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Rh brave and loyal. Several of these poems witness that he saw his "Tommies" as they were. What if the battle songs he wrote are not such as can ever quite win their favour, and can hardly better content a more refined public? since for those, as for these, his life and death were his best poem. He had been ready to appreciate all his men's virtues and to make even all their deficiencies. They were his inspiration and he was theirs. This give and take between the leader and the led is more trustworthy than the rigidity of discipline, replacing it by life—a wonder of creation comparable to a master work in art. Augmented living ought perhaps always to precede a literary production which should be the spirit's pæan for victory—for wider and more delicate relations achieved—though at times it has been the bitter song of the vanquished, declaring that his loss is greater and other than the victor's gain. That grander pulse was throbbing through Vernède's veins, as his more frequent bursts of song and ever truer note testify; the poet liberated in him was rehearsing the adequate lay which we shall never hear—and indeed the enemy did not gain by his death anything commensurate with what we have lost, even though such losses should kindle us more finely than that masterpiece unheard, unsung and for ever overdue could have done! In two stanzas to his wife which now dedicate the book, Vernède himself underlines the difference between promises and deeds, between words and the seal of death:

What shall I bring to you, wife of mine,

When I come back from the war?

A ribbon your dear brown hair to twine?

A shawl from a Berlin store?

Say, shall I choose you some Prussian hack

When the Uhlans we o'erwhelm?

Shall I bring you a Potsdam goblet back

And the crest from a prince's helm?

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