Page:The Muse in Arms, Osborn (ed), 1917.djvu/15

Rh where they dared and endured, for those who marched to it there will always be an incidental beauty, an incommunicable enchantment, in its cheap, catchy rhythms. The words mattered not at all; or rather, each singer set his own meaning on them; so that "Tipperary," say, was for one man a little upland hamlet in the Pennines:

and for a second the very next halting-place on the route-march, and for a third Berlin, the goal of the great adventure, and for a fourth a city shining far above and beyond the mirages of mortality. The time has not yet come to collect the soldiers' songs in many tongues, which are a product of this world-war, and will have, for all who read them centuries hence, the beauty of memorial that is felt rather than heard or seen—the same beauty of romantic reality which stirred the soul of Sir Philip Sidney when he heard "Chevy Chase" sung by a blind crowder, though, strange to say, it never moved him to make war poetry of his own. These songs will be few, far too few—for the gramophone has enabled the music-hall song to conquer even such border-lands of art-music as Serbia and Montenegro and Roumania, where it now takes its place even at the camp-fires and silences the makers of folk-song with a brazen, indefatigable voice.

But for the music-hall song and another malign influence, this war might have given us a few English marching-songs equal in power and freshness to those which were sung by the men in blue and the men in grey, who wrought for the great Republic of the West a baptism of blood and tears. The other malign influence is that strange, literary convention whereby the rank-and-file of our fighting men, by land and by sea, are made to speak a kind of Cockneyese