Here lies a clerk who half his life had spent
Toiling at ledgers in a city grey,
Thinking that so his days would drift away
With no lance broken in life’s tournament
Yet ever ‘twixt the books and his bright eyes
The gleaming eagles of the legions came,
And horsemen, charging under phantom skies,
Went thundering past beneath the oriflamme.

And now those waiting dreams are satisfied
From twilight to the halls of dawn he went;
His lance is broken; but he lies content
With that high hour, in which he lived and died.
And falling thus, he wants no recompense,
Who found his battle in the last resort
Nor needs he any hearse to bear him hence,
Who goes to join the men of Agincourt.

The poem was first published in a book of 1915, so you can see why Brian Gardner included it in Up the Line to Death, and why a student-friendly website might describe it as ‘ a recruitment poem, to try and convince men to join up and fight in the First World War.’
Update: G.M. Griffiths used to say this about the poem on his very useful site, but  has now altered his comments on Asquith to take into account my suggestions in this post.

Some critics go further, like the American James Anderson Winn in his book The Poetry of War. Winn (who seems rather fond of ticking poets off) accuses Asquith of ‘deflecting the reader’s attention from the carnage of the Great War’, of ‘camouflag[ing] the bloodshed, and of denying ‘the reality of machine guns and barbed wire, with which he was surely familiar as an officer in the Royal Artillery’.
So I was surprised recently, when looking at the memoirs of Herbert’s mother, Margot Asquith, to read:

Our second son, Herbert, began his career as a lawyer. He had a sweet and gentle nature, and much originality. He was a poet, and wrote the following some years before the Great War of 1914, through which he served from the first day to the last.

The poem she refers to is, of course, ‘The Volunteer’.
From what I can gather, the poem was actually written in 1912. Asquith was not then a soldier but a lawyer, so himself presumably ‘ Toiling at ledgers in a city grey’. This is a poem about joining the newly-formed Territorials; far from deflecting the reader from the prospect of death, it faces the fact that volunteering is more than a romantic gesture, but may well lead to personal extinction (as we are told in the first two words of the poem).
I would agree that the vocabulary is rather lush, but it’s the clerk’s lush dream that Asquith is describing. I don’t think it’s fair to accuse Asquith of being unrealistic, because he is not aiming at realism, but at giving us the clerk’s vision, which is perhaps viewed with a tragic irony; the poet knows that it is unrealistic, and the clerk will find that it leads to death – yet it still has a magnificence.
And in describing war in terms of cavalry charges, Asquith was no more unrealistic than just about everyone else at the time.
In 1912 a continental war was a very hypothetical prospect. Prophets like Kipling warned against the build-up of German strength, and many were aware that Europe was becoming dangerously unstable; even the pessimists, however, did not envisage a war on the scale of what actually occurred. If one reads fictional imaginings of future wars, like Douglas Newton’s War! of 1914, they envisage fighting on the scale of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, a cruel but short campaign with a quick, decisive end. (This, of course, is what the Kaiser was hoping for in France, before turning his attention to a long slog against Russia. ‘Over by Christmas’ was very much part of the German war plan.)
In all such fictional depictions of future war, cavalry play a major part. The cavalry charge was, after all, the deadliest and most terrifying available weapon of attack, crashing through the infantry lines and reducing the enemy to a chaotic retreating mob. Artillery could take its toll on the enemy and machine guns were effective in defence, but cavalry, it was generally assumed, was the way to win a war.
The ‘reality of machine guns and barbed wire’ kept the cavalry off the battlefield for most of the War, which is why it degenerated into the long, terrible war of attrition.
Seen as a Great War poem ‘The Volunteer’ might look like an evasion of reality; seen as a pre-war poem about the Territorials, it looks rather different, perhaps even like a warning that romantic dreams may lead to death. As so often, context matters.

And always there was the close, not unfriendly, but real, persistent criticism of one’s colleagues. In the early days he had found the idea of this vastly exhilarating. [....] They played at being prigs. Never was such a set of boys. They were boys even when they verged on middle-age, and they would write like boys. It came of the inspiration of the great Secretan, who was an article of religion in the office, and of a religion unstaled. His ideals were austere, and he made fun with
a charming buoyancy. Of course he was a scholar and brilliance was mated with experience. He worked in politics without being precisely a politician.
A good deal of intellectual ragging went on amongst them all, with perhaps the exception of Secretan, who had always wit enough to extricate himself from the claims that might trespass upon his precious reserve. He was immensely generous and profoundly critical. He kept himself in a timid, arrogant seclusion, and you could imagine or you couldn’t what an overwhelming thing his friendship must be. Once he had startled Arden by saying that a writer should be able to perceive a distinct improvement in his style every six months ; perhaps Arden had added the word “distinct” himself, for to Secretan it would be redundant.

The novel gives a picture of the Guardian‘s reception in Manchester in August 1914, when it moved from strong advocacy of peace attempts to a measured support for the War. (‘England declared war on Germany at eleven o’clock last night. All controversy is now at an end. Our front is united,’ the paper announced on August 5th.) Monkhouse shows Manchester businessmen in a club berating the ‘radical rag’, despite this change in attitude, for lack of patriotism, and even accusing it of treason:

A stranger, intervening, wished to know whether a majority of the [paper's] shares were not held by Germans, and whether the leaders were not written by men of German extraction. ” Don’t answer the fool,” said Burke, but the man kept reiterating : “Is that the case ?” Attar said, “I can assure you, sir, that several drunken men have said so.”

Arden has to defend himself from patriots like these, and also from pacifists like his sister, to whom war was a ‘monstrous wickedness, an evil to be resisted on all occasions and at all costs.’
Monkhouse presents Geoffrey as suffering the ‘unhappiness of perpetual and alternative opposition.’ For him:

It seemed that the world was divided into the warlike and the pacific, and there was no room for those of the middle way. They seemed to be weak even while they held strongly to what they could perceive of reason and justice.

He decides to enlist, but fails the medical. He then has an operation to make him fit for recruitment (though the novel is vague about this, as well as some other practicalities; we never know exactly which part of him is operated on – or at least I couldn’t work it out.)
The complication with his becoming a soldier is that he has fallen in love with an actress called Sibyl, a young woman who declares herself to be of German extraction. The scenes where they talk through their dilemmas are among the most interesting in the book. She agrees that Britain is in the right, but cannot disown her German heritage; he feels the duty to fight against the German army, but insists that he will not be fighting against the German people (a fine and precarious distinction).
During their honeymoon, the newspaper brings news of the sinking of the Lusitania, an atrocity that puts more strain on their relationship:

She read, and looked blankly at Geoffrey over the top of the paper, read again and laid it down.
” Perhaps it is not true,” she said.
” Let us hope so.”
” Geoffrey, do you feel any resentment towards me?”
“You?” he cried.
“That’s what I think of first. It isn’t all these poor people children, babies. That’s far away. I only feel it bluntly yet. It’s you and me. Have we made an awful mistake? Are you thinking she’s a German? Because I am. It’s my people who have done this. Tell me what you feel. No, don’t come near me just yet.”

Their anguished relationship continues by letter when he is sent out to France. He is upset to learn, not from her, that her German origins are causing her to be badly treated back in England. The story comes to a decisive end, but its conflicts and issues are not resolved.
As a glimpse of history, the book is very interesting, because of the picture it gives of the Manchester theatrical and journalistic worlds. As a novel it is less satisfactory. Its issues are debated at considerable length, but are not fully dramatised. It is not even very clear just what the anti-German bullying that upsets Sibyl consists of. One senses that Monkhouse was more interested in working through some of his own confused feelings about the War than in doing the novelist’s basic job of creating a set of fully believable and interacting characters.
By 1923 and The Conquering Hero he was able to take a firmer grip on the questions raised by the War, and to produce a piece that was less wordy and more challenging.

While at the National Archives in Kew yesterday, I took a look at the file (HO 45/13944) about the prosecution of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow in 1915.
I was hoping to find some indication whether Lawrence’s attitude towards the War had been a contributing factor in the decision to prosecute. There were no clues about that, but the contents of the file were still interesting.
The papers at Kew are not about the initial prosecution, but about the need to answer questions posed afterwards by Philip Morrell M.P., in the House of Commons.
Morrell asked why proceedings were undertaken, and claimed that the prosecution was unfair to Lawrence, who was given no chance to defend himself.
He asked whether the Secretary of State was aware:

that no direct evidence was given by the prosecution in support of the charge, but that the counsel employed by the police, who was the only counsel present, confined himself to reading the unfavourable comments of two journalists. who were not called on to give evidence, and had apparently not read the book; and whether he will see that no further proceedings of this kind are taken by the police in respect of any work produced by an author of good standing and reputation, except after due notice being given to him, so that he may have at least as good an opportunity as any other accused man of replying to the charges made against him.

[The real problem was that Lawrence's publishers, Methuen, had caved in immediately there was a whiff of danger; they pleaded guilty and withdrew the book, leaving Lawrence isolated and his reputation badly damaged.]
Sir John Simon replied, pointing out that prosecution was of the publisher not of the author, and saying that

it was not correct to say that [the magistrate's] decision was arrived at without the book or the material passages therein being read.

(A slightly evasive answer; that reference to material passages hints that the magistrate may have read the hot bits, without looking at them in the context of the whole novel.)
Sir W. Byles asked a supplementary question, hinting at the issue I am most interested in: ‘Were these proceedings taken under the Defence of the Realm Act?’ and was told that they were not.
All these parliamentary quotations are taken from pages of Hansard that are stuck into the file. (In them ‘Lawrence’ is spelled ‘Laurence’ throughout, by the way, which maybe says something about the limits of his literary fame at the time.) Handwritten notes justify Simon’s answer: ‘The offence in respect of which proceedings were taken was not the writing but the publishing of the book referred to [....] The author not being a party to the proceedings could only be produced as a witness for the defence.’ Methuen, of course, chose not to call him.
So far, so legalistic. More revealing is the treatment of a Times report of the court case pasted into the file. These words reporting part of the prosecutor’s speech are underlined:

The book in question was a mass of obscenity of thought, idea and action throughout, wrapped up in language which he supposed would be regarded in some quarters as an artistic and intellectual effort.

In the margin, some ministerial hand has added:

The author dwells on the sexual feelings of a number of people in a way which suggests a diseased mind.
See e.g.: pp 317-8, 448-9.

Official feeling about Lawrence is shown in some pages added to the file in 1930. After Lawrence’s death, one S. Witt (who was he?) noticed an advertisement in the TLS for the publisher Secker, announcing a new edition of Lawrence’s novels, including The Rainbow.
He asked whether action should be taken, obviously feeling that it should be. One J.B responded:

Although the 1915 proceedings were taken in the Commisioner’s name, they were practically initiated by the late Sir Charles Matthews [DPP in 1917].
I have gone through the book again. There are a few passages that would I think still be adjudged obscene by some Courts; but I feel quite clear that proceedings would be unwise.

S. Witt had to agree:

It would certainly be unwise to give the works of Lawrence any further advertisement or to appear to be attacking a writer after his death. If all the critics were to write as plainly and boldly as the author of the paragraph in the Daily Telegraph of the 4th March (see within) we should have no further cause for anxiety.

So in 1930 The Rainbow was published with impunity.
That Daily Telegraph article, though, gives an idea of how he and his work were regarded by the respectable in 1930. It really is quite a nasty piece of writing.

He encountered queues of men at the recruiting offices waiting their turn to enlist. One day he walked along a line, and, regarded critically, it didn’t seem that the might of Germany had much to fear from these. They looked strangely small and shabby ; they joked a little sometimes, they lounged, they spat; some looked sullen, and some appeared to be gazing at an object infinitely far away; many had the Briton’s air of consciously making a fool of himself. He came to the end of the line and started, for there was the little man of the German restaurant. He looked defiant and apologetic too. He grinned faintly and said : “Ad to do it.” And Geoffrey felt then that there had never been anything like this in the world before, that nothing had ever mattered so much, that to falter now would be baseness and misery. As he paused there, the little man looked at him inquiringly and muttered again : ” Ad to.” Geoffrey shook hands with him and hurried away.

He saw Lindsay that night and told him that he wanted to go.

…and a peaceful New Year.

Not everyone was pleased when the Armistice ended hostilities on 11th November, 1918. John Glubb, a young officer in the Royal Engineers, wrote in his diary:

Alas, the war is over, at the time when it was beginning to be exciting and enjoyable, after all these years.

Glubb was annoyed that the recent months of moving warfare had not allowed him as many opportunities as it might have done. Only a few days earlier, he had written:

We shall accompany the advance guard, of course, and it should be quite exciting, if only we can overtake Bre’er Boche. I always have looked forward to a chance to bring my pontoons into action and slap down a bridge under enemy fire!

When Glubb published his wartime diaries in 1978 he not only chose ‘Into Battle’ as his title, but printed as his epigraph all of Julian Grenfell’s paean to the thrill of warfare (‘And he is dead who will not fight;/ And who dies fighting has increase.’). Few prose accounts of the war are so true to the spirit of Grenfell’s poem.
In a preface, Glubb explains how he came across ‘a bundle of old exercise books, full of faded writing in pencil’ – his diaries from sixty years before:

At a time when survivors who actually fought in the war are becoming fewer and when the war itself is often misrepresented to support modern political propaganda, it seemed to me that these artless pages, written day-by-day in trenches and bivouacs, might not be entirely lacking in interest.

Glubb was from a military family (his grandfather had been a hero of the Indian Mutiny and his father was a regular officer in the Royal Engineers, who later became a Major-General). In 1915, aged just eighteen, John Glubb was himself commissioned in the Engineers, and arrived in France in November of that year. Within a year, the high casualty figures among officers in his unit put this very young man in temporary charge of a large number of sappers, doing difficult and very dangerous work.
On occasion he admits to being terrified – for instance, when he lost his sense of direction while on night patrol in no-man’s-land, and did not know whether he was moving towards the British trenches or the German. More often, though, he describes being thrilled and fascinated by the processes of war. He describes a brilliant attack by German aeroplanes with unalloyed admiration.
The diary chronicles the frustrations and hardships of war, but throughout it all Glubb is fascinated by the challenges and techniques of warfare. One of the engineers’ tasks was trying to enable supplies and reinforcements for advancing troops by laying tramlines across the shell-blasted morass of No-Man’s-Land (where roads were quite impossible). The description of this operation is fascinating.
At Arras, Glubb was severely wounded in the throat and jaw. The account of his journey back to England is the most gripping part of the book.

I could feel something long lying loosely in my left cheek, as though I had a chicken bone in my mouth. It was in reality half my jaw, which had been broken off, teeth and all, and was floating about in my mouth.

On the battlefield he had seen death and suffering, but now he saw worse: ‘I realised vividly now that the real horrors of war were to be seen in the hospitals, not on the battlefield.’ Eventually Glubb arrived at Sidcup in the care of Harold Gillies’s plastic surgery unit; his jaws were cemented together, and he became eager to return to France.
He went back in time to be part of the last hundred days, the war of movement very different from the static trench warfare of the previous four years. This was exhausting but exhilarating, and his military enthusiasm survived four years of war.
After 1919 he stayed in the Army, was posted in Iraq (then governed by Britain under a League of Nations mandate) He became an officer of the Arab Legion, a force organised by the British to keep peace in the region. Later he became an eminence grise in the Middle East, and was famously known as Glubb Pasha.

‘Glubb Pasha’ in 1954

Suggestion to A-Level students: If your teacher tells you that Grenfell’s ‘Into Battle’ expressed the mood of the early days of the War, but that after the Battle of the Somme the whole army became disillusioned and despondent, a useful response might be to adopt a puzzled and serious expression, and ask: ‘But what about John Glubb?’

They link the archive to the current War Horse exhibition at the National Army Museum in Chelsea, and inevitably to the forthcoming Spielberg film.