BOOKS.

WAR-TIME POEMS.*

Si. CAMMAERTS has collected under the title of New Belgian Poems' the verses written by him from Easter, 1915, to Easter, 1916. They need no commendation to our readers, who have had many occasions of recognizing in these columns his incontestable claim to be regarded as a true interpreter of the unconquerable soul of Belgium. Many moods are reflected in this volume, passionate love of country, a noble indigna- tion, but above all endurance and hope—attends ct espire is the key- note of his message. Several of the poems take the form of portraits, of which the most striking is the contrast between the Kaiser and King Albert. and the most touching that of the old woman, living in a cottage only fifty yards from the German trenches, whom on account of her constant smile the soldiers have nicknamed La Josonde. There is also a fine tribute to the memory of Lieutenant Warneford. In the mystical vein we may note the beautiful allegory headed " Paques, 1916," the confession of the dying soldier, and " The Angels of Mona." Belief in God and the ultimate triumph of justice are at the core of all that M. Cammaerte writes. An impassioned simplicity animates his verse ; witness the lines which conclude the beautiful poem, "L'Aniour do in Petrie'

" C'est le meilleur de notre corps Et le plus pur de notre sang, C'est ce qui rappolle nos morte Et nous fait souhaiter nos enfants. Cost In couleur de notre vie Et In savour de nos chansons, C'eet la deuce folio De recolter cc qu'on Berne, Et l'abaurde passion De possider ce qu'on aims . . C'est tout ce qu'on ne pout dire Et tout ce qu on sent, Tout ce qu'on ne pout traduire Qu'en le chantant.'

In Songs of Botrel' Miss Winifred Byers has made a selection of some forty pieces by the famous Breton poet, appointed chansonnier our armies by M. Millerand. Most of these are taken from his pre-war verse and deal with the "simple annals of the poor "in Brittany, but Miss Byers has given us spirited versions of his stirring " Rosalie "—a song in honour of the bayonet—of the touching address " to the wounded," and of the song of the soldier from Paimpol, dedicated to the brave " Fusi- liers-marina." And she has been fortunate in securing a charming prefatory letter from the poet himself, dated from the trenches in the Argonne, in which he writes modestly of his " ephimeres chansonnettes " and with generous enthusiasm for the new and indissoluble ties that knit France and England. As Botrel has been adversely criticized by some superior persons, Miss Byers has done well to print the testimony of Anatole le Bras to the distinguished simplicity with which Botrel has expressed in verse the soul of Brittany.

Of the verse that has come straight from the trenches, the Ballads of Battle,' by Lance-Corporal Joseph Lee, of the Black Watch, are among the very best. In him the " Jocks " have found a true interpreter. The horror, the exultation, the weariness, and the humour of trench warfare are here, and at the back of it all the vision of " the little croft beneath the Ben." " Pick and Spade " and " The Mouth Organ " are real soldiers' songs, and " Macfarlane's Dug-out " might have been signed by Mr. Kipling. The spirit of Corporal Lee's verse is generous, alike to ally and foe, and at times he sounds a deeper note, as in the remarkable poem "The Green Grass" on the tragic mysteries of war, or the address to his grandfather who fought at Waterloo. The underlying seriousness and true poetic quality of the book are best expressed in the quatrain which serves as its prologue :- " I writ these songs in a dead man's book ; I stole the strain from a dead man's look ; And if much of death there may seem to be 'Tis because the dead are so dear to me."

Corporal Lee's spirited sketches and portraits add greatly to the

• (1) New Belgian Poems. By Emile Cammaerta. London : John Lane. Ps. ed. net.)—(2) Songs of Botrel. Translated by Winifred Byers. London : Holden and Burlingham. [2e. ed. net.]—(3) Ballads of Battle. Written and Illustrated by lance-Corporal Joseph Lee, 4th Black Watch. London : John Murray. 12s. ed. net.]—(4) Memoirs and Poems of A. W. Si. C. Tisdall, V.C. London : SIdgwIck and Jackson. ps. ed. net.)----(5) The Quest of Truth, and other Poems. By H. Ztalereaction.herOxliford : ersdnet..]-1-1 -(6) Song o.1 the Darda- -(17)anitnaricte and After. By HenryFank E. Westbrook': London :and Co.ck ednil Co. [Is. net.)—(S) Songs of the Sailor Man. By " T.B.D." London : Hodder and Stoughton. Ile. neta---(0) A Naval Motley. By Lieutenant N. M. F. Corbett, B.N. London : Methuen and Co.net.}—(10) The Holy War. By Katharine Tynan. London: Eildgwick and Jackson. [Ss. ed. net.)—(11) Made in England. By Owen Seaman. London : Constable and Co. 11s. net.)—(12) A Cornish Raul. By Bernard Moore. London : Arthur Stockwell. (2s. net.)—(13) German Peace. By D. S. MacColl. Glasgow : J. MacLehose and Sons. London : Macmillan and Co. [6(1.)—(14) The Pageant of War. By Lady Margaret Sack- sine. London : Simpkin and Marshall. net.1 attractiveness of his little volume, which is dedicated to the comrades in arms so faithfully and affectionately portrayed in his verse.

Lieutenant Tisdall, V.C, who came of a distinguished Irish family, crowned an exceptionally brilliant career at Bedford School and Cam- bridge by an heroic death at the Dardanelles, shortly after the magnifi- cent exploit in April, 1915, for which the Victoria Cross was awarded

him nearly a year after his death. The bulk of this memorial volume' is made up of reminiscences of his friends at school and Cambridge, and those who were with him on active service. It is a noble record of a fine and richly endowed nature, of which the dominant oharacteristio ie described by one of his schoolfellows as " a combination of disregard for consequences and regard for duty." His life was greater than his poetry, most of which was unhappily lost, but the little sheaf of verses

written between 1909-1912 is full of promise. There is a delightful epitaph on Dr. Verrall, in which he pictures his meeting with Euripides, Sophoclee, and Aeschylus, and a beautiful little poem on Norfolk, full alike of love of life and Nature and " divine discontent" :- " go to Norfolk at the summer's close And see again the hillsides gilt with grain, The glassy fords, the woods, the turnip rows, The dim, sad purple of the marsh again.

rn see the great farms and small villages,

The towerloss churches whore few people pray, The ruined abbeys in whose quires the breeze Sings sadly of an unreturning day.

And then P11 walk long miles and swim and run

And look for hours on the flowers that grow Purple on the sea-crowned marshes in the sun And hope to change the world ; it needs it so."

His own best epitaph is in the letter written home by one of his men.

" You would see it in the papers about our dear officer ' going down,' Mr. Tisdall. He was one of England's bravest men. All his mon about cried when ho went because all the boys thought the world of him."

The poems of the late Lieutenant H. Rex Freston,' who left Oxford in the middle of his undergraduate career to join the Army, and was killed in action last January, are greater in spirit than in execution. .Ks Sir Walter Raleigh says of him, " the best poems in the world are not so good a gift as what ho has given to his country." Ho was one who loved home and Oxford dearly, but cheerfully made the great renun- ciation; for though he seems to have had a presentiment that he was one of the baud redituri, there is no murmur of complaint or self-pity in these verses written from camp and barracks and from the front. As he puts it in " The Gift," "to him and many like him there seemed no other way." "Better die a faithful failure than not to have dared at all," was his motto, and this thought sustained him in many hours

of weariness and fatigue. The dedication to his mother and the lines

headed " Memory " are beautiful in their simple filial piety, and the lines on " The Old Masters," in which he compares the calm strength of the older poets with the clever tricks of modern verse, have a fine

thought nobly expressed :- " How shall they help me as I go To meet man's old-accustomed foe ? What help is learned of selfish breath To pass the giant gates of Death ? "

There are points of contact and divergence between two recently published volumes of Australian verse, Song of the Dardanelles" and Anzac and After.% Mr. 'Westbrook, who served with the Australian Field Artillery in Gallipoli from- April to October, 1915, never wrote a line of verse until he entered the Army two years ago. Mr. Henry Lawson, one of the best-known Australian poets and a typical repre- sentative of the robust and uncompromising spirit of the Sydney Bulletin,

though, as he tells us, ho has been at the front all the days of his life, " in campaigns all hopeless, in bitterest strife," sadly acknowledges that

age and infirmity have tied him to his armchair and fireside at home. But both are passionately loyal Australians, strong Imperialists, and generous in their recognition of the " new John Bull "—compare Mr. Westbrook's " Percy, a soldier swell," with Mr. Lawson's tribute to the silent English gentleman. Mr. Westbrook's philosophy is summed up in a curious but illuminating poem called " Why ? " in which, while admitting that what made him a soldier is a mystery still, he continues :- " But home's not a home if it's not worth a fight— All things put together I know I've done right. I've a lot to be lost and dern little to gain, But if things were reversed I'd just do it again."

He feels the lose of his comrades keenly :— " Somebody's bungled the job, it is said; Who, it isn't for me to know. But leaving the place where you fought and died, Is stabbing my heart to go.'

And again, though acknowledging the warmth of his welcome in London, his heart's in Australia, on the banks of the Mitchell at Lindenow. Mr. Lawson, who is of Danish origin, has some striking poems, "mostly Slavonic," on the soul of the Russian peasant ; on our debt to Drake and Ralegh and Wellington ; on the different types of " Dawes of War " ; and a really wonderful tribute to the Salvation Army in

" Booth's Dram."

Songs of the Sailor Man,8 by " T.B.D.," and A Nasal Motley,' by Lieutenant N. M. F. Corbett, R.N., both written at sea by naval officers, are both admirable in their different ways. "T.B.D." has perhaps more

" Who praise your God although He slay, Who are uplifted from the We know you in a murky day, By the sad glorious air you keep."

And to those whose pride is greater than their pain these tender and maternal consolations will bring-healing and comfort :- " Mercy of God, they are given, not taken away ! There's a.faee in the doorway, a foot on the -floor. They:sit-down beside us in:the shadows grey,- Lay their.heads oft our breasts as oft before."

The debt of the elders to the flower of our youth who die. in Flanders to keep England safe and peaceful, and above all the hope of. reunion, are constant themes of these beautiful poems, many of.- them inspired by, personal loss. The war has lent a new and noble eignificanee to the saying maxima debetur pueres reierentis, and none of our poets has expressed it more poignantly than "Katharine 'lesson."

Sir Owen Seaman reprints some thirty more of his admirable. verses from -Punch under tho title of Made in Engdand.11 Satire predominates; sainetimes light-hearted, as in the ode, in the measureof Shelley's "Sky- lark," to the first Zeppelin over London; sometimes seathhes,_as, in the denunciation of the pedants and cosmopolitans who shame their English breed—the Anglo-Bosch, in short. And once or twice, notably in "The Wayside Calvary," Sir Owen Seaman is wholly serious and inspired by a noble indignation.

. There is a charming poem in Mr. Bernard Moore's A.Cornish Haul" on " Gifts," in which the speaker describes the various. presents made to his mother on her birthday and goes on:- " I hadn' got no pennies an' I couldn' carve an' knit ; nothin' fit for Mother with a birthday look to it ; I'd■ witty get ..a tingly tune a-rural:a' in my head, An' so I made a lir song an' sang to her instead."

A Cornish Haul is fall of " tingly tunes," full of local -colour and local patriotism and racy local idioms. Mr. Moore writes of Cornwall is peace and war, of Connelepride and Cornish clay, of fishermen and their boata, and whatever he writes gees with a lilt and a swing.

Mr. D. S. MacColl has followed up his scarifying satires on the neutrality of Mr. Woodrow Wilson. and the Pope by a. third -addressed to Herr Houston Stewart Chamberlain on A German Peace.' It only runs to thirty quatrain, but within that narrow compass gives a brilliant and lacerating picture of the antecedents. and the perverted philosophy of a renegade.

Lady Margaret Sackville's poems" leave a somewhat confused impression. In the main they are a defence and vindication of paeifi- cistee and dreamers. She writes of the Pope's manifesto : " ono voice only through the reek and roar Sounds with a simple and august appeal " ; yet in " Pax Ventura" and the lines on the mon who go to Flanders she contrasts the apathy of those at-home with the sacrifice of those inspired by "a holy passion brave and high." "Not for this peace that was our shame Do ye, oh our redeemers, die." The poem which gives its name to the collection is exclusively devoted to illus. tatting the sinister and tragic aide of war to the entire exclusion of its heroism and self-sacrifice.

imagination, And is remarkable gift of packing naval history or the-root facts of our commercial expansion into a short but stirring ballad. Most of his poems have for their text a signal—e.g.; "&S. Briton will arriro at it a.m. with provisions for the Fleet," or " Ship will'complete with coal on arrival." The animating spirit and solidarity of the-Navy are to-ho found in "The Reason Why" and "The Seventeenth Shackle." For• ingenious rhyming the " Crystal Palace- Army" is- a. veritable tour de force, but-it is a faithful and high-spirited record as well'. Both writers are at one in-their generons recognition- of the work done by-the Moroantile Marine—" T.B.D." in " The Merchant Skipper's Song," and Lieutenant Corbett in " Convoy." Lieutenant Corbett has a stir- ring sang in-praise of the stokers, " the-lusty boys,- the dusty boys; the beggars who make the ship- go," and -in lighter vein he writes. most amusingly of " A Naval Examination " and" The Bores of the Navy." But he, too, can be serious,- and- there is nothing finer in eitherof these Iwo ‘splendid- little books than the "lines written -somewhere in the North Sea," from which' we-quote -the last stanza :-

" How long ago and far it seems,: this. peaceful country of our dreams, Of fruitful fields and parting streams—the-England that we know : Who holds within.her sealirt ring all that we love, and love can bring ; Alt, Life were beta little thing to give to keep her so."

" Katharine Tynan's " new- volume " is dedicated- to the mourners of the war,