Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/128

94 what took us by surprise was the completeness with which he threw aside his civilian habit of pleasant bohemianism, subdued himself to military discipline and grew cheerfully hardened to the rougher life of camp and training ground. Certainly, he was no lover of war; he answered the call to arms solely because he had a conscience and felt it was his duty to do so; then, with his usual thoroughness, he was not satisfied to make a pretence of being what he had set out to become. He devoted himself as keenly and as scrupulously to his military work as he had done to the literary work that was more properly his. He was impatient of the prolonged training and was not contented till he secured a commission in the Royal Garrison Artillery and was sent to France.

It was this compelling impulse, since he was a soldier, to be the real thing and share in the worst that befell his comrades, that took him to his death during the British advance in April 1917. 'For,' says his friend John Freeman, 'in France he