anthologizing war or inspiration...hehas glimpses of the ultimate significance of warfare’.^24 Far
from warning of the pity of war, this late war book aimed to illustrate the warrior’s
‘singular capacity for remembering the splendour and forgetting the squalor’ of his
‘dreadful vocation’. Selecting only work by ‘the new soldier poet’—of which he
says ‘There has been nothing like it before in the history of English literature’—he
presents his anthology as ‘the first coherent picture of the British warrior’s moods
and emotions in war-time’, therefore ‘more valuable than the huge harvest of war
poetry by civilian verse-makers’. Dismissingthe work of German soldiers as of
‘less value than Zulu war-chants’, he praises the ‘modern Sidneys and Raleighs’
who ‘keep to conventional forms’ and ‘the traditional currency of thought’. Robert
Graves called it a ‘typical anthology’ of the time, with ‘authors drawn from almost
every regiment’, ‘all very gallant and idealistic but with hardly a poet among them’.^25
Setting the mould for later anthologies,The Muse in Armsis divided into broadly
chronological thematic sections. Starting with ‘The Mother Land’, it graduates to
‘Battle Pieces’ and on to ‘In Memoriam’ and ‘The Future Hope’ by way of ‘The
Christian Soldier’, ‘School and College’, and ‘The Chivalry of Sport’. Though it
prints three poems by Gurney and Graves, including ‘David and Goliath’, there are
only two by Sassoon, the uncharacteristicearly ‘Absolution’, which affirms ‘We are
the happy legion’, and the tougher ‘The Rear-Guard’, which speaks of ‘Unloading
hell behind him step by step’.^26 The ‘happy legion’ falls easily into place in Osborn’s
anthology, with its happy allegiance to the classical past, Christian Church, and
public school. In ‘The Road’, Gordon Alchin equates modern soldiers with ‘Caesar’s
legions’, while Alexander Robertson sees in Gallipoli ‘what once was partly hid,|The
splendid pageant of the Aeneid’. W. N. Hodgson’s ‘Before Action’ prays ‘Make
me a soldier, Lord’, and soldiering and Christianity go hand in hand, as in W. E.
Littlejohn’s ‘Holy Communion Service, Suvla Bay’, which opens with a shot of ‘A
battered corned-beef box, a length of twine|An altar-rail of twigs and shreds of
string’,andendswithaChristiantableauof‘kneelingsoldiersinGod’sbattle-line,|A
line of homage to a mightier King’. Robert Nichols’s ‘Comrades’ offers a comparable
staged finale for a dead soldier: ‘ ‘‘Lift me.’’ They lifted him.|He smiled and held
his arms out to the dim,|And in a moment passed beyond their ken,|Hearing him
whisper, ‘‘Oh my men, my men!’’ ’^27 Though devoted to soldier-poets,The Muse in
Armsrepresents a muse enlisted in the service of the State, Church, and British Army.
(^24) E. B. Osborn, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),The Muse in Arms: A Collection of War Poems, for the
Most Part Written in the Field of Action, by Seamen, Soldiers and Flying Men who are Serving, or who
have Served, in the Great War(London: John Murray, 1918), pp. v–xxi.
(^25) Graves, ‘Poets of World War II’, 308.
(^26) Sassoon, ‘Absolution’, and ‘The Rear-Guard’, in Osborn (ed.),Muse in Arms,31and68–9.
(^27) Gordon Alchin, ‘The Road’; Alexander Robertson, ‘The New Aeneid’; William Noel Hodgson,
‘Before Action’; W. H. Littlejohn, ‘Holy Communion Service, Suvla Bay’; Robert Nichols, ‘Comrades’;
in Osborn (ed.),Muse in Arms, 45, 44, 22, 171, 52.