Page:The Muse in Arms, Osborn (ed), 1917.djvu/13

Rh even our Allies, cannot understand why this stout old nation persists in thinking of war as a sport; they do not know that sportsmanship is our new homely name, derived from a racial predilection for comparing great things with small, for the chevalerie of the Middle Ages. In "The English Bowman's Glory," written before any of our co-operative pastimes were thought of, the fine idea is veiled in this homely term:

Light is thrown on this phase of the British soldier's mentality by the verse (examples of which I have selected) he writes in honour of the games and field-sports in which he acquired the basal elements of all true discipline—confidence in his companions and readiness to sacrifice the desire for personal distinction to the common interest of his team, which is, of course, a mimic army in being.

But it is as an efflorescence of the spirit that this collection of war poetry by those who know war from within is most engrossing. There has been nothing like it before in the history of English literature, nor, indeed, of any other literature. Even the long agony of the Napoleonic Wars, so fertile in picturesque episodes which stand out in the flux of indistinguishable incident, gave us only two or three poems by soldier poets. The celebration of its great days and personalities was left to the professional poets, who wove out of hearsay their gleaming webs of poetical rhetoric. At school we learn their well-made songs and odes by heart and find them the provender of