Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/46

28 his khakied neighbour for a fatherly, grey-bearded civilian who had shouldered the guardsman's rifle so as to leave him free to carry his little girl, a child of two, whilst his wife, with a tremulous smile about her lips, kept pace with him, linked to his arm. The homeliness of that group in so warlike a setting helped to illustrate in its way, as those other memories do in theirs, all that I have been labouring here to express: that all the good and gracious human qualities in men are formed and nurtured in peace, amidst the decencies of common, everyday life; that war may on occasion evoke them, but it no more creates them than the night creates the stars.