Algernon Blackwood

“ The poems of loss and regret will appeal to the many who have heard the beating of the wings of the Angel of Death. And it is hoped that the beautiful poems of our countryside, of our grey seas and tumbling burns, will be read with joy by soldiers far from home and land where their hearts are. May they prove to be pictures as intimate to their hearts as the remembrance of dear familiar faces.”
In any brief notice of a book of poems that gives pleasure as this one does, it is difficult, and invidious, perhaps, to make quotations. Many poets of established fame have contributed to Country Life ”

“ Soldiers in the trenches have developed a hitherto latent taste for poetry, just as they have shown a resurgence of religious feeling.” In other words, the heart is open, and must be fed. And I would quote another passage, since it expresses better than I can precisely what I feel about this particular anthology: “There are poems to suit many tastes, but there are none given over to vague, ill defined emotion or any merely fanciful sentimentality. There are poems for today of ‘the lads who have gone to the war,’ and of those who will come back no more. ”