Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/143

Rh killed by a shell. Lively, high-spirited gossip alternates in his letters with wryly, sometimes grimly, whimsical descriptions of his surroundings. I have read no letters from the front that picture more graphically the everyday life behind the lines and in the trenches. From what he writes in jest or earnest of his brother officers, his men, and his own tireless activities and eager resolve to carry out his duties and give the enemy no rest, you are the better able to appreciate what his Brigadier-General wrote of his dash and pluck, and how 'whenever the Germans appeared to be getting particularly annoyed, the men would say, "Oh, it 's that little trench mortar officer at them with his guns."' But if he could tell of his doings and sufferings with a delightfully playful humour and make light of hardships and miseries—'It rains nearly all of every day, and the mud is vile,' he writes to his sister, 'but I am so glad to be out here'—at other times he sketches the dreadful world in which he is living in phrases that are nakedly and startlingly realistic.