A. St. John Adcock

“ They could look forward without a tremor, and if they could not always glance back without regret it was because the sacrifice they were making was a very real one—they were all young, life was sweet to them and had been rich in promise; yet they had it in them to subdue themselves and trample their regrets unflinchingly underfoot, upheld by the faith that they gave their lives that the world might remain worth living in for the rest of us.
That is the feeling, plainly expressed or implicit, in so much that the soldier poets have written of the war. ”

“ There is a delicate play of fancy and imagination and a lapidary cunning in the verbal artistry of his essays and criticisms which make it less surprising that he should at last have found a medium of expression in verse than that he did not find it earlier. But none even of his intimates can have foreseen that, with his gentle manners, his diffident self-distrust and bookish preoccupations, he had in him the makings of a soldier. Chivalry, the finest sense of honour, steadiness of purpose and a quiet courage we always knew that he had ”

“ For most of us know it is merely the coming to full tide of the mighty undercurrent that has been slowly gathering force in our life, as in our literature, all down the centuries. You may catch sounds of it in Chaucer, a fuller music of it in Langland; and thenceforward, to Morris, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, and our soldier authors of to-day, there is scarcely a poet of any significance who does not more or less preach that simple gospel of humanity. ”

“ There was the love of adventure, too, the longing to be in the great scrum—the romantic appeal of "the neighing steed and the shrill trump"—all the glamour and illusion of the violent thing that has figured for ever in books, paintings and tales, as the supreme earthly adventure.... But beneath all these impulses, like a tide below waves, there lies also a world of much deeper emotion. It is a love of peace, really, a delight in fairness and faith—an inherited joy in all the traditional graces of life and in all the beauty that has been blessed by affection. ”

“ There are as true and trenchant things said for democracy in Sir Thomas More's Utopia as in the books of such moderns as Ruskin, Dickens, Carlyle, Wells, Shaw; and it is no stranger that our people should have risen spontaneously now for the democratic ideal of freedom that is so literally in their blood, than that they should have put off the mild habits of civilian life and become instantly as hardy, fearless, and chivalrous soldiers as any in the world's history, for these qualities also are in their birthright. ”

“ But beyond and above even pity for the foully slaughtered children and women of Belgium rose the stronger, holier call to save the sanctuaries of civilisation from the destroyer, and so shatter his power for destruction that the peace of the world and the rights of the weak should never go in fear of it again—a call that rings like a tocsin in some of the noblest poetry of the war. ”

“ The mind of a child is a most beautiful thing. I have told you—have I not, Kiddie?—that I am passionately fond of children, though I think that no one at home realises how strong that passion is, and I have never told any one yet what I had determined long ago to do after I left Oxford. To-day, when there is a possibility of death to be faced, I can tell you all. I had decided, no matter how successful I was at Oxford, to go and teach at an ordinary secondary school—best of all at the old, old school itself—for there I should meet the material upon which I could work. ”

“ Whatever sin we have committed, we have never committed that sin. Our literature for centuries past testifies that though, the world being what it is, we have put our causes to the arbitrament of the sword, we have hated war, and the wrong and misery of it, with a steadily increasing hatred.
Among the stirring and splendidly patriotic thunderings of Henry V., Shakespeare puts into the mouths of the unlettered soldiery of his day a most poignant sense of the heavy responsibility their ruler will bear if he sends them to kill and be killed in a fight that is not just. ”

“ Ledwidge proved himself a doughty soldier; his heart was in the war, though the war was not in his heart—there was no room in that for anything but his love of home and the treasures of peace for which he was fighting. His Helicon, like the Kingdom of Heaven, was within him; he drew most of his inspiration from his memories of Ireland, and there is no lyric in his Songs of Peace more exquisite in feeling and utterance than 'A Little Boy in the Morning'—
He will not come, and still I wait. ”

“ Then, having menaced or persuaded the weaker German states into combining with it, it settled down to forty years of subtle, strenuous preparation on a gigantic scale with the avowed object of seizing Belgium, and more of France, and annexing divers other lands by murderous, irresistible might and so achieving a mammoth empire and world domination. The fruit of its labour is an empire that has sprung up like the unwholesome fungus-growth of a night, and the signs are that it will prove as transitory as any toadstool. ”

“ No militarism is here, nor in any of the poems I have read by these soldiers; no strut of the goose-step, no taste for slaughter nor lust of conquest for its own sake, nor any of the cheap, dazzling blatancies that belong to the militaristic spirit. These men were too sanely human to cherish hatred except of war and the folly or mad ambition of those who had plunged the world into it. ”

“ Few love lyrics have more grace and charm than his poems 'For Aline'; always there is charm, tenderness, playfulness in his verses about children; he was exquisitely sensitive to the beauty of the world and a conscious artist in conjuring its magic into his lines, but he saw no reason why the poet should not be still a sensible, practical human creature, and is merciless in his lines 'To a Young Poet who Killed Himself,' and was never blind to the fact that even the loveliest words fall short of the loveliness of things:
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree. ”

“ It is an emotion, an impulse, for which the word "patriotism" is a term far too simple and trite.... One fights for the sake of happiness—for one's own happiness first of all, certain that did one not fight one would be miserable for ever—and then, in the second place, for the quiet solace and pride of those others, spiritual and mental sons of ours, if not actually physical—the men of our race who will depend for so much of their dignity upon the doings of the generation before. War is a boastful, beastly business ”

“ Making such deliberate renunciation of life and all it meant to them, even for honour and the most sacred cause that ever called for the shedding of blood, these men would have been less admirable, less lovable, less human if they had been touched by no moods in which they knew and felt the full bitterness of it all and could almost find it in their hearts to wish that the cup might pass from them. ”

“ King Mud still reigns supreme, coiling his clammy self two feet deep along the trenches. Mud! Mud that clings like a burr, that has to be pushed away with your legs before you can walk, mud that squelches and squeals as you tread on it, and gurgles and chuckles as you lift your heavy swollen boot out of its embrace. Snow and mud!' 'One of our best servants has been killed, and my sergeant has died of wounds. I have just written to his wife. At such times one feels sick and weary of this world silliness, this mud and death called war. ”

“ Calm, though with death encompassed,
That watch the hours go overhead,
⁠Knowing too well we must
⁠With all men come to dust....
And in 'Anglia Valida in Senectute' glimmers a knowledge that not only the beauty and happiness of the world are passing away from him:
We are old, we are old, and worn and school'd with ills,
⁠Maybe our road is almost done,
Maybe we are drawn near unto the hills
⁠Where rest is and the setting sun.
He cannot, in the trenches, remember Oxford but the thought intrudes:
A little while, and we are gone ”

“ How can we rest who have not slain the slayers?
⁠What peace for us who have seen Thy children slain?
Hark, the roar grows...the thunders reawaken—
⁠We ask one thing, Lord, only one thing now:
Hearts high as theirs who went to death unshaken,
⁠Courage like theirs to make and keep their vow:
To stay not till those hosts whom mercies harden,
⁠Who know no glory save of sword and fire,
Find in our fire the splendour of Thy pardon,
⁠Meet from our steel the mercy they desire.... ”

“ Meanwhile, seeing that, as a matter of commonsense, there was no hope of ending war by meekly leaving the aggressor to overrun the earth and gather, unopposed, the full harvest of his iniquity, Geoffrey Wall devoted himself eagerly and resolutely to the mastery of his new profession. In one of his letters is an extraordinarily graphic account of his sensations on his first flight alone in an aeroplane; and that he enjoyed life in England, even the slack days when he was loitering about London while the War Office made up its mind to employ him, is evident all through his letters and his diary. ”

“ The feet that have trodden it so have toiled since through the mud of France and Flanders, through the sands of Palestine or Mesopotamia, or up the rugged steeps of Gallipoli, and too many of them shall never take the way homeward any more. Our hearts know what these barren patches mean, for the shadow of their barrenness falls far across the lives we live. Some day the grass will grow again and happiness return to some of us, but too much is gone that can never return. ”

“ The call that drew him out to France is in the second of two sonnets on 'Belgium, 1914' that he wrote in the first months of the war, while he was still at Marlborough:
There came a voice from out the darkness crying—
⁠A pleading voice, the voice of one in thrall:
'Come, ye who pass—oh, heed you not my sighing?
⁠Come and deliver! Hear, oh, hear my call!
For when the invader stood before my gate
⁠Demanding passage through with haughty tone,
A voice cried loud, "Wilt thou endure this fate?
⁠Better have death than live when honour 's flown!" ”

“ They were the true pacifists, so sincere in their devotion to Peace that they did not hesitate to fight and die for her sake; they were the authentic conscientious objectors, loathing bloodshed, yet ready to shed their own in safeguarding others who were dear to them, not afraid to put aside private scruples and, in a spirit of self-abnegation, to risk losing their personal souls that the freedom of the world and the general soul of the race might be saved. ”

“ The brotherly regard that grew up betwixt officers and men whose days were bounded by the common peril of the trenches is in the breezy, rugged story of 'Our Captain'; there is naked realism and power in the thumb-nail battle-sketch 'Hooge'; charm in the brief idyll of 'Hughine and Ninette'; the boyish fun of the regiment in 'Soliloquies on the March'; and in others are a man's unpretentious musings on life and death and the ways of God, and a sorrow for the dead and for those who will miss them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In sober earnest, we have arrived at a recognition of war as nothing but a necessary and degrading evil in the human community, and as not the less evil for being still necessary. Men of reason face it now precisely as they face the need of forming a rescue party to descend into a burning mine or to launch a lifeboat into the blind fury of a storm—unafraid, but not glorying. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If I have stressed this essentially human note, it is because it is so implicit and insistent in the songs that the soldier poets of this war have sung. They went into battle soberly or with a mystical exultation, prepared to die in it, but with a will to victory for the sake of peace and right and with a settled courage that nothing could shake. They descended into the pit and fought with beasts, but remained unconquerably human. ”

“ And it is part of our pride in them that in this they have done nothing new, have taken no new way, but have trodden instinctively and worthily in a beaten track; their courage, chivalry, love of justice, are theirs by inheritance, the ideals that led them are the common ideals that have led the best of our race through the past. So much you may learn by reading in the books that have been written by many soldier authors who have fought in this war and revealed in their verse or prose the faith and spirit that prompted them and their comrades-in-arms ”

“ His solitary country walks, in sun or rain or wind, the things he saw, people he met, dreams he had and all his lonely self-communings by the way have passed into his verse and made it intimately characteristic of him. Its wistfulness, its prevailing note of sadness are as much himself as are its delight in old English place-names, in natural beauty, in quaint touches of rural character. 'Melancholy' recaptures exactly the curious sense of remoteness from everyday life that is induced by a day's wandering uncompanioned. ”

“ We know, or if any do not they may know it from what has been written by our soldiers themselves, that there is no glory and little romance in war except for those who can play with the thought of it from far off, or after the years have healed its wounds and hidden the hideous ruin it wrought, and the agony of it has dwindled to the glamorous sorrow of a tale that is told. ”

“ You may know from his poems that he, too, loved children and dogs and horses; was a keen sportsman, fond of the open-air life; was scornful of social and religious humbug and hypocrisy; was quick to sympathise with the underdog and indignant with those who oppressed the poor. Withal, he had a delightful sense of humour, and it plays freely through the letters from the front in which he makes light of discomforts and danger and is charmed by the kindness of his French hosts and the affection that springs up betwixt him and their children ”

“ More than that—Australia has at last found a soul—there is no denying that—no denying that before the war we were the most soulless people alive, as a nation.... The life of a man is as nothing compared to the continuity of a nation, to the greatness of its soul.'
That is a great saying, but he meant it, and sealed it with his blood. ”

“ Before Armageddon was upon us, then, and the old world came to an end, we used to say that all our war songs were written by soft-handed civilians who were never under fire; and this was true enough when we said it, but is true no longer. In the past, the poets seldom became soldiers. When they did they saw too much of what lay behind the glory of war to make any songs about it. No soldier, but the scholarly poet-antiquary, Michael Drayton, enriched our literature with the vigorous, triumphant 'Ballad of Agincourt' ”