If you will but pay the price,
Learn the gaiety and strength
Of the gallant sacrifice.
Underneath the open sky.
Live clean, or go out quick—
Lads, you’re wanted. Come and die.”
The impulsive injustice and pride of youth! Yes, but it’s what millions are thinking at the Front. Whether you like to acknowledge it or no, the supreme value of Mackintosh as a poet lies in the fact that he was articulate, where others are silent and, above all, that he spoke the Truth.
He had a strange, almost womanly tenderness for his men—not for Kipling’s red-coats, but for the civilians in khaki who fight because of duty, with hatred in their hearts of shedding blood. His attitude towards them was a good deal that of a chieftain. War brought out in him his pride of race; he remembered increasingly that he was a Highlander. It speaks volumes for the new equality which has grown up among those who have shared “the gaiety and strength of the gallant sacrifice” that one of his noblest poems should have been addressed to the father of David Sutherland, a private in his company who was killed in action:—
But I had fifty sons
