Swan Songs

MORE than all the others put together the war poems of Alan Seeger, Lieutenant Colonel McCrae, and Lieut. Rupert Brooke, have touched and thrilled the heart of America. They are quiet, earnest, yet more powerful than trumpet blasts, for they rise triumphant from great depths, and as they sing, exalt.

Most familiar is our own Alan Seeger's "I Have a Rendezvous with Death." He was studying in Paris when the war broke out. In the third week he enlisted in the Foreign Legion. Two arduous years later he was called on higher service. July 4, 1916, his squad was caught in an assault on the village of Belloy-en-Santerre, where the Germans received them with the fire of six machine guns. Seeger was severely wounded, but went forward with the others, and helped take the place. Next morning he died. He had kept the tryst.

Alan Seeger was a New York boy. He was born in that city June 22, 1888. In his short life he had written some twenty poems. This was his last. It was written in camp, shortly before his call came:

Lieut. Col. John McCrae was a Canadian physician who served in the South African war as an artilleryman. He was on his way to Canada when the war began in 1914, and immediately upon landing he entered the Val Cartier training camp and was commissioned a Captain. Later he joined the McGill Hospital corps and went with it to France, where he rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, and died in service, January 28, 1918.

His poem, "In Flanders' Fields," was written on the Flanders front in the Spring of 1915. Its inspiration is thus explained by Sergeant Charles F. Bisset, of the 19th Battlion, 1st Brigade, Canadian Infantry:

"On the Flanders front in the early Spring of 1915, when the war had settled down to trench fighting, two of the most noticeable features of the field were, first, the luxuriant growth of red poppies appearing among the graves of the fallen soldiers, and second, that only one species of bird--the larks--remained on the field during the fighting. As soon as the cannonading ceased, they would rise in the air, singing."

Rupert Brooke, a brilliant, impassioned young Englishman, was one of the first to take arms when Great Britain went to war. He died in the Dardanelles expe-dition, April 23 , 1915. A few days before, he had sent from the Aegean Sea to the English--speaking peoples the poem by which he is best known.

Lieutenant Brooke was a rare poet, having a serene faith, a knowledge of life as continuous. His bent of thought, the manner of his feeling, shine most clearly in this sonnet

All of Rupert Brooke's work has been collected and issued, a rich though slender sheaf. The book is fervently commended to people whose own souls are in the key that responds to notes so spiritually fine and clear as those he sounds in all his lines.

"But a Short Time to Live" was written by Serg't Leslie Coulson, whose "little hour" came to an end at Arras, in France, October 7, 1916:

These songs, with others that have lilted so bravely, gravely, through the world's most bitter years of travail, will live long in literature, with many more as strong or as sweet. Had all the writers lived, we would have had a wealth of splendid gifts from them, especially, maybe, from that "poor bird--hearted singer of a day," Francis Ledwidge, who fell in battle in Flanders, July 31, 1917. Ledwidge was discovered by Lord Dunsany, himself a soldier-poet and a patron of poets. He was lance corporal in Lord Dunsany's company in the 5th Battalion of the Royal Inniskillen Fusileers. He wrote quite touchingly to a friend shortly before the end, "I mean to do something great if I am spared, but out here one may at any moment be hurled out of life." There is no doubt he would have done "something great," for here is a swan song not unworthy to bear his name to later times: