Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/41

Rh the throne of it and his two-headed Kultur at the gate; and because, at the outset, their manhood and their honour would not let them turn a deaf ear to the agony of outraged Belgium. The cry of that agony came to all of us with the compelling force that is in Cromwell's poignant appeal to the French king, when the Piedmontese, whom France was pledged to protect, were ruthlessly massacred by their oppressors:—

"'There are reasons of State which might give thee inducement not to reject these People of the Valleys flying for shelter to thee: but I would not have thee, so great a king as thou art, be moved to the defence of the unfortunate by other reasons than the promise of thy Ancestors and thy own piety and royal benignity and greatness of mind. So shall the praise and fame of this most worthy action be unmixed and clear, and thyself shalt find the Father of Mercy and his Son Christ, whose name and doctrine thou shalt have vindicated, the more favourable to thee and propitious through the course of thy life.'"

It is some such high cause as this, such