Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/257

Rh the second place, for the quiet solace and pride of those others, spiritual and mental sons of ours, if not actually physical—the men of our race who will depend for so much of their dignity upon the doings of the generation before. War is a boastful, beastly business; but if we don't plunge into it now we lower the whole pitch of posterity's life, leave them with only some dusty relics of racial honour. To enter into this material hell now is to win for our successors a kind of immaterial heaven. There will be an ease and a splendour in their attitude towards life which a peaceful hand now would destroy. It is for the sake of that spiritual ease and enrichment of life that we fling everything aside now to learn to deal death.'

This is why he and thousands of his fellows went to war—not for the glory of conquest and with insane ambitions of world power—but for love of peace and honour and freedom, and that it might not be said of them that they had betrayed posterity into bondage. After all, there are dearer things than life, things without