Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/252

202 if they could not always glance back without regret it was because the sacrifice they were making was a very real one—they were all young, life was sweet to them and had been rich in promise; yet they had it in them to subdue themselves and trample their regrets unflinchingly underfoot, upheld by the faith that they gave their lives that the world might remain worth living in for the rest of us.

That is the feeling, plainly expressed or implicit, in so much that the soldier poets have written of the war. To turn for a moment from the poets to a prose writer—it is the feeling, the desire that speaks to you from the letters of Harold Chapin, who was on the high road to success as a dramatist when, after attending classes in first aid, he enlisted in the R.A.M.C. on the 2nd September 1914, to be killed at the battle of Loos, on the 26th September, a year later. So far as I know, he wrote nothing in verse, but there is the truest poetry of idea and of emotion in certain of his plays. American by birth, he had