Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/371

Rh inevitable price of human progress, that it is a glorious institution and serves to preserve the breed of heroes as racing preserves that of horses. We know, or if any do not they may know it from what has been written by our soldiers themselves, that there is no glory and little romance in war except for those who can play with the thought of it from far off, or after the years have healed its wounds and hidden the hideous ruin it wrought, and the agony of it has dwindled to the glamorous sorrow of a tale that is told.

Byron on the field of Waterloo felt no exultant thrill: to him it was a 'place of skulls,' where 'the red rain hath made the harvest grow,' and it reminded him only of the

which had gone to the making of that Emperor's pride who, as utterly shorn of it all as if he had never possessed any, was then eating his heart out at St. Helena.