When John Masefield returned here some months ago he brought praise of Mr. Sassoon's war-poetry. It was a surprise to him that this poetry, published in London in May, 1917, and dedicated to Thomas Hardy, should not yet have reached Americans. Here is the book now, issued in the handsome war-forgetful style conferred on it by Mr. Heinemann; and only a year late.

It is not all war-poetry. Half of the volume contains verse that Mr. Sassoon must have written in the England that is gone. This part of the volume might by itself have made some reputation if there had never been a long war, and if it had been published with peace-time additions—but it is a thin companion to the verse that its author has added in France. Its anaemia is no evidence that its author is thinblooded, it is merely a proof that poetry had largely become a function of book-fed human beings in the traditional sphere where Mr. Sassoon resided before the war. It is distinguished verse, some of it quite charming and all of it beyond sentimentality, but it is definitely moon-luminous and pale. "The Old Huntsman" is a boyish attempt to secure a quavering sporting reminiscence. "Haunted," "Goblin Revel" and "Night-Piece" show the kind of crow's nest of fantasy to which English poets were compelled to climb so long as they had no full community with the life about them and no passionate experiences of their own. "October" and "Morning-Land" and "Arcady Unheeding" exhibit what a man with Mr. Sassoon's gift could do with classic opportunity; and "Dryads" is a fair poem to represent what I am taking to be his nostalgic youth:

     Dryads

When meadows are grey with the morn,
In the dusk of the woods it is night;

The oak and the ash and the pine
War with the glimmer of light.

Dryads brown as the leaf
Move in the gloom of the glade;
When meadows are gray with the morn,
Dim night in the wood has delayed.

The cocks that crow to the land
Are faint and hollow and shrill:
Dryads as brown as the leaf
Whisper and hide and are still.

This seems to me lovely, but it is only a forerunner of the true utterance which Mr. Sassoon finds in France. The war that he puts into poetry is not an occasion for pomp or patriotism. The word England is undoubtedly implicit in his singing, but he never gets more political than when he is

Wondering when we'll ever end it,
Back to Hell with Kaiser send it,
Gag the noise, pack up and go.

It is not war the politicality that inspires him, but war the human experience, war the terrific means to a political end. Had he remained in England he might have become a propagandist, a hate-artist. His enlistment carried him at one stroke across the mud-munitions and landed him body and spirit in the zone of death. In that zone he has not felt it necessary to apologize for his thoughts or opinions. He has framed them as they came to him, the bold and natural expression of a citizen-soldier supposedly free. The war has tested him. It has lifted him out of his old associations and lined him up with companions not chosen. It has fed his ears on gunfire and fed his eyes on the monstrosity of slaughter. The landscape of war has imprisoned all his senses, day and night, winter and summer weather. But instead of being stunned, his nature was tautened and his emotional impetus supplied. It is not that war is the supreme impetus, as some men argue. It simply happened to remit this poet's critical difficulties, to give him the spur he needed. Other men have seen and heard these same things and found them incommunicable; but the wounded comrade, the Golgotha of the sentry, the harsh imperative at dawn, the music-hall banality about the tanks, the blunt casualness of death—these incidents took a form for Mr. Sassoon which beauty and truth could arrange on, perhaps not the only form or the deepest form but one with the touch of immortality. And his liveliness, his salty wit, improved his reception of reality without trying to disguise its bitterness.

Most men succumb to the new monotonies of the war-routine, the spiritual anodyne of a strangeness beyond their mastery. They surrender personal verdict on their experience. They go dumb. But Mr. Sassoon has really mastered the inwardness and outwardness of what has happened to him. He has breasted the war. And the thrilling effect of this is not to estrange us from old human nature but to show war, the monstrous parvenu, incapable of perverting or subverting the manhood we have always recognized. That is why Mr. Sassoon's thirty war poems go so deep. Fire and flood invade him only to bring into relief his buoyant and sensitive spirit, his honesty, his normal repugnances, his laughter, his hatred of cant. His spirit has been tempered by the furnace, not contorted or reduced to melted butter. He neither weeps too little nor crooks his knee nor inflates his chest nor struts with a proud posterior. He remains a man.

The first war poem is this,

Only men who have fought can really feel this "absolution," I suppose, but no one has better expressed the purgation of war. There are other moods, however, in which Mr. Sassoon has sung witheringly of this same absolution.

Another variant on the theme of absolution is this:

You may guess from these quotations the happy accent of "Conscripts," "Enemies," "The Tombstone-Maker," "The One-legged Man," "The Choral Union," "Stretcher Case," "The Hero," "In the Pink," "A Subaltern," "The Redeemer." There is a jolly humor in some of them, "Stretcher Case" being perhaps the cleverest in the amusing turn it gives to a poignant episode. It is not forced humor, but a burst of friendly sunshine through the phantasmagoria of the war. And Mr. Sassoon is no less willing to express the grave reality, as this fine poem shows,

     The Road

The road is thronged with women; soldiers pass
And halt, but never see them; yet they're here—
A patient crowd along the sodden grass,
Silent, worn out with waiting, sick with fear.
The road goes crawling up a long hillside,
All ruts and stones and sludge, and the emptied dregs
Of battle thrown in heaps. Here where they died
Are stretched big-bellied horses with stiff legs;
And dead men, bloody-fingered from the fight,
Stare up at caverned darkness winking white.

You in the bomb-scorched kilt, poor sprawling Jock,
You tottered here and fell, and stumbled on,
Half dazed for want of sleep. No dream could mock
Your reeling brain with comforts lost and gone.
You did not feel her arms about your knees,
Her blind caress, her lips upon your head:
Too tired for thoughts of home and love and ease,
The road would serve you well enough for bed.

It is not laid on thick, Mr. Sassoon's version, but his is one of the true legends of the war, and has the accent of simpler English poetry. There are phrases and moods which remind one of ballad, the simplicity is so perfect—even the supreme imaginative ballad of English, with its calamities and portents,

All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon….

Quotation is often unfair. Sometimes it puts a layer of fine apples on the top of the barrel, misrepresenting what's underneath; or else it picks out a random fruit or two that belie the actual content. But I have striven to take no advantage in making these quotations from The Old Huntsman. They represent the book as a whole. Its tone may not please every one, it must certainly disappoint the gentlemen who wish to disguise the tiger of war; but it is the tone of a youth singularly alive to actuality, and you cannot expect the man who is gripping with the actuality to take the same tone as the war-booster. The soldier is hardly less patriotic than the booster, and he is just three thousand miles nearer the fact.