...could be found in the war literature of many countries — in the verses, for example, of Rupert Brooke ("Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour"] and Alan Seeger ("I have a rendezvous with Death"J. Seeger was even more explicit in a letter he wrote...

...service of honor, an especially clear message conveyed in the first octave of his most famous poem: Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,...old and cold and weary, Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move, And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, And all the little emptiness...

...an opportunity for national and cultural regeneration, a sentiment caught in Rupert Brooke's lines: Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour...cleanness leaping Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.1 Others, most notably Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw, opposed the war from the outset....

...idealistic youth it came as a crisis of the spirit. At the outbreak of the war, Rupert Brooke had written: "Now God be thanked, Who has matched us with His hour,...And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping." They had marched off to the lilt of "Tipperary," or "Die Wacht am Rhein," or "La Marseillaise," dreaming...

...Brooke's famous description of recruits remains remarkably evocative of the mood — 'as swimmers with cleanness leaping, glad from a world grown old and cold and weary'. Less pleasing to the elder statesmen of social Darwinism was the reversal of the traditional hierarchy...

...the world. But there is a lust of battle, too, where great resolve can lift men to their finest hour. "Now, God be thanked, Who has matched us with His hour, / And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping."2 Some seize on the day, others are seized by the emergencies of thought or of action, but...

...national versions of the French Union Sacree of that year, when Rupert Brooke rendered thanks to God "Who has matched us with His hour, and caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping."18 In a book entitled Why We Fight, and in words echoed at the time by innumerable Americans...

...spiritual degeneration and the monotony of bourgeois life when he declared the war a chance to dive 'as swimmers into cleanness leaping, glad from a world grown old and cold and weary'.2' In this way, as the twentieth century opened and Britain reflected the mechanical and scientific...

...GKChesterton (London: Ousely, 1936), pp. 44-45. 14. As Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) in "1914: Peace": "Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,...And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping." 15. The Everlasting Man, p. 171. It is likely that Chesterton drew his picture of Carthage largely...

...sonnet 'Peace' sentiments that paralleled those of German and Italian intellectuals •welcoming war: Now, God be thanked Who has matched us -with His hour,...old and cold and weary, Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move, And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, And all the little emptiness...