Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/36

18 to the moon, to sleep, to love, and verses that sigh over the vanity of human things. These, and other of our soldier poets like them, dead and living, seem to be a vastly different type of fighting man from the 'blonde beast,' the professional slaughterer adored of the German intellectuals, and this war is showing and will show which of the two types is fittest to survive in a reasonable world, and which belongs to the jungle and is doomed to extinction.

Two hundred years after Chaucer was dead, you find his ideal of the British soldier persisting (for it was the national ideal) in Ben Jonson's epistle 'to a friend, Master Colby, to persuade him to the wars'—an appeal that might well have been written yesterday, so applicable is it to what has happened in our generation:—

Wake, friend, from forth thy lethargy: the drum

Beats brave and loud in Europe, and bids come

All that dare rouse, or are not loath to quit

Their vicious ease and be o'erwhelmed with it.

It is a call to keep the spirits alive

That gasp for action and would yet revive

Man's buried honour in his sleepy life,

Quickening dead nature to her noblest strife....