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; but if we don't plunge into it now we lower the whole pitch of posterity's life, leave them with only some dusty relics of racial honour. To enter into this material hell now is to win for our successors a kind of immaterial heaven. There will be an ease and a splendour in their attitude towards life which a peaceful hand now would destroy. It is for the sake of that spiritual ease and enrichment of life that we fling everything aside now to learn to deal death.
II
The Soldier is Mr. Rupert Brookes finest poem, I think; but he has others in this same number worth remembering. I like this:—
Now, God be thanked Who has watched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping;
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!
Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there
Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to share the laughing heart's long peace there,
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.
Finally, there is this royal requiem:—
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
