Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/224

178 War widened his horizon and took him into new, strange lands that were an unfailing source of interest and delight to him. These and their strangeness and bizarre loveliness were themes that attracted him; only now and then he touched on the war itself, more or less elusively, as in 'Credit and Debit' and 'While Scouring Linen,' or satirically as in 'Thoughts of a Refugee.' He spends no hate or rage on his enemies—I do not remember, indeed, that he ever has anything to say of them. He fought them because they had made that his duty, but he was not inclined to write about them. He had no fear of death, but no love of it. 'Dearest,' he says in the last letter to his mother, written three days before he fell wounded and was no more seen, 'how beautiful a thing life is!'

Perhaps on the dreadful and vaster battlefields of France Death slew such myriads and the menace of it was so constant that there was not often such escape there from the thought of it. Most of the poets who have written from there have