ABSTRACT
W.S. Rusk, an American reviewing the first volume of A Student in Arms in 1917, forecast that much writing about the Great War would be lost to ‘the winnowing flail of time’. The poet and the dramatist, the seer and the philosopher – the people who deal in ‘man himself and his spirit’s destiny’ – would be deprived of most ‘mirrors into the soul of man at the time of his greatest trial since he first reared his head above the level of the beast’. A Student in Arms, however, was sure to last. It was the book of an author who ‘saw things whole’. Rusk commended it to posterity for its ‘buoyant optimism’, and its hope that ‘the present morally foul world is being purified in the consuming yet refining fire of war.’ Rusk particularly valued its portrayal of death as ‘a rather unimportant event in the experience of the true man’. 1
