No More Learning

Erskine Macdonald:--The following poems from _Soldier Poets_:--"The
Beach Road by the Wood," by Lieutenant Geoffrey Howard; "Before Action,"
by the late Lieutenant W. N. Hodgson ("Edward Melbourne"); "Courage," by
Lieutenant Dyneley Hussey; "Optimism," by Lieutenant A. Victor
Ratcliffe; "The Battlefield," by Major Sidney Oswald; "To an Old Lady
Seen at a Guest-House for Soldiers," by Corporal Alexander Robertson;
"The Casualty Clearing Station," by Lieutenant Gilbert Waterhouse; and
"Hills of Home," by Lance-Corporal Malcolm Hemphrey.

The Macmillan Company:--"To Belgium"; "Verdun"; "To a Mother," and "Song
of the Red Cross," by Eden Phillpotts, from _Plain Song, 1914-1916_
(published also by William Heinemann, London); "The Island of Skyros,"
by John Masefield; "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight," from _The Congo
and Other Poems_, by Vachel Lindsay; "O Glorious France," by Edgar Lee
Masters, from _Songs and Satires_; "Christmas, 1915," from _Poems and
Plays_, by Percy MacKaye; "The Hellgate of Soissons," by Herbert
Kaufman, from _The Hellgate of Soissons_; "Spring in War-Time," by Sara
Teasdale, from _Rivers to the Sea_; and "Retreat," "The Messages," and
"Between the Lines," by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson.

Messrs. Macmillan & Company:--"Australia to England," by Archibald T.
Strong, from _Sonnets of the Empire_, and "Men Who March Away," by
Thomas Hardy, from _Satires of Circumstance_.

Elkin Mathews:--"The British Merchant Service" (the _Spectator_), by C.
Fox Smith, from _The Naval Crown_.

John Murray:--"The Sign," and "The Trenches," by Lieutenant Frederic
Manning.

The Princeton University Press:--"To France," by Herbert Jones, from _A
Book of Princeton Verse_.

Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons:--"I Have a Rendezvous with Death," and
"Champagne, 1914-1915," by the late Alan Seeger, from _Poems_.

Messrs.
Sherman, French & Company:--"The _William P. Frye_" (_New York
Times_), by Jeanne Robert Foster, from _Wild Apples_.

Messrs. Sidgwick & Jackson:--"We Willed It Not" (_The Sphere_), by John
Drinkwater; "Three Hills" (London _Times_), by Everard Owen, from _Three
Hills, and Other Poems_; "The Volunteer," and "The Fallen Subaltern," by
Lieutenant Herbert Asquith, from _The Volunteer, and Other Poems_.

Messrs. Truslove and Hanson:--"A Mother's Dedication," by Margaret
Peterson, from _The Women's Message_.




INTRODUCTION


Because man is both militant and pacific, he has expressed in
literature, as indeed in the other forms of art, his pacific and
militant moods. Nor are these moods, of necessity, incompatible. War may
become the price of peace, and peace may so decay as inevitably to bring
about war. Of the dully unresponsive pacificist and the jingo patriot,
quick to anger, the latter no doubt is the more dangerous to the cause
of true freedom, yet both are "undesirable citizens. " He who believes
that peace is illusory and spurious, unless it be based upon justice and
liberty, will be proud to battle, if battle he must, for the sake of
those foundations.

For the most part, the poetry of war, undertaken in this spirit, has
touched and exalted such special qualities as patriotism, courage, self-
sacrifice, enterprise, and endurance. Where it has tended to glorify war
in itself, it is chiefly because war has released those qualities, so to
speak, in stirring and spectacular ways; and where it has chosen to
round upon war and to upbraid it, it is because war has slain ardent and
lovable youths and has brought misery and despair to women and old
people. But the war poet has left the mere arguments to others. For
himself, he has seen and felt. Envisaging war from various angles, now
romantically, now realistically, now as the celebrating chronicler, now
as the contemplative interpreter, but always in a spirit of catholic
curiosity, he has sung, the fall of Troy, the Roman adventures, the
mediaeval battles and crusades, the fields of Agincourt and Waterloo,
and the more modern revolutions.