Page:The Muse in Arms, Osborn (ed), 1917.djvu/12

viii see why," answered the General. And, looking at the faces of those who passed by, the other saw in each one of them that open and sunny joyousness which is eternally expressed in the wonderful lines entitled "Into Battle" by Julian Grenfell—concerning which Mr. Rudyard Kipling said: "His lips must have been touched." They were not merely unafraid; they all gloried in the thought of the great ordeal to come. And so they went up in sunshine and with singing to win undying fame and deathless gratitude in the valleys of decision where—

They had inherited the blithe, unconquerable courage of the little professional Army which saved the civilised world and England's honour in the still-victorious retreat from Mons to the Marne. For, as the General said, in further explanation of what must seem to the enemy a military miracle, something altogether above and beyond scientific expectation, "The Old Army was the nation in miniature. The New Army is the nation itself."

The poems here collected give, it is true, a stirring picture of the outward and visible semblance of modern scientific warfare. But modern battles are so vast and so extended in both space and time that composed battle-pieces, such as have come down to us from the far-off centuries of archery and ballad-making, may no longer be looked for. The thread on which all such pictures are strung—the new impressions such as "The Assault" and old ballads such as "Agincourt, or the English Bowman's Glory"—is the insular conception of fighting as the greatest of all great games, that which is the most shrewdly spiced with deadly danger. The Germans, and