not the scholar’s, but the soldier’s road. Young American artists abandoned their Paris studios for the ranks of the Foreign Legion, the Aisne offensive, or at longest, Verdun. To those who volunteered in the legion, life promised little beyond “one crowded hour of glorious strife.” They asked no more.
Nay, rather, France, to you they rendered thanks
(Seeing they came for honor, not for gain),
Who, opening up to them your glorious ranks,
Gave them that grand occasion to excel,
That chance to live the life most free from stain,
And that rare privilege of dying well.
Perhaps the whole world had gone mad. But in their idealism, the young men of 1914 were sane, saner than we of the age of doubt, who pore over heavy books and wonder why the war was fought. They left us what transcends the Victor’s Peace, a record of human bravery that will serve as an inspiration to generations yet unborn.
Two men will always stand out preëminent among the soldier poets who sang the enthusiasm of 1914, an English volunteer, Rupert Brooke, and an American légionnaire, Alan Seeger. Brooke was twenty-eight when war cut short a career whose early work had given such splendid promise that his fellow-poet, Drinkwater, wrote, “there has not been, I think, so grievous a loss to poetry since the death of Shelley.” Son of a master at Rugby, Brooke was educated there and later at King’s College, Cambridge. But in the classical public school and university training, he acquired little except the artist’s appreciation of the beauty and the power of words. Too much of an intellectual to accept without question the already fading beliefs that a Victorian England had bequeathed to a younger generation, he led a restless life in London society, broken by long months of solitude in the country, by studies on the Continent, and travels up and down the world. These were his years of doubt, when he sought the answer to the eternal questions, to which perhaps there is no answer. The war came as something of a relief. Life was no longer an enigma, a ceaseless search for answers to the unanswerable. “Well, if Armageddon’s on,” he wrote, “I suppose that one should be there.” No one ever loved more wholly and more minutely the old life “at peace at home under an English heaven.” But suddenly it all seemed shallow and meaningless. The greatest adventure of all lay before him. He who would find his life must lose it. Gladly men like Rupert Brooke sought and found the answer on the battlefield. Lightly they cast aside all that had gone before,
. . . To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
The half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!
The Greeks had a saying, “Whom the gods love, die young.”
In Rupert Brooke, England lost a poet of rare accomplishments. Herein is the tragedy and the glory of those first fierce months of open warfare. Men of really great talents went out, ill-trained and badly led. Their young lives were almost thrown away. But they left their country a tradition. Theirs was a willing sacrifice that many thousands later died to avenge. It was better that they went as they did, soldiers of a few weeks’ training who flung themselves into the breach when the professional army, the “old contemptibles” of gallant memory, had been killed off in the retreat from Mons, the Marne, and the bloody fight for the channel ports, and the new citizen armies were yet unformed.
Brooke served in Belgium with the Royal Naval Division, a volunteer organization as valiant and as void of solid military position as the hastily conceived strategy that thought to hold Antwerp with a mere handful of troops against German numbers and German howitzers. It is easy for professional soldiers to criticize in the light of after events. But 1914 was a year of high hopes and daring experiments. Courageous sallies were made by undisciplined volunteers thrown into battle by statesmen who had yet to learn that gallantry alone counted for little against wire and machine guns. Armageddon had not yet become a mere process of exchanging lives over long years during which the world siege by sea could play its silent part.
Early in February, 1915, the Royal Naval Division was sent out to Gallipoli. Rupert Brooke never reached the front. He died aboard a French hospital ship at Skyros,
A voice forever stilled, a memory,
Since you went eastward with the fighting ships,
The hero of a great new Odyssey,
And God has laid His finger on your lips.
Another poet, John Masefield, who learned the magic of thought and of language, not at Rugby and Cambridge, but in the forecastle of sailing ships, who learned life, not from London society and the quiet English countryside, but from “the sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with a clout, the chantyman bent to the halliards,” has left his impression of the landing at Gallipoli, an immortal memorial to the best manhood of the British Empire who laid down their lives in an adventure foredoomed from the start.
. . . The land of Lemnos was beautiful with flowers at that season, in the brief Aegean spring, and to the seawards always, in the bay, were the ships, more ships, perhaps, than any port of modern times has known. In this crowded shipping, strange, beautiful Greek vessels passed, under rigs of old times, . . . and the tugs of the Thames and Mersey met again the ships they had towed of old, bearing a new freight of human courage. . . . No such gathering of fine ships has ever been seen upon this earth, and the beauty and the exultation of the youth upon them made them like sacred things as they moved away. . . . The noise of the cheering swelled . . . till all the life in the harbour was giving thanks that it could go to death rejoicing. . . .
They left the harbour very, very slowly; this tumult of cheering lasted a long time; and no one who heard it will ever forget it, or think of it unshaken. It broke the hearts of all there with pity and pride; it went beyond the guard of the English heart. . . . The sun went down with marvelous colour, lighting island after island and the Asian peaks, and those left behind in Mudros trimmed their lamps, knowing that they had been for a little brought near to the heart of things.
Near to the heart of things! Perhaps only war can bring mankind face to face with reality.
Those whose sole philosophy is the hatred of war and all that pertains thereto never tire of pointing to the loss of the few supremely gifted, who, but for a blind burst of shrapnel or a chance camp fever, might have lived on to enrich the world with the fullness of their art. They recoil at the thought of Cervantes at Lepanto, of Sir Philip Sidney riding unarmored into battle, of Byron seeking a soldier’s grave on the plains of Thessaly. And yet as long as there are wars for causes that appeal to the chivalry of youth, gallant men like these will be among the first to go. One cannot think of Sidney as content to dally at court composing sonnets for his beloved Stella while other knights fought in the Low Countries for England’s Queen and the Protestant cause. Nor can one think of Rupert Brooke as willing merely to write when, three centuries later, English men-at-arms marched again along those same roads, roads they have so often trod to the battlefields of Flanders. The blessings of life which he had loved so dearly he was willing, even eager to surrender. Appreciation of living made death more significant. Few among the dead, of whom he wrote and for whom he spoke in the most beautiful of his five war sonnets, could have had his perception of the possibilities of human experience.
These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset and the colours of the earth.
These had seen movement, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved; and gone proudly friended;
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.
Those who know and admire his verse cannot but rejoice that he went and that Fate withheld her hand long enough for him to write his brief record of the devotion that drew young men into the first volunteer regiments. For there is more, much more, in war than its waste and its manifold sufferings. Above and beyond all this there has always been an ideal. Man does not live by bread alone. It is perhaps best that he died before the long years of the protracted siege began to weaken the spiritual élan of 1914. Brooke was preeminently the poet of the first months. Others were to write of the last years, the dreary length and the vast proportions of operations by land and by sea that finally pressed whole nations into the ranks. He left to the soldiers of the armies yet unformed, an ideal, a supreme utterance of English patriotism.
. . . These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those that might have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
One cannot think of such a life as wasted. True it was thrown away with many other lives, the noblest and the best, in an expedition whose strategy was unsound and in a war that fuller knowledge seems to show was but the culmination of blind forces. However great the sacrifice, however disappointing the new world that finally emerged from the smoke of gigantic battles, human bravery was here, and loyalty, and a clear love of country which will nerve other generations in the hour of national trial. “Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail, no weakness, no contempt.” Rupert Brooke was a soldier, typical of the volunteer soldiers of 1914, an Englishman whose character combined all that is finest in the English race. Herein he differs but little from his comrades in the great adventure. Brave men are many. Poets, alas, are few; and to Rupert Brooke alone was it given to put into immortal verse the deep, though voiceless, belief in their country’s cause which inspired so many, who
. . . died (uncouthly, most) in foreign lands,
For some idea but dimly understood
Of an English city never built by hands,
Which love of England strengthened and made good.
Brooke felt that he would never repass the three thousand miles of sea between his own England and Gallipoli.
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. . . .
He was buried at Skyros. The world will not soon forget this gallant soldier poet. His verse will be read long after the sources, the narrative, and the results of the Great War, like the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have become the province of the professional historian. Nations and empires come and go, but the loyalty and devotion of youth remain unchanged throughout the ages. In her National Cemetery at Arlington, America’s war dead sleep with the verse of a Roman poet, written two thousand years ago, for epitaph:
“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”
While Rupert Brooke will forever typify those for whom death in their country’s cause was fair and of good repute, Alan Seeger, American corporal in the Foreign Legion, wrote for those who served under alien flags in a war that seemed to them a glorious quest. For him neutrality was an utter impossibility. A great game was being played. He would not, and could not, stand idle on the side lines. The call had come for another crusade. He could not stand aloof and accept what seemed to him the ignoble shelter of American citizenship. It can scarcely be said that two years of life in the Latin Quarter had made Seeger an expatriate. He was a man of twenty-six, a graduate of Hackley School and Harvard. To him Paris had given little more than she has given to so many generations of young students from abroad, an opportunity to see life, to study, and perhaps to write. His early verse has no special significance. It is the work of a very young man, caught in the artistic and sensuous spell of Paris, a boy in love with love.
The glad-eyed streets and radiant gatherings
Where I drank deep the bliss of being young . . .
It walks here aureoled with the city-light,
Forever through the myriad-featured mass
Flaunting not far its fugitive embrace,
Heard sometimes in a song across the night,
Caught in the perfume from the crowds that pass. . . .
Where the enchantment of Paris would have led him, no one can tell. The boulevards, the studios, and the crowded cafés, had for him the true romance of La Bohème, Bohème of the first act, the courtship of beauty in strange places. The music had not yet changed to the tragedy of the final scene. And then came August, 1914, war, deserted studios, and empty lecture-rooms at the Sorbonne. One who had lived so deeply felt that he must go on to where he
. . . drained deeper the deep cup of life,
And, on sublimer summits, came to learn,
After soft things, the terrible and stern,
After sweet Love, the majesty of Strife.
Seeger joined the legion a few weeks after war was declared. He was shot down in a flurry of machine gunfire while leading his section to the attack at Belloy-en-Santerre in July, 1916. Two crowded years, a volunteer under a foreign flag, and then the end. Why did he accept a sou a day as a common soldier of the legion? At first, for pure adventure perhaps. In the beginning, it seems to him that he is fighting merely to defend Paris from pillage, Paris the city to which he owed so much, art, inspiration, and the gift of self-expression. But, as the war wore on, his horizon broadened. He is fighting, not merely for Paris, but for the freedom of a great nation, France, in a conflict between contrasted civilizations, a struggle “from which no people nobly stands aloof.” Never has the French cause been more clearly and more simply set forth than in his poem dedicated to the dead of the Champagne offensive. Her fruitful vineyards freed at last from the invader’s guns symbolize the labor, the gladness, and the courage of life that merge in the temper of France. Of the soldier of the Champagne he wrote:
That other generations might possess—
From shame and menace free in years to come—
A richer heritage of happiness,
He marched to that heroic martyrdom. . . .
There the grape-pickers at their harvesting
Shall lightly tread and load their wicker trays,
Blessing his memory as they toil and sing,
In the slant sunshine of October days. . . .
In his later poems, written in 1916, beneath and beyond this generous surrender of self to the French cause, there sounds a note of fatalism born of stern sufferings. Gradually he ceases to ponder the justice of war in the abstract. Instead he submits himself to what he pictures as a kind of cosmic force, a preordained Fate that of necessity draws all men and all nations into the maelstrom.
Comrades in arms there—friend or foe—
That trod the perilous, toilsome trail
Through a world of ruin and blood and woe
In the years of the great decision—hail!...
There was a stately drama writ
By the hand that peopled earth and air
And set the stars in the infinite
And made night gorgeous and morning fair,...
The life and death of Alan Seeger is a record of a deep and thoughtful character. A youth, to whom “beauty was truth, truth beauty,” comes at the last to accept as foreordained and therefore right beyond all human argument, what is today so often spoken of as the least beautiful and the least justifiable of man’s work on earth—war. An American who of his own generosity chose service under a foreign standard, and who speaks for the soldier adventurers of all times, asks that we think of him, not as a willing volunteer, but as a conscript of Destiny. An artist to whom youth had seemed “one trembling opportunity for joy,” cast it aside as an outworn garment. A poet who instinctively sensed the greatness of his sacrifice, wrote of his own death, not in terms of exalted knighthood nor in self-laudation, but rather in praise of all the pleasures of life he so readily gave up, lest, failing in the hour of the great decision, he feel himself forever unworthy to enjoy them. He made and kept a rendezvous with death.
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Springs brings back blue days and fair.
God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Where hushed awakenings are dear . . .
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Springs trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger were distinctly men of the Beginning. Neither lived to experience the prolongation of the struggle into 1917 and 1918, years when almost the entire world’s wealth and manhood were conscripted for the titanic effort that at last won victory—victory bought at the price of a Europe ruined and swept by revolution. In these latter years there was little time for verse. The inspiration of 1914 had given birth to a fierceness of purpose that made victory possible. The war moved on to tragic ends which the statesmen had failed to envision. Men forgot that victory itself might be bought too dear. Heavier and heavier burdens were laid on the backs of the nations, burdens that must be carried by generations yet to be. The American Army infused into the struggle something of the exultation that had inspired France and Britain three years before. But of the young American manhood who fought under their own colors, none left a literary record comparable to the poetry of Alan Seeger. Patriotism and sacrifice were here, but not their expression in lasting verse. Men were too busy winning the war to write about it. The nations had come to regard the world-wide battle as something of a commonplace. Captain Flagg of What Price Glory neither knew nor cared for the lofty sentiments of the first volunteers. He was a professional soldier. His creed was loyalty to his corps and to his job. It was not his to reason why. Nor could the genial schoolmaster in Journey's End have read dramatically from Rupert Brooke during those tense moments before the raid into the German lines. The time for poetic words had passed. The last years were years of action. The war had gone on too long. Time had robbed it of its early vision. It was better at the last not to think too deeply. There was no escape short of victory. Man, who so lightly took up the adventure of war, was caught in the wheels of a colossal machine that could not be stopped until its bloody work was done. These are the ideas of the latter years. They have formed the basis of nearly all post-war literature. The poets of the Beginning were forgotten by those who wrote the triumph and the tragedy of the End. For ten years the world has chosen to read the books that depict the sufferings, the stoicism, and the disillusionments of 1918.
To accept the ideas of this “realistic” school, is to embrace what is at best a half truth. That war is destructive of much that is finest in life, no one can deny. But surely we should not forget that it arouses what is best and noblest in mankind—bravery and the sacrifice of self to a cause. These are eternal virtues inherent in youth. They cannot be destroyed. While it is possible to classify and index the material strength of a nation, back of it all there will always be the great imponderables, the patriotism that inspired Rupert Brooke and the crusader’s enthusiasm that swept Alan Seeger into the ranks of the Foreign Legion. Rifles, artillery, battle fleets—these do not win wars of themselves. They are but the tools. They change with the changing years. Victories are won by the devotion of men and women, that spiritual strength of which the poets sing. In all the vast armory of war, there is no weapon so bright as the eternal sword of human courage.
?
The mother sits by Severn side,
Where Severn joins the Bay,
And great gray ships go down the tide
And carry her sons away.
They carry them far, they carry them wide,
To all of the Seven Seas,
Bid never beyond her love and pride,
And ever the deathless tales abide
They learned at the Mother’s knees.
—W. K. Post.