Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/284

228 A succession of bizarre, imaginative stories beginning with The Boats of the Glencarrig, had established Hope Hodgson's reputation as a novelist before, at the outbreak of war, he came home from the south of France to qualify for a commission in the R.F.A. He was sent to the western front in October 1917. At the beginning of the following April he distinguished himself by saving his guns in a stubborn rearguard action; and on the 17th of the same month he was killed while acting as observation officer. Before he settled down to a literary career, he had served eight years at sea, and his memories of those days are in his stories and in the lyrics and ballads that are gathered into his one book of verse, The Calling of the Sea, which is now in the press. I recall him as a forceful, enthusiastic personality, seeming much younger than his forty years; an idealist who aimed at the highest both in literature and in life, and I know that if he could have chosen the manner of his ending he would have had no other than the brave death he died.