Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/176

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Who brought me forth in life and limb all whole,

Who blessed my powers with His divine repair,

And gave me back my soul!

A far other war-song this, far nobler in its humility and more courageous than the brazen, sounding rhymes that our civilian war-poets used to sing for us!

It was nothing strange that these men, nurtured in peace, reared wholly in the gentler arts of life, should have entered so suddenly into the new and abhorrent atmosphere of war, haunted, more or less, by premonitions that they would never return. This premonition recurs in the verse of most of them and is accepted sometimes stoically and as a matter of course, sometimes with regret or with bitterness, but without dread, and sometimes in an eager and lofty spirit of self-sacrifice. Something of this sense of doom is in Geoffrey Bache Smith's later poems, but it leaves him untroubled, and when he hints at it it is with a calm, serene philosophy. He gave evidence of literary ability while he