Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/288

232 as the titanic world-war was than the far-reaching campaigns of Napoleon; and the probability is that it will take more than another century to produce the poet who shall be fitted to put the full story and significance of our Armageddon into one tremendous song. Meanwhile, to say nothing of what has been done by civilians, the soldiers themselves have written such an enormous body of verse touching on its infinitely varied aspects that it would be possible to compile from their ballads, lyrics, sonnets and miscellaneous rhymes, a sort of composite epic which in range and variety, in poignant truthfulness and intimacy of experience, would excel all that any one poet could compass.

That compilation is outside our scope here, within the limits of a single volume, where we can look to do no more than pay due tribute to the soldier poets of our own islands, and only to the too many of those who have died for the faith that was in them. But their work is sufficiently representative to indicate how different such an epic would be from any that has