The Prize Poem
Things were beastly dull at Merivale when we went back after the Christmas holidays, and I believe even the Doctor felt it. Of course, from our point of view, his life must always be deadly, but I suppose he gets a certain amount of feeble excitement into it, in ways not known to us. It’s rather interesting to wonder what old people do find worth doing; yet they must do something to amuse themselves, off and on, or they’d go mad, I should think, which they seldom do. The amusements of a very old person must be rather weird, yet they clearly like to be alive, for when my grandmother died, she was eighty—a time of life when you’d think there was simply nothing left. Yet, when I went to say farewell to her, she told me she hoped to see the spring flowers once more. She didn’t; but it shows how fearfully hard-up old people must be for amusement of any kind; for who on earth would want to see flowers, spring or otherwise, if practically everything else had not been lost to them? Myself I would much rather have died years before than eat the food my grandmother ate, and never go out except in a bath-chair; but she found it good enough, strange to say. So, no doubt, Dr. Dunston, who is entirely active, and can eat meat and drink wine and walk rapidly about, still finds being Head of Merivale School all right.
But the winter term was deadly, what with the bad weather and the slow progress of the War, and losing most of our football matches, owing to having a very weak team.
Then old Peacock, of all men—the new master, I mean—got an idea, and Fortescue thought it was a good one, and Peacock proposed it to the Doctor, and Dr. Dunston agreed to it.
In fact, he announced it after chapel during the third week of February in these words:
“Our new friend, Mr. Peacock, has made a proposal to me, and I have great pleasure not only in agreeing with him, but in congratulating him on a very happy thought. Suspecting that there may be mute, inglorious Miltons amongst us—a sanguine hope I cannot share—Mr. Peacock has thought that it would add an interest to the term and wake a measure of enthusiasm and energy in the ranks of our versifiers if we initiate a competition. He suggests a prize poem upon the subject of the War; and while my heart misgives me, yet I bow to Mr. Peacock’s generous proposal. You are invited, one and all of you, from the greatest to the least, to write a prize poem on the subject of the War, and if such a momentous theme fails to produce some notable addition to our war poetry, then Mr. Peacock’s disappointment will be considerable. He trusts you to enter upon this task in no light spirit, and when I add that Mr. Peacock proposes to give a prize of one guinea—twenty-one shillings—to the victorious poet, you will see that a real effort is needed. You will have a calendar month to prepare and execute your verses, which must be composed outside the regular school hours; and I may tell you that unless a certain humble standard of intelligence and poetic ability is reached, I shall direct Mr. Peacock to withhold his prize.”
Well, there it was; and, of course, a good deal of excitement occurred, and it was jolly interesting to see who entered for the prize poem and who did not. No doubt Travers major would have won it without an effort, being so keen about everything to do with war; but, luckily for the rest, he had left to go to Woolwich the term before. Travers minor entered because he was strongly advised to, being a flier at literature in general and keen about poetry; but he said frankly he should not praise the War, but slate it, because he utterly disagreed with it and hated war in general.
Of course, the prize being a guinea made a lot of difference, and many unexpected chaps decided to write a prize poem, though most of these, when they sat down with pens and ink to do it, found such a thing quite beyond them in every way.
I myself—my name is Abbott—was one of these, and after reading a good many real poems of the War, which Mr. Fortescue, who was a great poet and much interested in the competition, kindly lent me, I found, on setting out to do it, that the difficulties were far too great. Rhymes are easy enough to get, in a way, but when you come to string the poem together, you generally find your rhymes aren’t solemn enough. I believe I could have written a screamily funny prize poem; but, of course, that wouldn’t have pleased the Doctor, or Peacock either, so it wasn’t any good wasting time being funny. For instance, I wrote the following poem in less than ten minutes:
The Hun, the Hun, the footling Hun,
Most certainly doth take the bun.
And Blades and several other chaps said it was jolly good. But Blades, who had also had a shot or two on the quiet, was like me—he could only make comic poems, and the stanzas of his poem took the form of Limericks. He said he could invent them with the greatest ease—in class, or at prayers, or at meals, or going to bed, or getting up, or in his bath—in fact, at any time when he wasn’t playing football. He gave me an example, which seemed to me so frightfully good that I thought very likely Peacock would have given him a consolation prize. So he tried it on Peacock; but Mr. Peacock thought nothing of it, and said that was not at all the spirit of a prize poem, but belonged to the gutter-press, whatever that is. It ran like this:
The Kaiser set off for Paree
As if it was only a spree,
But old French’s Army,
It soon knocked him barmy,
And now he is melancolee.
He next had a flutter at Nancy,
Though doubtless a little bit chancy;
But his men got a doing,
With plenty more brewing,
So he galloped off, saying, “Just fancy!”
There were hundreds more verses—in fact, you might say the whole history of the War as far as it had got; and I advised Blades to send it to The Times—to buck it up—or Punch, or something; but he wouldn’t, and when Peacock decided it was no use, he gave up writing it, so a good poem was lost, in my opinion.
Many fell out before the appointed day for sending in the prize poems; but many did not, and though it was natural that a good few chaps chucked it, the extraordinary thing was the number of chaps who kept on to the bitter end, so to speak, and sent in poems. Almost the most amazing was Mitchell. He certainly had made a rude poem once in a moment of rage, but as to real poetry, a cabbage might just as well have tried to make a poem as him. He was only keen about one thing in the world, and that was money; and, of course, that was why he entered the competition. He said to me: “I’d do much worse things than make a prize poem, if anybody offered me a guinea. If it had been one of the Doctor’s wretched prizes, I wouldn’t have attempted it; but a guinea is a guinea, and as nobody here can make poetry for nuts, I’m just as likely to bring it off as anybody else. It’s taking a risk, in a way, but I’ve got my ideas about the War, just as much as Travers minor or Sutherland, and, if I don’t win, I shall get a bit of fun out of it, anyway.”
He was a mean beast always, but cunning and frightfully crafty; and as he had never had a decent idea in his life, let alone a poetical one, we were all frightfully interested in Mitchell’s poem on the War.
The chap Sutherland he had mentioned was regarded as having a chance, for he knew a lot about the War, and had two cousins in it, one in France and one with the Fleet. He got letters without stamps on them from these chaps, but there was never much in them. Thwaites also entered, and he was known to write poetry and send it home; but it had not been seen, and Thwaites, being delicate and rather fond of art and playing the piano and such like piffle, we didn’t regard him as having warlike ideas. Besides, once, when Blades suddenly pulled out one of his teeth in class and bled freely over Thwaites, who sat next to him, Thwaites fainted at the sight of blood; which showed he couldn’t possibly write anything worth mentioning on such a fearful subject as war; because, you may say, a war is blood or nothing.
Only one absolute kid entered, and this was Percy minimus, who had sent a Christmas pudding to the Front, and had the photograph of a “Tommy” back. So he wrote a prize poem which he let his friends see, and Forbes minimus said it was good, as far as he could say to the contrary. No doubt it appeared so to a squirt like Forbes minimus, but, of course, it could not be supposed to stand against the work of Travers minor, or Sutherland, or Rice.
I always rather thought myself that Rice might pull it off, being Irish and a great fighter by nature. Unfortunately, he didn’t know anything whatever about poetry; yet his fighting instinct made him enter, and though he wasn’t likely to rhyme very well, or look after the scanning and the feet and the spondees and dactyls, and all that mess, which, no doubt, would count, yet I hoped that, for simple warlike dash, Rice might bring it off. I asked him about it, and he said a good many things had gone wrong with it, but here and there were bits that might save it.
He said:
“I believe I shall either win the guinea right bang off, or get flogged.” Which interested me fearfully, but didn’t surprise me, because it was rather the way with Rice to rush at a thing head-long and come out top—or bottom. He only really kept cool and patient and never ran risks when he was fighting; but at everything else, which he considered less important, he just dashed. He had dashed at the prize poem—very different from Tracey, who was always cool about everything, and wouldn’t have gone to the Front himself for a thousand pounds. Tracey was great at satire—in fact, satire was a natural gift with him—and though, of course, it didn’t always come off, owing to being so satirical that nobody saw it, still he often did get in a nasty one; and sometimes got licked for doing so.
He told me his prize poem was all pure satire, and I said:
“I doubt if the Doctor or Peacock will see it.”
And Tracey said:
“I can’t help that. Poetry is art, and I can’t alter my great feeling for satire to please them. It will come out; and even though old Dunston and Peacock don’t see it, I know jolly well the Kaiser and the Crown Prince would, if they read it.”
Well, there it was, and that was about the lot worth mentioning who had a shot at Mr. Peacock’s guinea. The calendar month passed, and one day, when classes began, the Doctor appeared, supported by Peacock, Fortescue, and Brown.
Everybody was summoned into the chapel, and the Doctor, who dearly likes a flare-up of this kind, told us that the prize poems had been judged and were going to be read.
“I may tell you,” he said, “that the prize has been won, contrary to my fear that none would prove worthy of it. But we are agreed that there is a copy of verses on the solemn subject set for discussion that disgraces neither the writer nor Merivale. Indeed, I will go further than that, and declare that one poem reflects no small credit on the youthful poet responsible for it; and Mr. Peacock and Mr. Fortescue, than whom you shall find no more acute and critical judges, share my own pleasure at the effusion.”
The Doctor then began to read the prize poems, and he started with that of Percy minimus, much to Percy’s confusion.
“The views of Percy minimus on the War are elementary, as we should expect from a youth of his years,” said old Dunston. “I may remark, however, that he rhymes with great accuracy, and if he shows an inclination to be didactic, and even give Lord Kitchener a hint or two, I frankly pardon him for the sake of his concluding line. This reveals in Percy minimus a flash of elevated feeling which does him infinite credit. One can only hope that his pious aspiration will be echoed by those great nations doomed to defeat in the appalling catastrophe which they have provoked.”
Then he gave us the poem.
THE WAR
BY PERCY MINIMUS
War is a very fearful thing, I’m sure you’ll all agree,
But sometimes we have got to fight in order to be free.
The Germans want to slaughter us, and do not understand
We are a people famed in fight, and also good and grand.
We never were unkind to them and never turned them out
When unto England’s shores they came, to trade and look about.
But all the time, I grieve to say, they only came as spies,
So that, when came the dreadful “Day,” they’d take us by surprise.
Which they did do, and if our ships had not been all prepared,
The Germans would have landed, and not you or I been spared.
Now all is changed, and very soon, upon the Belgian strand,
I promise you a million men of English breed shall land.
And thanks to good Lord Kitchener, their wants will be supplied
With splendid food and cosy clothes and many things beside;
But he must bring the big siege guns when Antwerp we shall reach,
Because with these fine weapons we have got to make a breach.
So let us pray that very soon we smash the cruel Hun,
And if, by dreadful luck, we lose—oh, then God’s will be done!
We applauded Percy minimus for his sporting attempt, feeling of course, it was piffle really, but good for a kid. Then the Doctor said he was going to read Rice.
“Mr. Fortescue,” said Dunston, “has evinced the deepest interest in the achievement of Rice. He tells me that there is now a movement in art—including the sacred art of poesy—which is known as the Futurist Movement. Rice’s effort reminds Mr. Fortescue of this lamentable outrage on the Muses, for it appears that the Futurists desire to thrust all that man has done for art into the flames—to forget the glories of Greece, to pour scorn on the Renaissance, to begin again with primal chaos in a world where all shall be without form and void. This is Nihilism and a crime against culture. For some mysterious reason, the boy Rice, who we may safely assume has never heard of the Futurists until this moment, appears to have emulated their methods and shared their unholy extravagance of epithets, their frenzied anarchy, their scorn of all that is lovely and of good repute. He even permits himself expressions that at another time would win something more than a rebuke. I will now read Rice, not for my pleasure or yours, but that at least you may learn what is not poetry, and can never be mistaken for poetry by those who, like ourselves, have drunk at the Pierian spring.”
WAR
BY RICE
Smash! Crash! Crash! Bang! Crash! Bang!
Rattle, rattle, rattle, and crash again.
Air full of puffs of smoke where shells are bursting overhead,
Scream of shrapnel over the trenches and yells of rage!
Roar of men charging and howling a savage song—
“Now we shan’t be long!” Tramp of feet—then flop! they fall,
Dropping out here, there, and everywhere, and rolling head
over heels like rabbits.
And some sit up after the charge, and some don’t.
Shot through the heart or head, they roll gloriously over—all in!
But on go the living, shouting and screaming, and some bleeding
and not knowing it.
As loud as the “Jack Johnsons” they howl, their rifles are at
the charge and the bayonets are white—
The white arm that goes in in front and out behind—
Or in behind and out in front of the Germans running away.
The Boche hates the white arm—it sends him to hell by the million!
Crash! Crash! Squash! Smash! Smash! Smash!
The trench is reached. Blood spurts and bones crack like china.
Gurgles! Chokes! Yells! Helmets fly, bayonets stick
And won’t come out! Everybody is dead or dying in the
trench—except twelve Tommies!
Damns, growls, yells choked with blood!
Death, awful wounds, mess, corpses, legs, arms, heads—all separate!
The trench is taken, and England has gained
A hundred yards! Hoorooh!
Hoorooh! Hoorooh! Hoorooh!
And what must it be to be there!!!
Signed RICE.
I looked at Rice while his poem was being intoned by the Doctor. He had turned very red, but he stuck it well, and somehow, though, of course, it was right bang off, and no rhymes or anything, I liked it. And Mr. Fortescue liked it, as he afterwards told Rice; but the Doctor and Mr. Peacock fairly hated it, so that was the end of Rice.
They thought nothing of Tracey’s poem, either. The Doctor said:
“Tracey has produced what, for reasons best known to himself, he calls ‘a satire.’ It possesses a certain element of crude humour, which, on such a solemn theme, is utterly out of place. Upon the whole, I regard it as discreditable in a Sixth Form boy, and do not think the better of Tracey for having written it.”
He then read Tracey.
A SATIRE
BY TRACEY
No doubt, O Kaiser, you have thought
Napoleon was a duffer
Compared to you, when you set out
To make Old England suffer.
But if you read your history books,
You’ll very quickly find, Sir,
That Boney knew, despite his faults,
How to make up his mind, Sir.
You flutter up, you flutter down,
You flutter night and day, Sir,
Yet somehow victory won’t look
Your mad and fluttering way, Sir,
But when the war by us is won,
And in Berlin our men, Sir,
You’ll be a bit surprised to find
Where you will flutter then, Sir.
We laughed and thought it ripping; but the Doctor seemed to be hurt, and said: “Silence, silence, boys! It ill becomes us to jest at the spectacle of a fallen potentate, and still less so before he has fallen.
“A more pleasing effort is that of Travers minor,” went on the Doctor, picking up the poem of Travers. “We have here nothing to be described as a picture of war, but rather the views of an intelligent and Christian boy upon war. Personally, I think well of these verses. They are unostentatious—no flash of fire—but a temperate lament on war in general and a final conviction not lacking in shrewdness. I will not say that I entirely agree with Travers minor in his concluding assertion, but he may be right—he may be right. At any rate, the poem is a worthy expression of an educated mind, and by no means the worst of those with which we are called to deal.”
He then read Travers minor, and we were all frightfully disappointed, for it turned out that Travers hated war, so the result wasn’t a war poem at all, but a very tame affair without any dash about it—in fact, very feeble, I thought. His brother would have despised him for writing it. Of course, Peacock wanted a poem praising up the glory of war, not sitting on it, like Travers minor did.
THE FOG OF WAR
BY TRAVERS MINOR
From out the awful fog of war
One thing too well we see—
That man has not yet reached unto
His highest majesty.
For battle is a fiendish art
We share with wolf and bear,
But man has got a soul to save—
He will not save it there.
This is the twentieth century,
We boast our great good sense.
And yet can only go to war
At horrible expense
Of human life. It makes us beasts;
We shout and spend our breath
To hear a thousand enemies
Have all been blown to death.
And each of all those thousand men
Was doubtless good and kind,
As those, no doubt, remember well
Whom he has left behind.
And when I hear that war brings out
Our finest qualities,
I do believe with all my heart
That is a pack of lies.
A deadly silence greeted the prize poem of Travers minor, and I believe the Doctor felt rather sick with us for not applauding it. And Tracey, who was very mad at what the Doctor had said about him, whispered rather loud that Travers minor’s effort was almost worthy of Hymns Ancient and Modern.
There were only three poems left now, and the excitement increased a good deal, because nobody had won Peacock’s guinea yet, so it was clear that either Mitchell, or Thwaites, or Sutherland minor was the lucky bargee. Both Mitchell and Thwaites seemed beyond the wildest hope, and we felt pretty sure that Sutherland must have done the trick. But he hadn’t. The Doctor picked up his poem and put on a doubtful expression.
“I confess that Sutherland gives me pause,” he said. “For skill in rhyming, Sutherland deserves all praise—he is ingenious and correct—but such is the faultiness of his ear that he flouts the fundamentals of prosody in each of his four stanzas. In fact, Sutherland’s poetry, regarded as such, is excruciating. He has ideas, though not of a particularly exalted character; and even if he had given us something better worthy to be called a poem, his lamentable failure in metre would have debarred him from victory. His last verse contains an objectionable suspicion we might associate rather with a commercial traveller or small tradesman, than with one of us.”
Well, Sutherland’s wasn’t bad really, though rather rocky from a poetical point of view, as the Doctor truly said.
KHAKI FOR EVER
BY SUTHERLAND
Loud roars the dreadful cannon above the bloody field,
While, like the lightning, through the smoke’s dim shroud
The tongues of flame are flashing, where, concealed,
The vainglorious enemy’s battery doth vaunt and laugh aloud,
Thinking that men of British race are going to yield.
Poor German cannon-fodder! Little do they know
That those who wear khaki have never yet
Wherever, at the call of Bellona, they may go,
Surrendered to a lesser foe than Death. They’ve met
Far finer fighters than the Boche, and made their life’s-blood flow.
Whether upon the open battle-front, or in a trench,
Or in a fort, or keeping communications,
With such a leader as great General French
The British khaki boys defeat all nations,
And in the foeman’s gore their glittering bayonets they quench.
And they will win, for right is on their side;
And when they do, the neutrals shall not share
The rich-earned booty the Allies divide;
For, as they would not sail in and fight, it is not fair
That they should win the fruits of this bloody tide.
We could see what the Doctor meant about Sutherland’s poem—it didn’t flow exactly; but it might have been worse. Then Dr. Dunston picked up Mitchell’s poem and frowned; and Peacock frowned; and Fortescue also frowned. We didn’t know what was going to happen, for the Doctor made no preliminary remarks on the subject of Mitchell. He just gave his glasses a hitch and glared over the top of Mitchell’s effort and then read it out.
OLD ENGLAND FOR EVER
BY MITCHELL
Oh, now doth Death line his dead chaps with steel,
The swords of soldiers are his teeth, his fangs,
And now he feasts, mousing the flesh of man!
Rejoice, ye men of England, ring your bells.
King George, your King and England’s, doth approach,
Commander of this hot, malicious day!
Our armour, that marched hence so silver bright,
Hither returns all gilt with German blood;
Our colours do return in those same hands
That did display them when we first marched forth;
And, like a jolly troup of huntsmen, come
Our lusty English all with purple hands,
Dyed in the slaughter of their Teuton foes.
But to their home they will no more return
Till Belgium’s free and France is also free;
Then to their pale, their white-faced shore,
Whose foot spurns back the ocean’s roaring tides
And coops from other lands her islanders—
Even to that England, hedged in with the main,
That water-walled bulwark still secure,
Will they return and hear our thunderous cheers.
But Belgium first, unhappy, stricken land,
Which has, we know, and all too well we know,
Sluiced out her innocent soul through streams of blood,
Which blood, like sacrificing Abel’s, cries,
Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth,
To us for justice and rough chastisement,
And, by the glorious worth of our descent,
Our arm shall do it, or our life be spent.
The Doctor stopped suddenly and flung his eyes over us. Naturally we were staggered and full of amazement to think of a hard blade like Mitchell producing such glorious stuff. Any fool could see it was poetry of the classiest kind.
“Do you desire to hear more?” shouted the Doctor.
And we said, “Yes, sir!”
“Then seek it in the immortal pages from whence the boy Mitchell has dared to steal it!” he thundered out, growing his well-known, deadly red colour. “With predatory hand and audacity from which the most hardened criminal would have shrunk, this abominable boy, insolently counting on the ignorance of those whose unfortunate duty it is to instruct him, has appropriated the Bard to his own vile uses; and his cunning has led him to interpolate and alter the text in such a manner that sundry passages are made to appear as one. Mitchell will meet me in my study after morning school. I need say no more. Words fail me——”
And they actually did, which was a record in its way. The Doctor panted for a bit, then he picked up Mitchell’s poem, or rather, Shakespeare’s, as if it was a mouse that had been dead a fortnight, and dropped it on the ground. It was rather a solemn moment—especially for Mitchell—and the only funny thing about it was to see the Sixth. Of course, they’d been had by Mitchell, just the same as us in the Fifth—in fact, everybody; but they tried to look as if they’d known it was Shakespeare from the first. As for Mitchell, he had made the rather rash mistake of thinking old Dunston and Peacock and Fortescue didn’t know any more about Shakespeare than he did; and now he sat awful white, but resigned. As a matter of fact, he got the worst flogging he ever did get, and had a narrow squeak of being expelled also. It calmed him down for days afterwards, and he was also called “King John” till the end of the term, as a mark of contempt, which he badly hated.
Then the Doctor snorted himself calm, and his face grew its usual colour. He picked up Thwaites, and ended with the tamest poem of the lot, in my opinion. Which shows that grown-up people and boys have a very different idea about what is poetry and what isn’t.
“The verses of Thwaites have won the poet’s bay,” said Dr. Dunston. “Thwaites alone has written a work worthy to be called a poem. His stanzas possess music and reveal thought and feeling. Neither technically are they open to grave objection. I congratulate Thwaites. Though not robust, or a pillar of strength, either in his class, or in the field, he possesses a refined mind, a capacity of emotion and a power for expressing that emotion in terms of poetry that time and application may possibly ripen and mature. Such, at least, is my opinion, and those who have sat in judgment share it with me.”
He then gave us Thwaites—twittering sort of stuff, and interesting, not because Thwaites had got “the poet’s bay,” whatever that is, but because he had landed Peacock’s guinea. Nobody much liked his prize poem except the masters, and even Thwaites himself said it wasn’t any real good, and was written when he had a beastly sore throat and was feeling utterly down on his luck. In fact, he was going to call it “Lines Written in Dejection at Merivale,” like real poets do, only he got better before he finished the last verse, and so didn’t.
TO THE EARTH
BY THWAITES
Suffer, sad earth; no pain can equal thine:
Thy giant heart must ever be a shrine
For all the sorrows of Humanity.
As one by one the stricken ages die,
The bright beams of the stars are turned to tears,
And howling winds that whistle down the years
Sigh “Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow!” and are gone
Into the silence of oblivion.
Suffer, great world; the poison fangs of Death
Can only wound, not kill thee.... Lo! the breath
Of everlasting dawn is in the wind;
The distant throbbing of a giant Mind
Shall set the music of the Universe
Once more in time—with harmony coerce
The discord of a warring race to cease
And sorrow die within the arms of peace.
Thwaites spent his guinea almost entirely on tuck, and though he was very generous with it, and shared the grub with the competitors Rice and Sutherland minor, who were his friends, he still kept enough to make himself ill again. For it was one of the unlucky things about Thwaites that any muck really worth eating always bowled him over. He wrote a poem three times as long as his War poem, called “Effect of Cocoanut Rock on the Tummy of Thwaites”; but Dunston wouldn’t have purred much over that.