Page:The Muse in Arms, Osborn (ed), 1917.djvu/20

xvi hates his enemy, howsoever hateful, when he has wreaked his righteous anger on him in action; and the last thing an Englishman would think of doing, when he returns to billets, is to write in the style of Lissauer's "Hymn of Hate." In one letter which accompanied a selection of verse, hasty but impressive, I read this sagacious saying: "Not worth while trying to score off the Boches in verse—we can do that better when fighting them." So invective is left to the non-combatant versifier, who has not the safety-valve of action in arms for his tumultuous feelings. Looking deeper into this matter, we see that the British soldier's attitude, finally expressed in the words of one of them, "Well, it's Fritz; he can't help it, poor devil," is really based on the axiom of Christian morality that it is our duty to hate the offence, not the offender. Furthermore, his shrewd common sense enables him to see that all this "raging against the enemy," which Bismarck praised as commendable in a war-like nation, is a waste of will-power and tissue. The tenacity of the British people in warfare is largely due, no doubt, to their faculty of economising emotions in a crisis, of avoiding all the excesses in word and thought which make for nervous exhaustion in a nation or an individual. Hatred, as psychologists teach us, uses up nervous energy; the very visage of the hater is that of an athlete who is making his final effort in some feat of strength or swiftness.

Very little verse seems to have been written by German soldiers since the war began. Such tributes as were paid to "Father Blücher" by his men are altogether lacking; even Hindenburg, though supposed to be fashioned of the same knotted timber as Luther and Bismarck, has not inspired a single soldier-poet. The truth is that Hindenburg is a deity, or rather a fetish, only to the non-combatant