Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/290

234 all of all humanity from the iniquities and maniacal horrors of war.

These were the ideals, and nothing but these, that led hundreds of young Americans to anticipate the decision of their Government and enlist in the French and Canadian and English armies immediately the war was upon us; and one of the first of those hundreds was Alan Seeger. He came of an old New England family, and was born in New York in 1888. Two or three years' residence in Paris had inspired him with a deep love and admiration of France and the French, and when the Huns were swarming into Belgium, the menace to Paris, the prospect of France being broken and humiliated again as in 1871, so wrought upon him that he promptly joined the French foreign legion.

Rupert Brooke's ideal of self-sacrifice was not higher, nor Julian Grenfell's joy in battle keener, than are the idealism and the eager, soldierly spirit that are alive in Seeger's letters and diary and poems. He claimed to share with Sidney a devotion