Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/42

24 principles and emotions as these that give war nearly all the poetry and the glory that can ever be found in it. There is nothing of either in the mere exhibition of military might, the boast of conquest, the raw carnage, the hecatombs of slain. Something magnificent there is, apart from every ethical consideration, in all heroic fighting against odds, in any act of supreme courage on the field, in so desperate a charge as that of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, in the deathless story of the great retreat from Mons, even if you forget the cause for which those heroes fell. But probably the incidents that uplift us most in the telling are incidents in which the kindly, self-sacrificing instincts of men are seen to survive amidst the barbarity and indescribable inferno of a battlefield. The dying Sidney's ready compassion for the soldier who lay wounded beside him at Zutphen, his simple self-renunciatory 'His need is greater than mine,' are worth nearly all his poetry. The right touch, too, is in each of those innumerable tales of how on a stricken