Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/206

162 of the shells, still see the tired patrols out in the rain, and

You will understand how irresistible that call was to him if you read his 'In Memoriam' on Private David Sutherland and other of his men who were killed, where, addressing David's father, who mourns the loss of his only son, he sorrows that he, their officer, had fifty such men who followed and trusted him, and it wrung his heart to remember how they had seen him with their dying eyes and held him while they died. I am not quoting from this poem, for it is a tender and poignantly beautiful thing that must be read in its entirety, and it helps one to interpret, if any help be needed, the lines 'To Sylvia,' dated October 1917, when he had had his way and was with the Seaforths in France again, with death waiting him only a month ahead in the battle that was to come near Cambrai:

God knows—my dear—I did not want

To rise and leave you so,