Page:Our Poets of Today (1918).djvu/121

Rh The story qualities of these poems is demonstrated by the fact that beginning with the well-known "Shooting of Dan McGrew" they have been adapted one by one into successful plays for the motion picture screen.

Within Service there was a desire that could not be quelled to express the various scenes and adventures through which he was living and so he gave us his poems of real men, "red blood men" they have been called, men who talk in a vigorous tongue, men whose primal instincts and passions spur them to labour, to dream, to achieve, to bow down before defeat—in fact, human men. These are the men of "The Spell of the Yukon."

Service, an ardent motor enthusiast, enlisted as an ambulance driver early in the war. Stories of the bravery of his exploits cannot be given here, but he has faced the shell-stormed road with his loads of wounded, he has lived the things he writes, and just as he has analyzed the Yukon man, so has he interpreted the struggles of the soldier of to-day.

The war stories that Robert Service tells in "Rhymes of a Red Cross Man" are among the most picturesque things that poetry has produced as a result of the World War. The same vivid stroke that splashed the pages of his Yukon poems with life and adventure is again evidenced with even a stronger amount of feeling than in his earlier work.

Among these poems is the dramatic tale of "Jean Desprez." Here Mr. Service pictures a peasant boy of France, who gives a crucified Zouave a cup of cold water during a German invasion in his home village. The effect of this upon the Hun invaders produces