No hate is in our anger, No vengeance in our wrath, We hold the line of freedom Across the tyrant’s path. Where’er oppression vaunteth We loose the sword once more To stay the feet of conquest, And pray an end of war. SWAN SONGS More than all the others put together, the war poems of Alan Seeger, Lieutenant Colonel McCrae, and Lieut. Rupert Brooke, have touched and thrilled the heart of America. They are quiet, earnest, yet more powerful than trumpet blasts, for they rise triumphant from great depths, and as they sing, exalt. Most familiar is our own Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.” He was studying in Paris when the war broke out. In the third week he enlisted in the Foreign Legion. Two arduous years later he was called on higher service. July 4, 1916, his squad was caught in an assault on the village of Belloy-en-Santerre, where the Germans received them with the fire of six machine guns. Seeger was severely wounded, but went forward with the others, and helped take the place. Next morning he died. He had kept the tryst. * * * * * Alan Seeger was a New York boy. He was born in that city June 22, 1888. In his short life he had written some twenty poems. This was his last. It was written in camp, shortly before his call came: I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH[1] I have a rendezvous with Death At some disputed barricade When Spring comes back with rustling shade And apple blossoms fill the air. I have a rendezvous with Death When Spring brings back blue days and fair It may be he shall take my hand And lead me into his dark land And close my eyes and quench my breath; It may be I shall pass him, still, I have a rendezvous with Death On some scarred slope of battered hill, When Spring comes round again this year And the first meadow flowers appear. God knows ’twere better to be deep Pillowed in silk and scented down, Where love throbs out in blissful sleep, Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath, Where hushed awakenings are dear. But I’ve a rendezvous with Death At midnight in some flaming town, When Spring trips north again this year, And I to my pledged word am true. I shall not fail that rendezvous. Lieut. Col. John McCrae was a Canadian physician who served in the South African war as an artilleryman. He was on his way to Canada when the war began in 1914, and immediately upon landing he entered the Val Cartier training camp and was commissioned a Captain. Later he joined the McGill Hospital corps and went with it to France, where he rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, and died in service, January 28, 1918. His poem, “In Flanders’ Fields,” was written on the Flanders front in the Spring of 1915. Its inspiration is thus explained by Sergeant Charles E. Bisset, of the 19th Battalion, 1st Brigade, Canadian Infantry: