“ Among the many books which the war has drawn forth it may safely be said that none contains more concentrated poignancy than the tiny pamphlet of verses which Mr. Gibson entitles 'Battle.' Sympathy and irony strive for the palm throughout. The little book is a monument to the wantonness of it all, to the cheapness of life in war, the carelessness as to the individual, the disregard alike of promise and performance, the elimination of personality. When war is declared, said Napoleon, there are no longer men, there is only a man. ”
Quotes from Friends ()
“ The main thing about them is just that they are extraordinary poems; by means of their psychology, no less and no more than by means of their metre, their rhyme, their intellectual form and their concrete imagery, they pierce us with flashing understanding of what the war is and means--not merely what it is to these individual pieces of ordinary human nature who are injured by it and who yet dominate it, but, by evident implication, what the war is in itself, as a grisly multitudinous whole. ”
“ Modern warfare is not beautiful, and Mr. Gibson does not try to gloss it in the usual way, by underlining the heroism and endurance it evokes. All that is simply assumed in these poems, just as the common soldier himself assumes it. An almost appalling heroism is unemphatically revealed in them as the fundamental fact of usual human nature. ”
