More Songs by the Fighting Men - Soldiers Poets: Second Series. Galloway Kyle

conviction.

      The same characteristics, the same yearning over the beloved country left behind and of tender feeling for parents and home, are found in all the poems that have come to us from men in the fighting forces since the former volume was collected. And here we may repeat, that while these volumes are typical of the lyrical efflorescence of the fighting men, they do not pretend to be exhaustive: the larger task of sifting already published work and compiling a more complete anthology has been undertaken by a devoted advocate of the significance of the soldier poets' work and its claim to recognition.

      ​We builded better than we knew when we issued the original volume as the climax of our proud association with the soldier poets: it was a greater thing than we were then aware of. No literary work of our day has possessed so much genetic force or been of greater influence. It was well said that "Soldier Poets" was of greater service to the Allied cause in America than many Blue Books and specially prepared statements: it showed the high clean spirit of ardent, generous youth engaged on a new Crusade. These songs before sunrise gave fresh vitality to poetry and were welcomed by a nation on the eve of rebirth as the promise of a greater intensity of living, a finer perception of beauty, a clearer vision of the undying splendour after the weary days in which life and art had become dreary and meaningless to the multitude. Now the birth-throes have become more severe, the spiritual quickening more accentuated, more and more of the poems are personal threnodies, and the sentinel graves of the Poetry Review young men who responded to the call in 1914 now consecrate the long line from Nieuport to Basra. They are a more glorious and more numerous company than the Elizabethans, with whom, in the great comradeship beyond the grave, they still march, an invisible army, with their brothers-in-arms who continue the material and spiritual warfare here in the flesh, inspiring and directing the fight that will not end with the war.

      Galloway Kyle.

      ⁠"The Poetry Review,"

      ⁠London, W.C.

      ⁠All Saints' Day, 1917.

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      Eric De Banzie, Sapper, R.E.

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      ERIC DE BANZIE

      Sapper, R.E.

       The Gift

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      "OH, I have known the dreams of youth . . . then what

      ⁠The dead, long, useless years gave promise of;

       Remnants I'll humbly gift thee—all I've got,

      ⁠Which thy sweet thanks shall be the solace of."

       Thus spake a restless mind all out of tune

      ⁠With souls and thoughts the world could offer him. . . .

       Thou know'st he thanked Thee, God, for War's grand boon—

      ⁠The end, the glory, England proffered him.

       The sorrow of his going matters not;

      ⁠Only the fierce high glow that in his heart

       Lit up those remnants that a rifle shot

      ⁠Filched from an England who was grieved to part.

       Alway, the nobleness that England gives

       Rescinds her royal gift—so England lives!

      ⁠France.

      Paul Bewsher, Sub.-Lieut., R.N.A.S.

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      PAUL BEWSHER

      D.S.C., Sub-Lieut., R.N.A.S., France

       The Dawn Patrol

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      SOMETIMES I fly at dawn above the sea,⁠

       Where, underneath, the restless waters flow—

      ⁠Silver, and cold, and slow.

       Dim in the east there burns a new-born sun,

       Whose rosy gleams along the ripples run,

      ⁠Save where the mist droops low,

       Hiding the level loneliness from me.

       And now appears beneath the milk-white haze

       A little fleet of anchored ships, which lie

      ⁠In clustered company,

       And seem as they are yet fast bound by sleep,

       Although the day has long begun to peep,

      ⁠With red-inflamèd eye,

       Along the still, deserted ocean ways.

       The fresh, cold wind of dawn blows on my face

       As in the sun's raw heart I swiftly fly,

      ⁠And watch the seas glide by.

       ​Scarce human seem I, moving through the skies,

       And far removed from warlike enterprise—

      ⁠Like some great gull on high

       Whose white and gleaming wings beat on through space.

       Then do I feel with God quite, quite alone,

       High in the virgin morn, so white and still,

      ⁠And free from human ill:

       My prayers transcend my feeble earth-bound plaints—

       As though I sang among the happy Saints

      ⁠With many a holy thrill—

       As though the glowing sun were God's bright Throne.

       My flight is done. I cross the line of foam

       That breaks around a town of grey and red,

      ⁠Whose streets and squares lie dead

       Beneath the silent dawn—then am I proud

       That England's peace to guard I am allowed;

      ⁠Then bow my humble head,

       In thanks to Him Who brings me safely home.

      Collin Brooks, Sergeant, M.G.C.

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      COLLIN BROOKS

      Sergeant, Machine Gun Corps

       To Another Poor Poet

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      SHALL God forget these darkling years we spend

       In poverty and misery and toil

       Unlit save by a glint of faëry spoil

       That gleams and leads us, steadfast, to His end,

       The darkling years when only Hope is friend

       To Courage who, from