Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/136

 IV

was impossible that the altruistic enthusiasm which nerved and ennobled our people in the hour of our setting forth on the great quest, could remain burning at white heat through the hardship and disillusion, the wearing agony and inhuman horrors of over four long years of war. After the eager swiftness of the first onset, our soldiers settled down to a dogged endurance of the filth and peril and tedium of trench warfare, to a fixed determination of 'seeing it through,' which was but the old enthusiasm adapting itself to circumstances and manifesting itself in a sober and more enduring form. This change of mood which came over the soldiers came also over the songs 100