Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/310

252 know, the country made sacred to us by the memories and the graves of our dead and associated with the joys and sorrows of our own lives, will always keep a surer hold upon our hearts than a people we have never known and the countries that enshrine for us no memories that are ours.

What but that mystic love of one's own land, one's own race, brought the myriads of Canada and Australasia rallying to the banners of the Motherland? Thousands in those armies were not born in England and had never trodden its soil, but it had been the home of their fathers; they were linked to it by all the records and traditions of their ancestry; they drew their life from it as from the very root of their being. They may have thought little of such things or forgotten them in ordinary times, but when the shadow of peril was over these islands they remembered, and went out to fight with a hatred of tyranny, a love of freedom that was bound up indissolubly with a love which was instinct in their blood and spirit of the land whose people and whose history were also theirs.