Ambulance Brigade Hospital is considered to be possibly the best in France.

In admirably built huts, equipped with the very latest appliances, are beds for between five and six hundred patients. The staff consists of 19 officers under LieutenantColonel Trimble, C.M.G., L.R.C.P.Ed., a matron, an assistant matron, 53 trained sisters, and 24 V.A.D.'s; assisted by a Provisional Company of R.A.M.C., composed of St. John Ambulance men, enlisted for the duration of the war, with a strength of 141 of all ranks. There are pathological, X-ray, dental, and electro-cardiograph departments; two finely equipped operating theatres; dispensary; and ice and soda water making machinery. While the entire hospital, including the Provisional Company of R.A.M.C. men, is fed from one large kitchen.

One has only to look at photographs of the gay flower garden in the spacious quadrangle; of scores of sick and wounded. men sitting or lying in the shady galleries and the covered ways that connect the wards, while the Australian band plays in the hot sunshine; or those long white wards with the white eight-pointed cross on its black ground upon the coverlid of each bed, to see what a haven of mercy has been prepared for our soldiers.

It is a token that the ancient Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem continues its beneficent work of tending sick and wounded soldiers, aided by the wonders of every appliance that modern science can give, as did its Knights Hospitallers over 700 years ago.

ROSE G. KINGSLEY.

SOME SOLDIER POETS

1. 1914 and other Poems. By RUPERT BROOKE. Sidgwick and Jackson. 1915.

2. Pages from a Family Journal. [Edited by Lord DESBOROUGH.] Eton. Privately printed. 1916.

3. In Memoriam: Auberon Herbert. By MAURICE BARING. Oxford: B. H. Blackwell.

1917.

4. Worple Flat and other Poems. By E. WYNDHAM TENNANT. Oxford: B. H. Blackwell. 1916.

5. Ardours and Endurances. By ROBERT NICHOLS. Chatto and Windus.

1917.

6. Over the Brazier. By ROBERT GRAVES. The Poetry Bookshop. 1916.

7. The Old Huntsman and other Poems. By SIEGFRIED SASSOON. W. Heinemann. 1917.

THE

HE two years which preceded the outbreak of the war were marked in this country by a revival of public interest in the art of poetry. To this movement coherence was given and organisation introduced by Mr. Edward Marsh's now-famous volume entitled Georgian Poetry.' The effect of this collection-for it is hardly correct to call it an anthology -of the best poems written by the youngest poets since 1911 was two-fold it acquainted readers with work few had the 'leisure or the zeal to investigate,' and it brought the writers themselves together in a corporate and selected relation. I do not recollect that this had been done-except prematurely and partially by The Germ' of 1850-since the 'England's 'Parnassus' and 'England's Helicon' of 1600. In point of fact the only real precursor of Mr. Marsh's venture in our whole literature is the Songs and Sonnettes' of 1557, commonly known as Tottel's Miscellany.' Tottel brought together, for the first time, the lyrics of Wyatt, Surrey, Churchyard, Vaux, and Bryan, exactly as Mr. Marsh called public attention to Rupert Brooke, James Elroy Flecker and the rest of the Georgians, and he thereby fixed the names of those poets, as Mr. Marsh has fixed those of our youngest fledglings, on the roll of English literature.

The general tone of the latest poetry, up to the moment of the outbreak of hostilities, was pensive, instinct with natural piety, given somewhat in excess to description of landscape, tender in feeling, essentially unaggressive except towards the clergy and towards other versifiers of an earlier generation. There was absolutely not a trace in any one of the young poets of that arrogance and vociferous defiance which marked German verse during the same years. These English shepherds might hit at their elders with their staves, but they had turned their swords into pruning-hooks and had no scabbards to rattle. This is a point which might have attracted notice, if we had not all been too drowsy in the lap of our imperial prosperity to observe the signs of the times in Berlin. Why did no one call our attention to the beating of the big drum which was going on so briskly on the Teutonic Parnassus? At all events, there was no echo of such a noise in the chambers of ' imagery' which contained Mr. Gordon Bottomley, or in Mr. W. H. Davies' wandering songs of joy,' or on the great 'hills and solemn chanting seas' where Mr. John Drinkwater waited for the advent of beauty. And the guns of August 1914 found Mr. W. W. Gibson encompassed by one dim, blue 'infinity of starry peace.' There is a sort of German Georgian 'Poets' in existence; in time to come a comparison of its pages with those of Mr. Marsh may throw a side-light on the question, Who prepared the War?

The youngest poets were more completely taken by surprise in August 1914 than their elders. The earliest expressions of lyric military feeling came from veteran voices. It was only proper that the earliest of all should be the Poet Laureate's address to England, ending with the prophecy:

Much suffering shall cleanse thee!

But thou through the flood

Shalt win to Salvation,

To Beauty through blood.'

As sensation, however, followed sensation in those first terrific and bewildering weeks, much was happening that called forth with the utmost exuberance the primal emotions of mankind; there was full occasion for

' exultations, agonies,

And love, and man's unconquerable mind."

By September a full chorus was vocal, led by our national veteran, Mr. Thomas Hardy, with his Song of the Soldiers':

'What of the faith and fire within us,
Men who march away

Ere the barn-cocks say

Night is growing gray,

To hazards whence no tears can win us;
What of the faith and fire within us,
Men who march away?'

Already, before the close of the autumn of 1914, four or five anthologies of war-poems were in the press, and the desire of the general public to be fed with patriotic and emotional verse was manifested in unmistakable ways. We had been accustomed for some time past to the issue of a multitude of little pamphlets of verse, often very carefully written, and these the critics had treated with an indulgence which would have whitened the hair of the stern reviewers of forty years ago. The youthful poets, almost a tradeunion in themselves, protected one another by their sedulous generosity. It was very unusual to see anything criticised, much less 'slated'; the balms of praise were poured over every rising head, and immortalities were predicted by the dozen. Yet, as a rule, the sale of these little poetic pamphlets had been small, and they had been read only by those who had a definite object in doing so.

The immediate success of the anthologies, however, proved that the war had aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse, an attention anxious to be stirred or soothed by the assiduous company of poets who had been ripening their talents in a little clan. These had now an eager world ready to listen to them. The result has been surprising; we may even, without exaggeration, call it unparalleled. There has never before, in the world's history, been an epoch which has tolerated and even welcomed such a flood of verse as has been poured forth over Great Britain during the last three years. These years have seen the publication, as I am credibly informed, of more than five hundred volumes of new and original poetry. It would be the silliest complaisance to pretend that all of this, or much of it, or any but a very little of it, has been of permanent value. Much of it

is windy and superficial, striving in wild vague terms to express great agitations which are obscurely felt by the poet. There was too much of the bathos of rhetoric, especially at first; too much addressing the German as thou fell, bloody 'brute,' and the like, which broke no bones and took no trenches. When once it was understood that, as a cancelled line in Tennyson's Maud' has it,

'The long, long canker of peace was over and done,'

the sentiments of indignation and horror made themselves felt with considerable vivacity. In this direction, however, none of the youngest poets approached Sir Owen Seaman in the vigour of their invective. Most of them seemed to be overpowered by the political situation, and few could free themselves from their inured pacific habit of speech. Even when they wrote of Belgium, the Muse seemed rather to weep than to curse. Looking back to the winter of 1914, it is almost pathetic to observe how difficult it was for our easy-going British bards to hate the Germans. There was a good deal of ineffective violence, and considerable misuse of technical terms, caused, in many cases, by a too hasty reference to newspaper reports of gallantry under danger, in the course of which the more or less obscure verbiage of military science was picturesquely and inaccurately employed. As the slightly censorious reader looks back upon these poems of the beginning of the war, he cannot resist a certain impatience. In the first place, there is a family likeness which makes it impossible to distinguish one writer from another, and there is a tendency to a smug approval of British prejudice, and to a horrible confidence in England's power of muddling through,' which look rather ghastly in the light of the autumn of 1917.

There was, however, a new spirit presently apparent, and a much healthier one. The bards became soldiers, and in crossing over to France and Flanders, each had packed his flute in his kit. They began to send home verses in which they translated into music their actual experiences and their authentic emotions. We found ourselves listening to young men who had something new, and what was better, something noble to say to us, and we returned to the national spirit which inspired the Chansons de Geste in the eleventh century. To the