Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/292

236 better. Death is nothing terrible after all. It may mean something even more wonderful than life.'

'It is the slackers and shirkers alone in this war,' he writes, again to his mother, in 1915, 'who are to be lamented. Had I the choice I would be nowhere else than where I am.' He notes in his diary that he is glad to be fighting with the French, who have 'the admiration of all who love liberty, and heroism in its defence.... Whatever be the force in international conflicts of having justice and all the principles of morality on one's side, it at least gives the French soldier a strength that 's like the strength of ten against an adversary whose weapon is only brute violence.' And in a last letter, to a friend, written on 28th June 1916, the night before he was killed in a victorious charge, he rejoices: 'We go up to the attack tomorrow. We are to have the honour of marching in the first wave—I am glad to be going in the first wave. If you are in this thing at all it is best to be in to the limit. And this is the supreme experience.'