of children and women and defenceless civilians, but as free, clean human creatures, prepared to take arms and slay or be slain, in fair fight with armed men, for a cause they felt to be just, and yet in the hour of triumph
By objects which might force the soul to abate
Her feeling, rendered more compassionate.
Pass over another two centuries, and the same national ideal of the British soldier survives still inviolate in Tennyson's 'Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington':—
Yet remember all
He spoke among you, and the Man who spoke;
Who never sold the truth to serve the hour,
Nor paltered with eternal God for power;
Who never spoke against a foe;
Whose eighty winters freeze with one rebuke
All great self-seekers trampling on the right;
Truth-teller was our English Alfred named;
Truth-lover was our English Duke;
Whatever record leap to light,
He never shall be shamed.
The same ideal of the great soldier recurs again and again to-day in the songs of our soldier poets, for it is the racial tradition in which they and their comrades
