Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/49

Rh have stripped the thing of its gaudy trappings, they have bared their own hearts to us, and we know that they are speaking now not for themselves only, but for our armies and our nation as a whole. For when the Hun, mad for power, started to run amok through human rights and the sanities of civilisation, and the young manhood of our race spontaneously rose to answer that challenge, they were of all sorts and conditions who swarmed to the recruiting stations—aristocrats and navvies, artisans and university professors, tradesmen, farmers, lawyers, stockbrokers, actors, artists, and poets—and these last, drawn also from every grade of society, have coalesced into a representative group which is of itself a sort of microcosm of our army, as our army is of our nation.

Before the war, Rupert Brooke had won the Rugby school prize for his poem, 'The Bastille,' gained a Fellowship at King's, Cambridge, and was devoting himself to scholarship and literature; Francis Ledwidge had been a scavenger on the roads of Ireland; Edward Thomas was