Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/313

Rh Young as he was and fired with boyish enthusiasms, he was not slow to see through the romantic show of it to that revolting, inglorious side of war that darkens like a disillusioned afterthought through so much of the poetry, especially the later poetry, that the soldiers wrote out of bitter knowledge of the difference between sending others into hell and going there yourself. Meanwhile, seeing that, as a matter of commonsense, there was no hope of ending war by meekly leaving the aggressor to overrun the earth and gather, unopposed, the full harvest of his iniquity, Geoffrey Wall devoted himself eagerly and resolutely to the mastery of his new profession. In one of his letters is an extraordinarily graphic account of his sensations on his first flight alone in an aeroplane; and that he enjoyed life in England, even the slack days when he was loitering about London while the War Office made up its mind to employ him, is evident all through his letters and his diary. He was interested and puzzled by the happenings at a spiritualistic