He visits the deserted home of his dead friend—­

    ’Ah, but there was no need to call his name,
    He was beside me now, as swift as light ... 
    For now, he said, my spirit has more eyes
    Than heaven has stars, and they are lit by love. 
    My body is the magic of the world,
    And dark and sunset flame with my spilt blood.’

And so the undying dead

      ’Wander in the dusk with chanting streams,
    And they are dawn-lit trees, with arms upflung,
    To hail the burning heaven they left unsung.’

Further, this war poetry, while reflecting military things with a veracity hardly known before, is yet rarely militant.  We must not look for explicit pacifist or international ideas; but as little do we find jingo patriotism or hymns of hate.  The author of the German hymn of hate was a much better poet than anyone who tried an English hymn in the same key, and the English poets who could have equalled its form were above its spirit.  Edith Cavell’s dying words ‘Patriotism is not enough’ cannot perhaps be paralleled in these poets, but they are continually suggested.  They do not say, in the phrase of the old cavalier poet, that we should love England less if we loved not something else more, or that something is wanting in our love for our country if we wrong humanity in its name.  But the spirit which is embodied in these phrases breathes through them; heroism matters more to them than victory, and they know that death and sorrow and the love of kindred have no fatherland.  They ‘stand above the battle’ as well as share in it, and they share in it without ceasing to stand above it.  The German is the enemy, they never falter in that; and even death does not convert him into a friend.  But for this enemy there is chivalry, and pity, and a gleam, now and then, of reconciling comradeship.

    ’He stood alone in some queer sunless place
    Where Armageddon ends,’—­

the Englishman whom the Germans had killed in fight, to be themselves slain by his friend, the speaker.  Their ghosts throng around him,—­

    ’He stared at them, half wondering, and then
    They told him how I’d killed them for his sake,
    Those patient, stupid, sullen ghosts of men: 
    At last he turned and smiled; smiled—­all was well
    Because his face would lead them out of hell.’

Finally, the poet himself glories in his act; he knows that he can beat into music even the crashing discords that fill his ears; he knows too that he has a music of his own which they cannot subdue or debase: 

    ’I keep such music in my brain
    No din this side of death can quell,
    Glory exulting over pain,
    And beauty garlanded in hell.’