Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/370

304 And in the next century, Southey took the same theme and, in his gentler vein, satirised the Duke and his triumph in 'The Battle of Blenheim,' where old Kaspar, moralising over the skull found on the battlefield, is unable to explain why the victory was a great and a famous one, and can only reiterate, to the end, that it was that:

Since then, we have come more and more, as a nation, to little Peterkin's outlook on this matter of war. We are more insistently asking why it should survive among rational Christian people, what is the good of it, with its brutalities, its waste, its suffering and heartbreak, and all the harm it does? And we grow less and less contented with the mechanical explanation of non-combatant philosophers and professors that it is a biological necessity, a natural, recurring phase in our social evolution, and its miseries the