Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/360

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If one may say so without seeming boastful I sometimes wonder whether, just now, there are not too many apologists among us—too many well-meaning persons who paint our national past in darker colours than belong to it and write as if the war had lifted us to heights we had not trodden before? War cannot endow a nation with qualities it does not already possess; it is merely the acid which tests the metal and proves it to be either gold or a base imitation. At the risk of repeating myself, I want to emphasise that the minds and souls of the fifty-four soldier poets whose work we have been considering—and they 294