Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/320

260 he lived he would have enriched 'the literature of Australia on its dramatic side.'

Born in 1892, the second son of Mr. Consett Stephen, of the firm of Stephen, Jaques and Stephen, Sydney, Solicitors, he graduated B.A. of Sydney University in 1913, and obtained his LL.B. in 1915. He was to have been called to the Bar, but decided that just then his place was in the Army, and joined the R.F.A. as a 2nd Lieutenant. After six weeks' training in England, he was sent to France, and his life there, and the general life of the soldier in the trenches, in raids, in pitched battle and behind the lines, are admirably pictured in his letters, with a realism that is salted with humour and an extraordinary and apparently unstudied skill in description. They are less introspective than the letters of Vernède, or Parry, or Chapin; he seldom pauses to analyse his own sensations, but is more concerned to relate incidents and events that are passing around him, and relates them with such dramatic forcefulness that you can see