Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/40

22 nothing but a necessary and degrading evil in the human community, and as not the less evil for being still necessary. Men of reason face it now precisely as they face the need of forming a rescue party to descend into a burning mine or to launch a lifeboat into the blind fury of a storm—unafraid, but not glorying. There are, of course, exceptions among us, but as a nation we have arrived at years of discretion; we have outgrown that pride in the exhibition of muscular superiority over our neighbours which is pardonable, though silly enough, in youth, but a sign of madness in maturity; and it would not have been possible to rouse any enthusiasm in this country to-day for an aggressive or unjustified war. Our friends and fellow-workers have armed in their millions, not because they love 'the sport of kings,' or because they thirst for glory, or domination, or booty; but because they realise that there is no other way of saving their own souls and the soul of the world from being cast into a primitive hell upon earth with an All-Highest War Lord on