"Where are the brave, the strong, the fleet,
The flower of England's chivalry?
Wild grasses are their Minding sheet,
And sobbing waves their threnody.
"Peace, peace, we wrong our noble dead
To vex their solemn slumber so;
But childless and with thorn-crowned head,
Up the steep road must England go!"
We have here the same motive, the same lesson which Byron applies to Rome:
"The Niobe of Nations—there she stands,
Crownless and childless in her voiceless woe,
An empty urn within her withered hands,
Whose sacred dust was scattered long ago!"
XXXIX. It suggests the inevitable end of all empire, of all dominion of man over man by force of arms. More than all who fall in battle or are wasted in the camps, the nation misses the 'fair women and brave men' who should have been the descendants of the strong and the manly. If we may personify the spirit of the nation, it grieves most not over its 'unreturning brave,' but over those who might have been, but never were, and who, so long as history lasts, can never be.
XL. Against this view is urged the statement that the soldier is not the best, but the worst, product of the blood of the English nation. Tommy Atkins comes from the streets, the wharves, the graduate of the London slums, and if the empire is 'blue with his bones,' it is, after all, to the gain of England that her better blood is saved for home consumption, and that, as matters are, the wars of England make no real drain of English blood.
In so far as this is true, of course the present argument fails. If war in England is a means of race improvement, the lesson I would read does not apply to her. If England's best do not fall on the field of battle, then we may not accuse war of their destruction. The fact could be shown by statistics. If the men who have fallen in England's wars, officers and soldiers, rank and file, are not on the whole fairly representative of 'the flower of England's chivalry,' then fame has been singularly given to deception. We have been told that the glories of Blenheim, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Majuba Hill, were won by real Englishmen. And this in fact is the truth. In every nation of Europe the men chosen for the army are above the average of their fellows. The absolute best doubtless they are not; but still less are they the worst. Doubtless, too, physical excellence is more considered than moral or mental strength, and certainly again the more noble the cause, the more worthy the class of men who will risk their lives for it.
Not to confuse the point by modern instances, it is doubtless true
