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298

POWDER AND PATRIOTISM

“Dulce et decorum est pro patriâ mori.” —Horace.

“Is ultra-patriotism a good thing?” —British citizen of the twentieth century.

I

No doubt it is good and pleasant to find in the whole wide earth
Valour and strength and beauty, virtue and grace and worth:
It is right to be just to a Frenchman or German, an alien birth.

II

Victors in Art and in Science may Russian or Prussian be.
A German may study triumphant the nerves of a gnat or a flea.
Be large-souled, cosmopolitan. It matters nothing to me.

III

Never be insular, narrow. Teach your children at school
Never to fight or be furious—to follow the golden rule.
If a fool should strike at your left cheek, turn your right to the fool.
299

IV

This is excellent teaching: this is the fashion and mode.
Yet there are articles two, unchanged in my militant code—
That our bayonets refuse to bend and our powder consent to explode.

V

Russians, Germans, Italians, Austrians, Japs and Turks,
All are hearty good fellows, pleasing in ways and works:
Yet they have guns, torpedoes, swords, destroyers and dirks.

VI

Taking account of all things, thinking still in the road
That Nelson and Wellington followed, I cleave and cling to my code—
That British bayonets shall curve not, and British powder explode.
 

The British powder is said, on good authority, to be greatly inferior to the German. —December, 1908.

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