Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/256

206 'when doubts descend on one dismally, when one's soldiering seems nothing but a contemptible vanity, indulged in largely to keep the respect of lookers-on. And, of course, cowardice of that sort, a small pinch of it anyway, did help to make most of us brave. There was the love of adventure, too, the longing to be in the great scrum—the romantic appeal of "the neighing steed and the shrill trump"—all the glamour and illusion of the violent thing that has figured for ever in books, paintings and tales, as the supreme earthly adventure.... But beneath all these impulses, like a tide below waves, there lies also a world of much deeper emotion. It is a love of peace, really, a delight in fairness and faith—an inherited joy in all the traditional graces of life and in all the beauty that has been blessed by affection. It is an emotion, an impulse, for which the word "patriotism" is a term far too simple and trite.... One fights for the sake of happiness—for one's own happiness first of all, certain that did one not fight one would be miserable for ever—and then, in