ABSTRACT
Tired, overworked, and perhaps already suffering from the pernicious anaemia that was to kill him, Strachey misquoted the poem he chose to encourage Hankey in publishing A Student in Arms. The book appeared in May, the month in which the restive Hankey was at last returned to active service in the run-up to the Battle of the Somme, due to begin late the following month. Strachey wrote ‘The song that stirs a nation’s heart/Is in itself a deed’, while Tennyson had written not ‘stirs’ but ‘nerves a nation’s heart’, and it is ‘nerves’ that reflects more accurately the purpose of Hankey’s war writing, which was to steady rather than to excite or inflame.
