Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/159

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surely it were a far more noble thing

to keep your memories all fresh as Spring,

to do again the things that we held dear

and thus to feel your spirit ever near.

This I will do when peace shall come again—

peace and return, to ease my heart of pain....

But those days of peace and return were never to come for him. He was twenty-two when he died, and there is enough in this small sheaf of his verse to lift him to an honoured niche in the Valhalla of those inheritors of unfulfilled renown who have gone down among the waste and wreckage of the war. His lighter air songs, 'The Call of the Air,' 'Dawn,' 'The Joys of Flying,' are alive with a buoyant gaiety and the exhilaration of flight, and only once, in 'North Sea,' does he brood on the grim horrors of his perilous work.

There is no bitterness in his brooding; only an intense realisation of the hideous side of warfare; but in some of the most striking verse of Henry Lamont Simpson and Cameron Wilson there is the bitterness, the stern or satirical resentment, which are absent from all the earliest war poetry, but enter more and more into