Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/254

204 I want yet. I want from the bottom of my heart to see it out'; and to his mother again a week later: 'Don't listen to peace talk yet—discourage it if you can. Nothing makes us madder out here. Remember we are on the wrong side of the top to talk of peace. It is a worse idea than the war. A patch-up peace with those bloody gentry over there!' This was a man at the front who wrote that, and added, 'Do you realise that I can see one of them now?... I can hear them in the distance too.... No peace until we are on top, please.' It was the home-staying pacifist, claiming to be more humane than such men as these, who clamoured incessantly for peace by immediate negotiation because, forsooth, as he speciously reiterated, peace would have to be made by negotiation at last—as if it made no difference whether you tried to reason with your enemy while he had his foot on your neck or after you were well on your feet again and at no such disadvantage.

There is a passage in Dixon Scott's