Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/251

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It were easy enough to write so courageously of dying and play with fancies of what may happen after death if, writing as a distant onlooker and in no danger, one merely dramatised the thoughts and emotions of the men who were in the battle lines; but the strength and glory of these soldier poets is that they wrote in the heart of darkness, that the terrors they clothed in beauty were storming round about them, that they were fronting the bitter death they felt they were doomed to die and welcomed in their songs, and that they justified in action the highest and proudest of their written words. They could look forward without a tremor, and