Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/108

78 time of national crisis like the present the individual has no right whatever to urge his views if they are contrary to the best and immediate interest of the State.'

Less than a year later, a lieutenant in the King's Royal Rifles, he is writing to his sister from France: 'In general, the whole of the war zone is so un-Christian in its aspect and so horrible in its antithesis to all that is beautiful and good that I would rather not write about it. I do my best to forget and, in a measure, to forgive it by reading Keats, Blake, Swinburne or Housman, and even by attempts to write poems on the things of life, not the sins of it.' He goes on to say that he believes man is now being made to pay for the sins of his body with his body; that for centuries civilisation has been on the wrong track; 'man has developed his physical mind almost to the utter exclusion of his spiritual self'; that all manner of new inventions have been designed to increase his bodily comfort; he has given himself up to the worship of gold, values it for its own sake