: we suspect him of an inclination to be rude to his immediate
predecessors. But his extreme modernness--"Life is a cliche--I would
find a gesture of my own"--is, in the case of so lively a songster, an
evidence of vitality. He promises a new volume, to be called _Fairies
and Fusiliers_, and it will be looked forward to with anticipation.

All these poets seem to be drawn into relation to one another. Robert
Graves and Siegfried Sassoon are both Fusiliers, and they publish a
[Greek: stichomythia] "on Nonsense," just as Cowley and Crashaw did "on
Hope" two centuries and a half ago. Lieut. Sassoon's own volume is later
than those which we have hitherto examined, and bears a somewhat
different character. The gallantry of 1915 and the optimism of 1916 have
passed away, and in Lieut. Sassoon's poems their place is taken by a
sense of intolerable weariness and impatience: "How long, O Lord, how
long?" The name-piece of the volume, and perhaps its first in execution,
is a monologue by an ignorant and shrewd old huntsman, who looks back
over his life with philosophy and regret. Like Captain Graves, he is
haunted with the idea that there must be fox-hounds in Heaven. All
Lieut. Sassoon's poems about horses and hunting and country life
generally betray his tastes and habits. This particular poem hardly
touches on the war, but those which follow are absorbed by the ugliness,
lassitude, and horror of fighting. Lieut. Sassoon's verse has not yet
secured the quality of perfection; he is not sufficiently alive to the
importance of always hitting upon the best and only word. He is
essentially a satirist, and sometimes a very bold one, as in "The Hero,"
where the death of a soldier is announced home in "gallant lies," so
that his mother brags to her neighbours of the courage of her dead son.
At the close of all this pious make-believe, the Colonel

"thought how 'Jack,' cold-footed, useless swine,
Had panicked down the trench that night the mine
Went up at Wicked Corner; how he'd tried
To get sent home; and how, at last, he died,
Blown to small bits";

or, again, as in "Blighters," where the sentimentality of London is
contrasted with the reality in Flanders:

"The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin
And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din,
'We're sure the Kaiser loves the dear old Tanks!

"I'd like to see a Tank come down the s