would represent tolerance. And I always take the sternest measures to keep my platoon sergeant in check! I fully appreciate the wisdom of the War Office when they put inefficient officers to rule sergeants. . . . But I've seen the Fatherland (I like to call it the Fatherland, for in many families papa represents efficiency and mama tolerance—but don't think I'm W.S.P.U.) so horribly misrepresented that I've been burning to put in my case for them to a sympathetic ear."
And he strikes the same note, in some ways more profoundly, in verse:
TO GERMANY
You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,
And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
But gropers both, through fields of thought confined,
We stumble and we do not understand.
You only saw your future bigly planned,
And we the tapering paths of our own mind,
And in each other's dearest ways we stand,
And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.
When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each other's truer form
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm
We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm
The darkness and the thunder and the rain.
This, like the other poems I have quoted, has a fine movement; and though at the outset the phrasing is not felicitous, it improves till it becomes worthy of the meaning in the last three lines. Then, too, what wise, kindly eyes this young fellow sees with; how many of us can be put to shame by such a gentle sanity! His discoveries about his own countrymen are no less persuasively illuminating.
"One has fairly good chances of observing the life of
