Page:The Muse in Arms, Osborn (ed), 1917.djvu/22

xviii to die of its own soullessness, perhaps to run down suddenly like a piece of clockwork with an exhausted spring.

Another distinguishing characteristic of the work of our soldier-poets is the absence of the note of what may perhaps be called professional patriotism. The word "patriot" does not occur once in all the pieces I have read. Why? Because the soldier's love of his land, for which he willingly sacrifices all that he has been, all that he might be, is something inexpressive, never to be directly intimated, much less anatomised, in terms of 'ics and 'isms. Even so married lovers, in the first abounding joy of possession, never discuss the nature of love, but talk as a rule of trifling matters which are yet looked on as symbols of their singular intimacy. As soon as they begin to philosophise about passion, the true at-one-ment has passed; they are on the way to being merely in love with loving rather than with one another. The soldier instinctively feels that, as soon as ever love of one's country and all that inhabits there is thought of as "patriotism," the best of its spiritual fragrance is beginning to be lost. It is then as a flower entered in a botanist's museum; a quality once soul-compelling and inexplicable which must now be explained and justified; a thing to be dried, dissected, lectured upon, argued about. And in the end this mere philosophic 'ism is apt to become nothing better than a form of politics; a trick of logomachy which the partisan may seize for his own benefit, and refuse to all his opponents. Hence, the oft-quoted saying of Dr. Johnson, the most English of Englishmen, which has been so frequently and so foolishly used as an argument in favour of the cosmopolite's contention that man is but "parcelled out in men" by the sense of nationality. The soldier who devotes himself to the service, blissful, sacrificial, keen, of his one and only