anthologizing war Vocht’ and ‘A Nation Once Again’. By contrast, C. F. Forshaw’sOneHundred Best
Poems on the European War by Poets of Empire(1915) and its sequel,One Hundred
Best Poems on the European War by Women Poets of the Empire(1916), represented
writers with a relentlessly imperial and militaristic agenda. One poem called out
‘Come Forward, Sons of Britain’, another invoked ‘Great England, Scotland—ay,
and Erin too’, while everywhere ‘The Empire’s Call Rings Out!’ ‘A Call to Arms’ has
as its chorus ‘Briton, play the man’, embodying a lethal combination of coercive
masculinity and recruiting slogan. Another is directed against the Hun and ‘ruthless
Goth’, while invoking the ‘Alliance between Valour, God and Right,|Atripleunion
that our Shakespeare sung’. Yet another asserts that ‘Trafalgar and Waterloo|Were
won by what we call the Crowd’. Such historic rhetoric was clearly directed to the
modern crowd, as confirmed by the Revd. J. G. Gibson’s ‘Soldier Boy’s Last Letter’:
‘It’s not hard for me to die—|I’m dying for you all.|Ask all the boys to come and
fight|At your boy’s dying call.’^15 This is the poem as recruitment poster.
Such anthologies for the home market were complemented by collections of
soldiers’ songs. A poignant example is Stephen Gwynn and T. M. Kettle’sBattle
Songs of the Irish Brigades(1915), including Kettle’s ‘Paddy’, which gives Kipling’s
‘Tommy’ a nationalistic Irish accent: ‘We ain’t no saints or scholars much, but
fightin’ men and clean;|/We’ve paid the price, and three times thrice, for Wearin’ o’
the Green.’^16 Kettle was a nationalist who threw himself into the Irish recruitment
campaign, and paid with his death in France for wearing the khaki. More typical was
F. T. Nettleingham’sTommy’s Tunes(1917), subtitled ‘A comprehensive collection
of soldiers’ songs, marching melodies, rude rhymes and popular parodies, collected
and arranged on active service with the B.E.F.’^17 Such songs were designed to
keep up the morale of soldiers, and combine regimental swagger, irreverence, and a
ballad sense of history. Their cheerfully vernacular tone and down-to-earth imagery
are a breath of fresh air after the fusty solemnity of civilian verse.
‘Among the minor results of the Great War is a vast output of war literature’,
wrote the Canadian Carrie Holman introducingIn the Day of Battle: Poems of
the Great War(1916), the poems of which were marked not by ‘the bugle note
of actual conflict’ but by ‘the deeper chord of their intense and ideal patriotism
which alone can justify war’.^18 Her anthology drew on fifty-seven non-combatants,
sixteen of whom were women, and included poems like Mary Booth’s ‘The Women
of Belgium to the Women of England’ and Marion Smith’s ‘St Jeanne of France’,
reflecting an international as well as a feminine perspective. The same is true of
(^15) In Charles F. Forshaw (ed.),One Hundred Poems of the European War by Poets of the Empire
(London: Elliott Stock, 1915), 9, 68, 141, 92, 92, 154, 180, 79. 16
T. K. Kettle, ‘Paddy’, in Stephen Gwynn and T. K. Kettle (eds.),Battle Songs of the Irish Brigades
(Dublin: Maunsel, 1915), 26.
(^17) For further details, see Catherine Reilly,English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography
(London: George Prior, 1978).
(^18) Carrie Ellen Holman, ‘Foreword’, inidem(ed.),In the Day of Battle: Poems of the Great War
(Toronto: William Briggs, 1916), 7.