An interesting article on the BBC News website on Friday profiled Jessie Pope, a poet today’s schoolchildren (apparently) love to hate.
Ms Pope’s verse is not quite in the McGonagall class – it’s quite competent in fact – but the sentiments she expresses aren’t quite what we’ve come to feel about the first world war:
Who knows it won’t be a picnic – not much-
Yet eagerly shoulders a gun?
Who would much rather come back with a crutch
Than lie low and be out of the fun?
The above being typical of the jingoistic verses she published in the Daily Mail and in three wartime anthologies between 1916 and 1917. Poor Jessie suffers rather by comparison with the likes of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, the latter being inspired to pen Dulce et Decorum Est in response to her work.
One shudders to think what a certain poet and tragedian would have made of the Great War had he lived to see it.
I think that William would have been in the same camp as everyone else at that time. I cringe sometimes when they spout the Patriotic rubbish that was turned out at then. William would have been a little nearer the truth as he would have had sons that would be there, just like every other family that were forced to send there sons to war; and for what?