Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/289

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The Men from Overseas
233

yet been written; for the attitude towards war, the feeling against the wrong, the crime of it, that was theirs is expressed or implied in the work of their comrades in arms and in song who fought the same good fight and lived to see the end of it. But though it is also impossible, within our limits, to attempt any adequate record of the poet soldiers of the other English-speaking peoples, a passing reference to what they have done may serve at least to show that the purpose and ultimate hope behind our and their patriotism was not peculiar to any one of these nations, but common to them all. At the risk of repeating oneself, one must emphasise that from their own words it becomes clear that they went to their deaths for a love of justice and liberty in which the love of country was swallowed up in a larger love of mankind. They died not merely for England, America, Australasia, Canada, South Africa, but that France, the very Mecca of the free, might be saved; not merely to rescue and avenge Belgium or Serbia, but for the redemption once for