Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Scott, Burns, Campbell, Tennyson, Browning,
the New England group, and Walt Whitman,--to mention only a few of the
British and American names,--and he speaks sincerely and powerfully
to-day in the writings of Kipling. Hardy, Masefield, Binyon, Newbolt,
Watson, Rupert Brooke, and the two young soldiers--the one English, the
other American--who have lately lost their lives while on active
service: Captain Charles Hamilton Sorley, who was killed at Hulluch,
October 18, 1915; and Alan Seeger, who fell, mortally wounded, during
the charge on Belloy-en-Santerre, July 4, 1916.

There can be little doubt that these several minds and spirits, stirred
by the passion and energy of war, and reacting sensitively both to its
cruelties and to its pities, have experienced the kinship of quickened
insight and finer unselfishness in the face of wide-ranging death. They
have silently compared, perhaps, the normal materialistic conventions in
business, politics, education, and religion, with the relief from those
conventions that nearly all soldiers and many civilians experience in
time of war; for although war has its too gross and ugly side, it has
not dared to learn that inflexibility of custom and conduct that deadens
the spirit into a tame submission. This strange rebound and exaltation
would seem to be due less to the physical realities of war--which must
in many ways cramp and constrain the individual--than to the relative
spiritual freedom engendered by the needs of war, if they are to be
successfully met. The man of war has an altogether unusual opportunity
to realize himself, to cleanse and heal himself through the mastering of
his physical fears; through the facing of his moral doubts; through the
reexamination of whatever thoughts he may have possessed, theretofore,
about life and death and the universe; and through the quietly unselfish
devotion he owes to the welfare of his fellows and to the cause of his
native land.