While he took off his cap and his gloves and his coat,
And his bag and his thonged Sam Browne. . .

Then follows a picture of the dog's master on leave fondling all the drawings he had left behind, and opening the cupboard to look at his belongings every time he came :

But now I know what a dog doesn't know
And all your life you will never know
What I wouldn't tell you even if I could,
That the last time we waved him away
Willy went for good.

...

He ruminates over the good days that are now over for ever:

When summer comes again,

And the long sunsets fade,

We shall have to go on playing the feeble game for two That since the war we've played.

And though you run expectant as you always do

To the uniforms we meet,

You'll never find Willy among all the soldiers

In even the longest street.

I must sit, not speaking, on the sofa,

While you lie asleep on the floor;

For he's suffered a thing that dogs couldn't dream of, And he won't be coming here any more.

I pass over Under, which is an unintelligible nightmare, and the long poem on Rivers, which almost succeeds in being great in spite of its lack of rhyme, and he finishes with a sonnet which many people place at the head of his achievement:

I shall make beauty out of many things:

Lights, colours, motions, sky and earth and sea, The soft unbosoming of all the springs

Which that inscrutable hand allows to me,

Odours of flowers, sounds of smitten strings,

The voice of many a wind in many a tree, Fields, rivers, moors, swift feet and floating wings, Rocks, caves, and hills that stand and clouds that flee. Men also and women, beautiful and dear,

Shall come and pass

and leave a fragrant breath;
And my own heart, laughter and pain and fear,
The majesties of evil and of death;
But never, never shall my verses trace
The loveliness of your most lovely face.

A poem which taken together with Envoi may well be said to place Mr Squire high among contemporary poets:

Beloved, when my heart's awake to God
And all the world becomes his testimony,
In you I most do see, in your brave spirit,
Erect and certain, flashing deeds of light,
A pure jet from the fountain of all being,
A scripture clearer than all else to read.
And when belief was dead and God a myth,
And the world seemed a wandering mote of evil,
Endurable only by its impermanence,

And all the planets perishable urns

Of perished ashes, to you alone I clung

Amid the unspeakable loneliness of the universe,

I

III

SIEGFRIED SASSOON

T seems a far cry from the old days of the Bullingdon, the Rousers, and the Loder, when whips

were cracked in “ Peck," and young men rejoiced

in the hunt of the fox with the Bicester and the "Drag," to the war-poetry of 1917, but Mr Sassoon has effectually bridged the distance.

In The Old Huntsman and Other Poems he has collected some seventy-odd poems, which mark him out as one of the little group of young warriors who felt impelled to put their impressions of war into verse, one with them in his appreciation of the beautiful and his curiosity about the dead, but not in the least like any other of them in his manner of writing or the conclusions at which he arrives about the effect which fighting has upon him.

In the first place he is colloquial, pellucidly clear, simple, terse, and straightforward. He dwells rather on the ironic side of it all; as a satirist in verse he excels. He, least of all the younger poets, can find glamour and nobility in the war. He paints ruthlessly what he sees, and what he sees is no thin red line or charge of heavy or light brigade. For the most part he regards war as an intolerable waste of good material.

To any Dead Officer who left School for the Army in 1914, he writes:

Good-bye, old lad! Remember me to God,

And tell Him that our Politicians swear

They won't give in till Prussian Rule's been trod
Under the heel of England. . . . Are you there? . .
Yes... and the War won't end for at least two years;
But we've got stacks of men . . . I'm blind with tears,
Staring into the dark. Cheero!

I wish they'd killed you in a decent show.

This reads amazingly like prose, but the white heat of his indignation raises the simple theme of his thought up out of the ruck of ordinary commonplace, and the very ordinariness of it takes on the guise of something that is unforgettable; it may not be poetry, according to the critic's canon, but it strikes home and we feel, with the writer, "blind with tears" at the purposelessness of such wanton destruction.

In the poem which gives the title to the book we are shown an old huntsman living over again by his cottage fireside great days of old with the hounds. He ponders on his probable future when he is dead:

Hell was the coldest scenting land I've known,
And both my whips were always lost, and hounds
Would never get their heads down; and a man
On a great yawing chestnut trying to cast 'em
While I was in a corner pounded by

The ugliest hog-backed stile you've clapped your eyes on.
There was an iron-spiked fence round all the coverts,
And civil-spoken keepers I couldn't trust,

And the main earth unstopped.

There will be many lovers of the chase who will sympathise with that picture and turn with a thrill of further appreciation to this:

I've come to think of God as something like
The figure of a man the old Duke was
When I was turning hounds to Nimrod King,
Before his Grace was took so bad with gout,

And had to quit the saddle. Tall and spare,
Clean-shaved and grey, with shrewd, kind eyes that

twinkled

And easy walk Lord God might be like that,
Sitting alone in a great room of books

Some evening after hunting.

Already we can see why Mr Sassoon dedicated his book to Thomas Hardy. There is the same passionate love of the countryside, the same sympathetic vision of the rustic, the same keen irony and Swift-like detestation of frippery and unreality.

Mr Sassoon, like many other subalterns taking a hand in the “great game,” is filled with loathing at war under modern conditions, and he is too courageous to pretend that it is otherwise with him. He can even dare to sympathise with and openly print the sentiments of the one-legged man, which would certainly be censored or else howled down by nine-tenths of the fire-eating civilian population :

Propped on a stick he viewed the August weald;
Squat orchard trees and oasts with painted cowls ;
A homely, tangled hedge, a corn-stooked field,
With sound of barking dogs and farmyard fowls.
And he'd come home again to find it more
Desirable than ever it was before.

How right it seemed that he should reach the span
Of comfortable years allowed to man!
Splendid to eat and sleep and choose a wife,

Safe with his wound, a citizen of life.

He hobbled blithely through the garden gate,
And thought: "Thank God they had to amputate!"

It is just as well that when future generations find themselves forgetting, amid the calm, slack waters of peace, the horrors that belong to war, they should