Theodore Roosevelt

The Outlook/May 29, 1918

THE Galahads who seek the Grail to-day, when they find it, most often fill it with their own heart’s blood. Captain Hugh Knyvett had just finished his book “Over There with the Australians” (Scribners), and it was on the eve of publication, when death smote him. The wounds, the terrible hardships, the sheer exhaustion of his long campaigns, finally told on him; he had gained high honor in the great war for right, he had found that in speech he could sway the hearts of the men of an alien country and a kindred tongue, he had won the girl that to him was the only woman in the world; and then, at the crest of life, death smote him, and his fine and gallant spirit went forth to discover what the grave mold hides.

No man could look on his face and not see that he combined as few men do the daring and the iron courage of the born fighter with a singularly gentle and lofty idealism. He was of fighting blood; he was one of five brothers who were in the army which the Australians sent across the vast oceans when Great Britain entered the lists to fight for the rights of the free peoples of mankind. The same intensity of spirit which made him so formidable a foe in personal combat also made him one of the most convincing and effective speakers who ever stirred to action souls that had been but half awake. He possessed all the Covenanter’s or Puritan’s sense of right and duty, remote though his temperament was from what we are apt to consider the typical Puritanic or Covenanting temperament.

He was utterly intolerant of what he regarded as baseness of motive; he fiercely denounced the doctrine of “my country, right or wrong; ” in his mind patriotism was dwarfed by humanity; to him this war was one between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, and the man who fought for darkness or who coldly refused to fight for the light belonged with the foul creatures of the pit, and deserved to be trodden underfoot.

Most men who profess this doctrine cannot live up to its highest level, and at any lower level it produces the ineffective spawn of pacifism and wishy-washy internationalism. But Knyvett’s was a virile soul. He had absolutely nothing in common with either the sinister and conscienceless strong men or the mischievous weaklings who clamor for peace without victory, who prattle about being “forgiving” to Germany, who speak against “punishing” her, and who smirkingly announce that they wish to hold the scales even between Germany, the brutal wrong-doer, and poor bleeding Belgium, whom she has so terribly wronged. There could be no better antidote to such mawkishness, to such sordid and repulsive baseness masquerading under the guise of sentimentality, than the last half-dozen chapters of the present volume. I wish they could be issued as a tract for all Americans who are not already heart and soul against Germany and all her allies and resolutely bent upon fighting this war through, at whatever cost, until it is crowned by the peace of complete and overwhelming victory.

Australia, like Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, has made a wonderful record in this war. All four commonwealths have established their right forever to sit at the council boards of the mighty. Never in history have any nations produced soldiers of a higher type. And among all these wonderful fighting men not one followed the gleam with a whiter vision than Hugh Knyvett or more surely proved his truth by his endeavor.