Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/166

128 he enlisted, in August 1914, in the Grenadier Guards; and he had seen much service and was a Captain of the Sherwood Foresters when he was killed in France on the 23rd March 1918.

If he had not been a true idealist, a patriot whose love of country was only part of a larger love of humanity, he would not have been impelled to go so quickly and voluntarily to the defence of Belgium, to pit his strength and life against the power of wrong when it seemed so much mightier than right. But he was a man, and eager to take a man's good way in that business. He went to war because he hated it, and saw no virtue in standing aside, leaving the outlaws who made war free to filch what they would of the world, and slay and ravage and triumph unopposed. He fought not for the lust of fighting, but for the joy of breaking, once for all, those who did fight for the lust of it. How deeply he was stirred by the horror and cruelty inseparable from that lust, and from the glory that traditionally rewards whoso survives to go on rejoicing,