Bret Harte, the beloved of Americans, East and West. The feeling is the same, but the verse itself is more delicate in thought and expression.
But it is under the tragic inspiration of war, met face to face, day after day, in all its horrors and intensity of suffering, that his verse takes on the old ruggedness of his earlier volumes but with an added strength and maturity, an intensity of feeling and expression that only such scenes of horror, and the experiences of his daily life, under the Red Cross, can inspire.
Never did the full realization of the awfulness of the present world conflict come to me, until, in the "Rhymes of a Red Cross Man," I saw it, stripped of all sentiment and romance, the true Demon that it is.
Never in any work of any author, with which I am familiar, have humour and pathos been so closely or daringly intermingled, making his work human and real beyond all art. We forget his poetry in the wonder of his vivid reality. The "Foreword" of this volume, dedicated to the memory of his brother, Lieut. Albert Service, of the Canadian Infantry, who was killed in action in France, in August, 1916, is a tragic preface to a still more tragic collection of verse. There is no imaginative fancy, but grim and horrible fact, set down in rugged, imcompromising words, which make us shudder and grow pale.
The red resentment of the guns.
And you yourself would mutter when
You took the things that once were men,
And sped them through the Zone of Hate
To where the dripping surgeons wait."
