Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/55

Rh world of difference between those romantic old war lyrics that our patriotic civilians used to write and the grim realism or high spiritual significances of those that were written in the mud and squalor of the trenches, in dug-out or billet, just before going into action, just after coming out of it, in the quiet of a rest-camp or while their writers were lying wounded in hospital. No Hymn of Hate is among them, no glorification of slaughter, no note of boastfulness or blatancy, but a deep love of country, a clear, rational sense of the tragedy and dire necessity of what must be done, in such an hour as this, by all who value liberty and honour more than peace at the price of both, an unwavering vision of the end to be fought for, faith in God and in each other, with those qualities of self-sacrifice and heroic resolve that you would look for in men who had rallied to what they were determined should be a last crusade against the folly and crime of war, and had gone forth together on that knightly quest, following the Holy Grail of a great ideal.