Primary tabs
Transcription
[Page 75]
April 30
of local influences justified to an extent American: Mexican would have been more correct.
Follows the smirking lying Englanders self appreciation above all other peoples of the earth.
The sentimentality is gone, it may be, but some of the racial sentiments still flourish, though transplanted afar. For example, the English joy in comradeship which has been the strongest influence of all in gathering our powers together from all parts of the globe and preserving the serried patience that cannot even dream of defeat. It was this that won us all our wars in the end – the English sentiment that all Englishmen, earl or churl, are wrought of the self same clay and must be all Englishmen together in times of danger.
I read this aloud to a couple of Inf. lads and the A. dressers last night.
Obviously Leon Gellert's "Songs of a Campaign" contain more of the "Oh England – Alma Mater". Patriotic slush. Almost the impertinent reviewer has lusciously exclaimed, "Oh how quite Colonial!"
April 30
99.
Philip Gibbs' new book, announced by Heinemans, "From Bapaume to Passchendaele". Its sub-title will add, "and back again with the English".
Alan Seeger's Poem has gone into a second impression. "The Vengeance of Fionn" is in a second edition: Frankeau's "City of Fear" in a 3rd impression. Masefield's "Old Front Line" in its 20th Thousand. Drinkwater's "Prose Papers" 2nd Imp., Brooke's "Selected Poems" in its 2nd, "Stray Birds" 2nd, "Wild Swans of Coola" out of print and by Baker's last catalogued 25/-.
100.
Evening: The A.D.S. is built within a great ring of old trees new with green, and by an old wood grown orchard, by the orchard hedge there's a battery of 4.5 guns, now regularly beating their shells out: a hundred birds are in the trees and they're whistling as in the early morning, by one of the orchard trees, I lay awhile listening to a blackbird's bonser singing – I think it was a blackbird, though it may only have been a black bird. The guns beating and the singing –
"You say a thousand things persuasively
And with strange passion hotly I agree,
And then a blackbird sings
By April lilac …
And what is all your argument to me!" [John Drinkwater]