Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/44

26 place with his rifle lying beside him on the stretcher. A trifle, no doubt; but there is a very different light about it from that which haloes the ruins of Louvain and the murder of Captain Fryatt.

I have known many who voluntarily abandoned a pleasant life and golden prospects for the future, as soon as the war came upon us, to fight for freedom and human rights, from nothing but an irresistible sense of duty and honour. I have stood at railway stations and seen our soldiers—who had been clerks and artisans a few months before—set out for the front stoically or cheerily, and have noted how their womenfolk, gathered to see them off, have heartened them with smiling goodbyes, and only broken into tears when the train had carried their men beyond sight of their weakness. I have stood at railway stations and seen tired and muddied soldiers from the trenches coming home on leave, and here and there from the vast crowd outside a mother, a father, a wife, a child, a sister, a brother, a sweetheart, run forward with sudden outcries to get