Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/318

258 He poured his keen delight in life into such ringing songs as 'The Road,' 'The Call of the Road,' and 'Moonshine'; his sorrow for those who had died in battle, and his confidence that a better world would rise out of the chaos which had engulfed them, into his 'Requiem':

That the war had already welded Australia into a nation is the text of one of the letters of Adrian Consett Stephen. When the news reached him in France that his country had voted against conscription he was disappointed, and, writing home, insisted that the soldiers had only voted against it because they shrank from forcing an unwilling mate to join them in that hell, or because they did not want the sort of man who would not come willingly. 'Australians don't seem to realise their own significance, that each