s_, but in
Mr. Sassoon's verse. The best poems in the book are poems of hatred. This
means that Mr. Sassoon has still other worlds to conquer in poetry. His
poems have not the constructive ardour that we find in the revolutionary
poems of Shelley. They are utterances of pain rather than of vision. Many
of them, however, rise to a noble pity--_The Prelude_, for instance, and
_Aftermath_, the latter of which ends:

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz,--
The night you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench,--
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it all going to happen again?"

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack--
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads,--those ashen-grey
Masks of the lad who once were keen and kind and gay?

_Have you forgotten yet?..._
_Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you'll never forget._

Mr. Sitwell's satires--which occupy the most interesting pages of
_Argonaut and Juggernaut_--seldom take us into the trenches. Mr. Sitwell
gets all the subjects he wants in London clubs and drawing-rooms. These
"free-verse" satires do not lend themselves readily to quotation, but both
the manner and the mood of them can be guessed from the closing verses of
_War-horses_, in which the "septuagenarian butterflies" of Society return
to their platitudes and parties after seeing the war through:

But now
They have come out.
They have preened
And dried themselves
After their blood bath.
Old men seem a little younger,
And tortoise-shell combs
Are longer than ever;
Earrings weigh down aged ears;
And Golconda has given them of its best.

They have seen it through!
Theirs is the triumph,
And, beneath
The carved smile of the Mona Lisa,
False teeth
Rattle
Like machine-guns,
In anticipation
Of food and platitudes.
Les Vieilles Dames Sans Merci!

Mr. Sitwell's hatred of war is seldom touched with pity. It is arrogant
hatred. There is little emotion in it but that of a young man at war with
age. He pictures the dotards of two thousand years ago complaining