Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/30

14 than any who never soiled his hands in a shop. A peaceful, useful occupation, shopkeeping in general is easily compatible with the pursuit of culture, with the living of that finer life of the spirit which differentiates the civilised man from the crude savage whose staple industry is war. It is a barbaric folk who, though there is no battle toward, delight in being soldiers all the time and accentuating the symbols of their profession. Those who have emerged from barbarism do not cease to be fighting men because they have ceased to be fighting men only. America and France are demonstrating that, and for ourselves—there is not more than an infinitesimal part of our army that knew how to handle a gun before this war was declared, and it was significant of our small professional army that, so far from loving to clothe itself in extravagant terrors, its officers made it almost a point of etiquette to get out of uniform into mufti whenever they were off duty.

I think the native common sense of the shopkeeping Britisher brought him long