Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/255

Rh Men of Letters, in an essay on Rupert Brooke—almost the last literary work that he did—which chimes with the songs of our poet soldiers and has always seemed to me to embody the motives, the ideals, often inarticulate, that, in the main, prompted our younger generation, as they prompted him, to their impetuous defence of the rights of every man against the outrageous brigandage of the Hun. Loathing war and unable to imagine, as he told me, that he could ever really bring himself to 'stick a man,' he joined up at once and was already a lieutenant of artillery when he wrote this essay, in which he says that for him Brooke's sonnet commencing,

captured completely 'one of the dimmest and deepest, one of the most active but most elusive, of all the many mixed motives, beliefs, longings, ideals, which make those of us who have flung aside everything in order to fight still glad and gratified that we took the course we did. There do come moments, I must admit,' he adds,