From out the awful fog of war
One thing too well we see--
That man has not yet reached unto
His highest majesty.
For battle is a fiendish art
We share with wolf and bear,
But man has got a soul to save--
He will not save it there.
This is the twentieth century,
We boast our great good sense.
And yet can only go to war
At horrible expense
Of human life. It makes us beasts;
We shout and spend our breath
To hear a thousand enemies
Have all been blown to death.
And each of all those thousand men
Was doubtless good and kind,
As those, no doubt, remember well
Whom he has left behind.
And when I hear that war brings out
Our finest qualities,
I do believe with all my heart
That is a pack of lies.
A deadly silence greeted the prize poem of Travers minor, and I believe
the Doctor felt rather sick with us for not applauding it. And Tracey,
who was very mad at what the Doctor had said about him, whispered rather
loud that Travers minor's effort was almost worthy of _Hymns Ancient and
Modern_.
There were only three poems left now, and the excitement increased a
good deal, because nobody had won Peacock's guinea yet, so it was clear
that either Mitchell, or Thwaites, or Sutherland minor was the lucky
bargee. Both Mitchell and Thwaites seemed beyond the wildest hope, and
we felt pretty sure that Sutherland must have done the trick. But he
hadn't. The Doctor picked up his poem and put on a doubtful expression.
"I confess that Sutherland gives me pause," he said. "For skill in
rhyming, Sutherland deserves all praise--he is ingenious and
correct--but such is the faultiness of his ear that he flouts the
fundamentals of prosody in each of his four stanzas. In fact,
Sutherland's poetry, regarded as such, is excruciating. He has ideas,
though not of a particularly exalted character; and even if he had given
us something better worthy to be called a poem, his lamentable failure
in metre would have debarred him from victory. His last verse contains
an objectionable suspicion we might associate rather with a commercial
traveller or small tradesman, than with one of us."
Well, Sutherland's wasn't bad really, though rather rocky from a
poetical point of view, as the Doctor truly said.