Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/341

 IX

I AM not attempting anything of criticism here; I am attempting nothing more than to show in their own words what was in their hearts and minds when these men of peace, these civilians in grain, made soldiers of themselves under stress of necessity, and what was the real object of their fighting. Going about their every-day business in the trenches or in the hurly-burly of conflict, they were like the rest of that incomparable fellowship of our fighting men who, as Lieutenant Coningsby Dawson has it in his Khaki Courage, 'wear their crown of thorns as if it were a cap and bells'; but behind the scenes, 279