Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/307

Rh queue that stretched from the door in Scotland Yard right out and round the corner out of sight in Whitehall. It was being continually lengthened by new arrivals. Something in the sight touched him profoundly, and he turned of a sudden, laid his hand on my arm and said, 'Come on. My God, if I look at these boys much longer I 'll have to hook on at the tail of this queue and join up with them!'

He joined up immediately America entered the war, and this personal recollection of mine explains why I feel they are right who say it was unthinkable that he could have done otherwise. And once he was a soldier it was characteristic of him that he was one wholeheartedly. 'He ceased altogether to be a journalist of any kind,' writes Mr. Holliday; 'that is, even the instinct of the journalist dropped from him when he touched it.' He wrote of himself, 'My days of hack writing are over, for a time at least.... The only sort of book I care to write about the war is the sort people will read after the war is over—a century after it is over.'