Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/242

 VII

, to whom a few lines back I made casual reference, was a Leeds boy, who began life at the age of thirteen and a half in the office of a local firm of iron and steel tube manufacturers. He had been promoted to the drawing office of the firm's headquarters at Birmingham, and was in his twenty-third year when Germany invaded Belgium. No sooner were Kitchener's posters calling from walls and hoardings for volunteers than he offered himself for enlistment, and was rejected. He tried to dodge in at two or three other recruiting depots, but was consistently barred out by them all because he was half an inch short of the standard 194