Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/236

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190
For Remembrance

missing, few of us who knew him had much hope of seeing him again. We knew that Streets was not the man easily to surrender': and in a letter from Major Plackett, under whom Streets served in England, in Egypt and, to the last, in France: '...He died as he had lived—a man. If his verses are as good as his reputation as a soldier, you may rest assured that the book will be a great success.'

Some of us used to say, perhaps too complacently, that Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton. Be that as it may, it is clear to all eyes that the more terrible battles of the Great War were won on the playing-fields and in the class-rooms of the Council Schools, as well as of the Colleges, and in the homes of the whole nation—in cottages and workmen's dwellings no less than in town and country mansions. The Public School spirit is a splendid and a potent tradition, but it does not account for such men as Streets, and, in our days, there are not a few of them. I honour their memories too profoundly to think for a