Of the brave hearts that never more shall beat,
The eyes that smile no more, the unreturning feet.
It was one of Washington's countrymen, too, James Russell Lowell, who raised the great rallying cry of all civilised democracies, insisted on the soldier's personal responsibility for the right or wrong that he does, and, in The Biglow Papers, spoke the nakedest truths that have ever been spoken about war and its makers:
Ez for war, I call it murder—
There you hev it plain and flat;
I don't want to go no furder
Than my Testament fer that....
Ef you take a sword and dror it
An' go stick a feller thru,
Gov'ment ain't to answer for it,
God 'll send the bill to you.
That is the essentially modern standard, and nothing but the obsolete ideas that persist in backward nationalities prevents the civilised world from living up to it. You get no conception except of the pity and barbarism of war in the realistic scenes and ironic comment of Thomas
