The Great War in Verse and Prose — Background and Themes

The Opening Sequence: Kipling, Kitchener, and the Call to Arms

The first five entries establish a rhetorical arc. Kipling’s “For All We Have and Are” (1914) issues a stark warning: “No doubt shall make us doubt.” Immediately following is Lord Kitchener’s “Instructions to the British Soldier,” a prose piece that advises troops on conduct. The juxtaposition is telling—the poet’s abstract resolve meets the general’s practical commands. Sir Owen Seaman’s “Pro Patria” then shifts to a satirical tone, mocking German pretensions. The section closes with Kitchener’s “Statement in House of Lords,” a factual report on troop numbers. A first-time reader should note how the editor moves from lyrical urgency to bureaucratic detail, establishing a pattern of alternating registers that recurs throughout the anthology.

Poems of Sacrifice and the Elegiac Mode

Several poems in the middle of the collection dwell on death and memorial. Julian Grenfell’s “Into Battle” (written shortly before his own death) celebrates the soldier’s fate with a pagan vitality: “The thundering line of battle stands.” In contrast, Frederick George Scott’s “A Grave in Flanders” offers a quiet, Christian consolation. The most striking juxtaposition comes when Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier”—with its famous line “some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England”—is placed immediately after John Oxenham’s “Edith Cavell,” a poem about the executed nurse. The reader is invited to compare Brooke’s idealized death in battle with Cavell’s deliberate martyrdom. The editor does not comment, but the arrangement itself prompts reflection on different kinds of sacrifice.

Prose Interventions: Speeches, Sermons, and Official Reports

Wetherell intersperses poems with substantial prose extracts. Winston Churchill’s speech on the naval war, David Lloyd George’s “A Scrap of Paper” address, and Henri Bergson’s philosophical “The Meaning of War” appear alongside verse. These prose pieces serve as historical anchors, grounding the emotional poetry in documented events. For instance, Lloyd George’s speech condemns the invasion of Belgium, while the poem “To Belgium in Exile” by Seaman immediately follows. The reader can trace how the same political argument is rendered in different modes. The inclusion of Bergson’s lecture is notable—it introduces a philosophical dimension rare in school anthologies, suggesting the editor aimed to elevate the discussion beyond mere jingoism.

The Canadian Contribution and Imperial Unity

Given the book’s Ontario provenance, Canadian voices feature prominently. Robert J. C. Stead’s “We Were Men of the Furrow” contrasts rural Canadian life with the war’s mechanized horror. Private Harold R. Peat’s “Canadians—Canadians—That’s All!” is a rare enlisted man’s perspective, written in colloquial prose. The anthology also includes Sir Robert Borden’s Guildhall speech, where he asserts Canada’s autonomous war effort. A reader attentive to imperial politics will notice how these selections balance loyalty to Britain with emerging Canadian nationalism. The final poem, “Kitchener’s March” by Stead, imagines the dead general’s spirit marching on—a fitting close for a volume that consistently treats Kitchener as a secular saint.

Because the excerpts are incomplete, the full range of the anthology’s later sections—including pieces by Emile Cammaerts, Gilbert Murray, and Joyce Kilmer—cannot be assessed here. However, the pattern established in the first half suggests that Wetherell valued thematic resonance over chronology. Readers approaching the complete text should watch for how each poem and speech answers or complicates the one before it, and consider what the editor’s choices reveal about the values promoted in Ontario classrooms a century ago.

Holding this 1919 anthology, I remembered my father's old school copy, its margins tense with pencil marks beside the war poems. It felt like eavesdropping on a classroom conversation across decades. Something similar stirred when I later found A Williams Anthology A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 — Context and Discussion, another curated echo of young voices bound by their era's earnestness.