Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/361

Rh and their many living peers have spoken for the general mind and soul of our people—were not formed on the battlefield; their opinions, ideals, aspirations were engendered in the home atmosphere during years of peace. We and our Allies, and Germany and her Allies, remained in war what racial instincts, long traditions, and peace-time training had naturally made of us all. The war did not make us or them one thing or the other; it did no more than give those who went into it opportunity to show whether they were beast or human, and I, for one, am not ashamed of the witness it has borne to the inherent character of my countrymen.

German professors, inflated with envy and a ridiculous pride in that German culture which has culminated in poison-gas, piracy, and the murder of civilians, have denounced us as land-grabbers and bloodthirsty; and no answer to that charge seems necessary beyond a comparison of the widely different ways in which the British and German empires