Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/160

122 it as the dark years pass, and are present, more or less, in most of the soldier-poetry that was written towards the last. The change did not come of weariness, of any loss of faith in the cause or slackening of the resolute will to go through to the end and to end in victory; it came of the long-drawn agony, the multitudinous slaughter, the incalculable squandering of young and splendid life, and was a profound protest against the murderous insanity of that destruction, against the blundering, obsolete ruling systems that had plunged the world into such a bloody chaos. It was the revolt of the modern against the ancient spirit, of the civilised against a reversion to barbarism, and the young, with all their passion for romance and transfiguring idealism, were swifter to join in this rational revolt than were many of our poets and others who are old enough to be wiser.

Henry Lamont Simpson was a year younger than Jeffery Day when he was killed in action at Hazebrouck. He was twenty, and the war had already opened