Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/137

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Stanley Russell
101

which so many in their ranks were writing. The songs of those later days no longer or seldom reiterate the shining ideals for which the singers were fighting, but take these for granted, and, instead, expose and denounce with stern outspokenness the injustice, the madness, the tragic misery and indescribable beastliness of war, and, so revealing it, justify and insist upon the realisation of that ideal of ending it for ever, which still lived in their hearts unquenchable and had become the more potent because they had done with clothing it in words and were stubbornly putting it into action.

But the idealism that rings like a trumpet call through so much of the earlier poetry is a heartening note in the scholarly verse of Captain Stanley Russell, who died, as he had lived, in the service of humanity, for the freedom and justice that are the watchwords of the great Leader

Under whose banners he had fought so long.

Trained for the Nonconformist Ministry, Stanley Russell was, from 1910 to 1913,