e says he has seen enough of that kind of thing.

THE NATION IN ARMS

This is the tale that is told of an almost universally respected
Minister,
Who, being fully aware of the views of Continental Potentates, and
their plans ambitious and sinister,
For the better defence of his native land, and to free her from
continual warlike alarms,
Determined that he would popularize the conception (and a very good
one too) of a Nation in Arms!
Now this is the way he proceeded to fan the flame of patriot ardour--
(This metre looks at first as easy to write as blank verse, or Walt
Whitman, but is in reality considerably harder),--
He assured his crowded audience that, while everyone must deprecate a
horrid, militant, Jingoist attitude,
Not to serve one's country--at least on Saturday afternoons--was the
very blackest ingratitude:
Death on the battlefield,--or at least the expense of buying a
uniform,--was the patriots' chiefest glory;
Dulce et decorum est (said the statesman, amid thunderous cheers) pro
patria mori!
Everyone should be ready to defend his hearth and home, be it humble
cot or family mansion,
Provided always that he discouraged a tendency to Militarism and
Imperial Expansion:
That was the habit of mind which a Briton's primary duty to stifle
was,
Seeing that the country's salvation lay rather with the intelligent,
spontaneous, disinterested volunteer who didn't care how obsolete the
pattern of his rifle was:
Too much skill in shooting or drill was a perilous thing, and he did
not mean to acquire it,
For fear of alarming peace-loving Emperors and such-like by display of
a combative spirit;
Regular armies tended to that: and in view of the state of
international conditions he
Meant to cut down our own to the minimum consistent with Guaranteed
Efficiency,--
Being convinced as he was that an army recruited and trained on a
properly peaceful principle
Would be wholly (and here comes a rhyme that won't please the mere
purist, but I'm sorry to say it's the only available one) wholly, I
say, and completely invincible!
This being so, he did not propose to devise any scheme or with
cut-and-dried details to fetter a
Patriot Public which quite understood of itself that England
Expects--et cetera.
After this oratorical burst, as the country next day was informed by
about tw