Part 9

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.

THE REVENGE

If anybody has done a crime, Dr. Dunston generally speaks to them before the school, so that all may hear what the crime is. And according to the way he speaks to them, we know the sort of fate in store.

If he says he remembers what it was to be a boy himself, there is great hope, for, as Mitchell pointed out, that means the Doctor has himself committed the crime in far-off times when he was young; but if he doesn't say he remembers what it was to be a boy himself, then the crime is probably a crime he never committed; and these are the sort he punishes worst.

Well, in the case of Tudor, he had never committed Tudor's crime, and he himself said, when ragging Tudor before punishment, that he had never even heard of such a crime. Therefore the consequences were bad for Tudor, and he was flogged and his greatest treasure taken away from him for ever.

It was, no doubt, a very peculiar crime, and Mitchell told Tudor that it was not so much the crime itself as the destructive consequences, that had put the Doctor into such a bate. But we found out next term that the destructive consequences had been sent home in a bill for Tudor's father to pay, and they amounted to two pounds, so Tudor caught it at home also.

Well, it was like this: Tudor came back for the spring term with a remarkably interesting tool called a glazier's diamond. He had saved up and bought it with his own money, and it was valuable, having in it a real diamond, the beauty of which was that it could cut glass. It could also mark glass for ever; and, after a good deal of practice, on out-of-the-way panes of glass in secluded places, Tudor had thoroughly learned the difficult art of writing on glass. We were allowed to walk round the kitchen garden sometimes upon Sunday afternoons, and, occasionally, if a boy was seedy and separated from the rest for a day or two, for fear he had got something catching, such a boy was allowed in the kitchen garden under the eye of Harris, the kitchen gardener.

And Tudor often got queer and threatened to develop catching things, though he never really did; but on the days when he threatened, he generally escaped lessons and was allowed in the kitchen garden. Needless to say, that this place was full of opportunities for practising the art of writing on glass, and, as nothing was easier than to escape from the eye of Harris, he used these opportunities, and wrote his name and mine and many others on cucumber frames, and on the side of a hot-house used for growing grapes, and also on the window of a potting-shed.

I am Pratt, and Tudor and me were in the Lower Fourth. It was a class that Dr. Dunston, unfortunately, took for history, and on those occasions we went to his study for the lesson and stood in a row, which extended from the window to the front of Doctor Dunston's desk. He sat behind the desk, and took the class from there. But there was a great difference in Tudor and me, because I was at the top of the Lower Fourth and he was at the bottom. In the case of the Doctor's history class, however, this was a great advantage for Tudor, because the bottom of the class was by the window, and the top was in front of the Doctor.