Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/369

Rh misery of it, with a steadily increasing hatred.

Among the stirring and splendidly patriotic thunderings of Henry V., Shakespeare puts into the mouths of the unlettered soldiery of his day a most poignant sense of the heavy responsibility their ruler will bear if he sends them to kill and be killed in a fight that is not just. Addison's verses on the battle of Blenheim give an elegant and flattering picture of Marlborough in the hour of triumph, but you need not grudge the Duke his compliment, for, when in due season he died, Swift wrote the satirical elegy upon him that is surely the bitterest, most mordant protest ever raised against a successful war and its commander: