Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/317

Rh a couple of papers, grunted, glared at me (I was the only other occupant of the waiting-room), then regarded the chandelier fixedly for about ten minutes, and suddenly heaved himself up on to his feet again and remarked sonorously, "My God! am I to wait here all day?" and lumbered out.'

When he died, in an aeroplane accident in August 1917, Geoffrey Wall was only twenty. He had shared his early ambitions chiefly between literature and mechanics; some years before he dreamt of flying he built himself a motor-car; but all along he had been following aviation developments, and in the first month of the war wrote in praise of Wilbur Wright—that he had toiled, not for gain, and, indifferent to the sneers of the doubters, was the first who shaped 'the burden of an age's thought' and fearlessly navigated the air: