the discipline of meter 127
use of exclamation points and ellipses. “Rejoice to obey,” we are told, “the beat
that bids thee draw heroic breath, deep-throbbing till thy mortal heart be
dumb.” The beat of the drum has become guns and the heart’s pulse, and it
seems poised to beat the mortal heart to death.
In Newbolt’s 1918 book, St. George’s Day and Other Poems, the inspiring
drum of his earlier poems transforms into a funeral march, and he fetishizes
the drumbeat to near absurdity in a poem about a collection of soldiers who
are too tired to march. In “The Toy Band,” subtitled “A Song of the Great Re-
treat,” Newbolt tells the story of General Tom Bridges (Robert Bridges’s
nephew), who creatively inspired his regiment to march by playing “Tipper-
ary” and “The British Grenadier” on instruments found in a toy shop. He re-
turns to this scene many times in his memoirs and letters; indeed, he recycles
it from an episode in one of the books he writes for the British Propaganda
Office, Tales of the Great War (1916):
When the reason is out of action, you must call to something deeper,
more instinctive. Everyone who has ever marched to a band knows how
music adds to your marching power without your thinking of it . . . he
paraded in the square, playing ‘the British Grenadiers,’ not probably
with a very rich tone but in exact and spirited time. The beat of it got
into the dead men’s pulses and made them soldiers again. They stag-
gered up and followed the toy band out of the town, and down the long
dark road toward Nyon.^58Indeed, in the accompanying illustration, the caption reads, “the beat of it got
into the dead man’s pulses,” to emphasize that the soldiers act without think-
ing once they hear the beat.
The poem teaches us about the poet’s ability to use simple, childlike ma-
terials to suit a national need; to return to the “ritum, ritum” that the poet
believes the public expects. The eerie nursery rhyme sing-song and nonsense
words do nothing to brighten a scene in which “half a thousand dead men”
are marching. The soldiers are an unthinking, automaton audience, reani-
mated only by the “penny drum” and urged to fight despite their physical
limitations.
The Toy Band
A Song of the Great Retreat
Dreary lay the long road, dreary lay the town,
Lights out and never a glint o’moon:
Weary lay the stragglers, half a thousand down,
Sad sight the weary big Dragoon.
“Oh! If I’d a drum here to make them take the road again, 5