Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/144

108 'How is the College doing in these hard times?' he asks in a letter to a friend connected with it. 'It hardly seems credible that it still exists, with so many of its tutors and students away: and yet I so often feel that the reality is Education and Fraternity, while all this horror of war is a transient appearance of the impossible. Such a glance into the chaos that man can make, unless love is his guiding principle, is indeed a terrifying experience. I am now in a hilly, wooded region, like the skirts of the Kentish Downs, with copses full of anemones and delicate periwinkles, and the sapling hazels and willows tasselled and downy with catkins and buds. A mile away is a village, shattered and wasted, and beyond that a sight more shocking than the ruin of human work, a ghastly wood where the broken trunks and splintered branches take on weird and diabolical forms. It is the Bois de Souchez. The ground round about is poisoned with human relics, limbs and bundles of clothes filled with rotten flesh, and even those poor remains